Fruit of the Sea

When you pick ’em yourself, the scallops taste even sweeter.

by Molly Rose Teuke
photography by Howard Lee Puckett

SweetTea Journal (Fall/Winter 2006) – I cheerfully admit to a weakness for scallops. I like them grilled, fried, steamed, and roasted; in pasta, chowder, and fish stew; pretty much any way but raw. Like most people, I usually get my scallops from a fish market. No way would I eat one uncooked. That’s about to change. Today, I’m going to catch my own—not the deepwater calico scallop, but the sweeter bay scallop—and Captain Steve Rassel, my guide, insists I eat my first one raw. We’ll see about that. Frankly, I’m just happy to be on the water anticipating a new adventure.

Motoring out the mouth of the Steinhatchee River in Taylor County, we make a swift transition from the human scale of the Florida fishing village of Steinhatchee to the near-infinite scale of the Gulf of Mexico. One moment we’re nodding to other boaters between no-wake channel markers, the next we’re easing north, picking up speed, and gliding along the edge of the vast, blue expanse of the Gulf. Captain Rassel navigates the channels of Deadman Bay and beyond with the instinct born of many years as a flat-water guide in these parts.

From my perspective, we are skimming over a delft-blue plate, and my eye is caught by a profound blue sameness. The shoreline is still discernible to our right—we’re just a mile offshore—but terra firma is all but invisible in my mind’s eye, and salt spray is the only taste of what’s to come.

Out here, where the horizons stretch to forever, the view extends to that subtle watercolor stroke where sky meets sea. Rassel slows his flat-bottom boat as we approach a mound of sand and grasses some eight miles north of where we started, angles to a gentle halt, and drops anchor. “This is it,” he says. “Everybody out.”

The scallop hunt is about to commence.

Rassel normally takes three or four people on a scalloping jaunt, but today “everybody” means just me. I spit in my mask and rinse it with seawater, and then don mask, snorkel, and water shoes. In the moment it takes to step over and down the ladder, I’m thrust into another dimension—the intimate underwater landscape of the shallows, where one’s field of vision is measured in inches and feet, not miles. This is the world of my secretive quarry—the small, succulent bay scallop.

It takes a few minutes to get used to sea grasses brushing against my legs in water that’s not even waist high. Unnerving at first, the sensation gradually morphs into a gentle caress as I put my face in the water and begin floating over the underwater meadow. I’ve already gotten the short course on Argopecten irradians, or the bay scallop, from Dr. Bill Arnold, research scientist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) and Fish and Wildlife Research Institute (FWRI). These bivalve mollusks—their shells constitute the two valves—live in shallow water, three to eight feet deep. Their life span is about a year in Florida waters, and they are recognized as “biomonitors,” because where you find scallops, you find a healthy ecosystem.

Sea grass is absolutely essential, Arnold says. Without it, you won’t find scallops. Unlike much of Florida’s coastline, the Big Bend region—starting south of Steinhatchee and curving up into the Apalachicola River area—still has lush meadows of the stuff. Scallop larvae attach to the base and move up the blade of sea grass as they grow, keeping clear of bottom-dwelling predators. Scallops then begin to develop their shell, which grows with them. As they mature into spat, as juvenile scallops are called, they’ll drop from the blades to the bottom. But scallops are active swimmers, and they like to hang out in sea grass meadows to feed and escape predators. They can move surprisingly quickly as they expel water by clapping their two valves together. This manner of swimming helps develop the tender white muscle we so prize on the dinner table.

Bay scallops need clean water, too, because they feed by “vacuuming” small particles of algae and organic matter from the water. They can pump a whopping 15.5 gallons of water in an hour—astonishing for a creature that seldom grows to more than two inches in diameter. Scallops typically like the low-salt nature of the Gulf of Mexico shallows, where the ocean’s normal salinity is diluted by inflow from dozens of freshwater rivers, creeks, and tributaries. But it’s still salt water, and it helps me float effortlessly under a warm sun.

We’re anchored off  Big Grassy Island, a mound of sand and grasses considered one of Rassel’s most dependable scalloping sites. On a weekend during scallop season—July 1 through September 10—you can follow a veritable parade of boats to scalloping hot spots. It’s not unusual, Rassel tells me, to see one hundred boats in the best locations. “People you didn’t even know had boats are pulling them out of their garages, out from under the pole barns, and off the back forty, heading to Steinhatchee for the scallops,” he says. Not that he minds. The hot spots vary from season to season, not day to day, and it doesn’t take long for word to spread. There’s no point in trying to be secretive, because everyone learns the best locations quickly—you just look for where all the boats congregate. “It’s not like fishing, where you want to keep your best spots secret,” he says. “It’s more like an underwater Easter egg hunt.”

Today, in the middle of the week, we see just a handful of boats around Big Grassy Island and Piney Point a quarter-mile to the north. Big Grassy’s name is deceiving. This long, narrow island looks to be less than five acres and is just sand and low vegetation. But it’s a handy landmark, and the shallows that surround it provide just the right scallop habitat. Rassel drops a second anchor to be sure the boat stays put, raises the dive flag required even for snorkeling, and then jumps in to show me how it’s done.

We swim against the tide for forty yards, and then drift back toward the boat. The tidal currents bend the grasses over and hide the scallops. If we swim into it, we can peer more easily down into the grass and spot these cautious mollusks. It’s not hard; I’ve never done this before, but within a minute I find my first scallop resting on a clump of algae, its top shell almost orange in the sunlight. Most scallops have a mottled brown upper shell and white lower shell, but the prettier ones show traces of orange and yellow. I pop it in my “creel”—a red mesh bag with a big “Florida Citrus” label on it—and keep looking. A brilliant cue in these midday hours is a cluster of turquoise-blue eyes reflecting in the sun. Scallops can have up to a hundred motion-sensitive eyes around the rim of their shell, and when the sun hits them just right, the eyes light up like a neon bracelet.

It’s a perfect day for scalloping: calm water, lots of sunshine, and a shifting tide. The shifting tide is key, Rassel says. “Say you have dead low tide at 10,” he says. “You need to get out there no later than 8:30 so you get an hour and a half on either side, reason being that then you get the grasses laying in different directions, and you see more. And you don’t want to get out there too late, because the tide coming in can bring sediment-filled water. The prettiest water is when the tide is going out.”

Meanwhile, underwater, he motions for me to listen. I hold my breath and hear a faint clicking sound—scallops are clapping their shells closed as we swim by. On a calm, quiet day with more snorkelers in the water, Rassel says you can hear the sound from the boat, but it’s more audible underwater. That clicking can mean trouble if I get careless and let a wary scallop clamp shut on my fingers. It would smart a bit, but Rassel assures me it’s more startling than painful.

We mosey about, gathering scallops from the sandy bottom, around the grasses, and on top of drift algae, until my mesh bag gets some weight to it. I climb back in the boat and dump my catch in a bucket to see how I’m doing. The daily limit per person is two gallons of unshucked scallops, or one pint of shucked scallop meat—the firm, tender, white muscle. I have barely more than a gallon. Still, it’s a generous take for an hour’s work. We could stay here and make our limit, but Rassel eases the boat toward Piney Point and beyond to Hagen’s Cove, both popular scalloping spots.

For centuries, bay scallops were plentiful along Florida’s coastline, but as the state’s human population grew, as water quality dropped, and as sea grass meadows shrunk, scallop populations diminished. For instance, as late as the 1960s, bay scallops constituted an extensive commercial fishery around Tampa and farther south in Charlotte Harbor. Today, they’re so sparse that both areas are off-limits to any scalloping.

The prime spots to scallop are in the lower portion of the Big Bend region near Steinhatchee and the Suwannee River and in St. Joseph Bay. While the harvest in Apalachee Bay is hit and miss (mostly miss), there are seasons when that area produces an abundant crop of large, succulent scallops, as happened three or four years ago. It could happen this year, but nobody will know for sure until the season hits.

The FWC first imposed limits on both commercial and recreational scalloping in 1985, and commercial harvesting of bay scallops was banned altogether in 1994. Today, scalloping is legal only from the Pasco-Hernando county line north of Tampa to the west side of the Mexico Beach Canal near Panama City, and only from July 1 through September 10. FWRI’s Arnold hazards an educated guess that some four million of these succulent bivalves are plucked from Florida’s Gulf shallows on opening day alone.

A single scallop can produce millions of eggs at once, but because of threatened habitat, predation, and a complicated reproductive biology, only one in twelve million might survive to adulthood. Every June, Arnold and a team of researchers from FWRI take a scallop census by counting the number of scallops in six-hundred-square-meter sections at nine different sites. Thanks in part to a managed harvest, the numbers are beginning to rebound. In collaboration with other groups, FWRI also is spawning scallop larvae in the lab and planting them in five-meter underwater corrals created with sediment containment booms in areas where scallop populations have been depleted. “Increasing the abundance of scallops at many different sites provides the best chance of consistent abundance,” Arnold explains. “Stability really is dependent on how many local populations you have. A good, healthy metapopulation can tolerate harvest, and that’s our goal, to increase the overall numbers to the point where we can have the whole Florida coast open to harvest. But it’s a fragile resource, and the people who have to protect it are the people out there doing the harvesting. You have to have some sort of conservation ethic and honor the bag limits.”

Rassel and I head in and plunk down at a picnic table to shuck the hundred or so scallops we harvested. We’ve kept ours on ice, which makes the shells pop open enough that we can pry them apart with a scallop knife—a paring knife with a very short blade—or a spoon that’s been sharpened on one side. I follow along as Rassel demonstrates: With the dark shell up and the hinge pointing away from me, I insert the knife and, starting on the right, detach the firm white muscle from the top shell and toss the top shell away. I get hold of the dark insides to discard them, holding them against my knife and pulling away from the muscle. A quick scrape underneath the muscle, and I pop it into an iced bag, tossing the bottom shell onto my growing pile of shucks.

Rassel makes me take the scallop meat back out and pop it in my mouth. I’m skeptical, but I do as he says and am surprised at how good it is. Sweet and fresh tasting, it has a delicate, almost creamy texture. Two hours later—shucking scallops is slow going—we drive to Bridge End Café in the old ferry master’s house on the east end of Steinhatchee and offer up our haul to co-owner, cook, and artist Jude McDairs. She’s happy to fix them to order for a small fee that includes the price of a couple of sides—black-eyed peas, lima beans, mustard greens, whatever she’s got on hand. For seven or eight bucks, it’s a good deal, and late-afternoon lunch on Bridge End’s screened porch seems a fine way to wind down after the day’s adventure.

The next morning, I head to just about the only other spot in Northwest Florida where scallops occur in fairly reliable abundance: St. Joseph Bay, midway between Steinhatchee and Pensacola. Here, Port St. Joe’s tenth annual Scallop Festival—September 2 and 3 this year—showcases the bay’s bounty. St. Joseph Bay has been designated as both aquatic preserve and an “Outstanding Florida Water” for its pristine condition and rich marine habitat. In these scenic waters, Captain Fred Erickson, business owner of  Presnell’s Bayside Marina and my guide for the day, continues my education, motoring out the channel past tiny Palm Island toward the head of the bay. He likes to get out in a rising tide, when scallops retreat to shallower water to avoid predation by blue crabs, stone crabs, and whelks.

St. Joseph Bay harbors one of the richest, most abundant concentrations of sea grasses in the entire Gulf, and those grasses tend to be less dense in the high-tide shallows, making scallops easier to see. The higher water makes navigating this very shallow bay easier, too. Erickson points out gashes where less-experienced boaters have gouged the bottom with propellers. Once sea grasses have been ripped out, they can take from three to ten years to grow back, if they recover at all. As we head toward a good scalloping spot, we pole our way through shallower depths to avoid adding to the damage. On the ride, we pass a bald eagle perched on a stump in the distance and catch sight of a belted kingfisher overhead, uttering its raspy, rattling cry.

At 43,000 acres, the bay feels more like a lake than part of an ocean, land enclosing three sides and curving around to protect most of the north end, and virtually no current in the shallows except the tide. But, surprisingly enough, it’s a pure saltwater environment. This is the only bay in the eastern Gulf of Mexico that isn’t influenced by an influx of freshwater. No one can say for sure why St. Joseph Bay is so good for scalloping. The sea grasses certainly help, as do the clear, calm waters. It may be that the low-energy tides, coupled with the fact that in a protected bay like this, the rain will have an impact on reducing salinity because you don’t actually get that much water exchange with the tides. We just don’t know, but that doesn’t stop people from enjoying the sweet little bivalves.

We meander awhile before dropping anchor near a couple of other boats, our arrival startling a dozen cormorants, which set off a patter as they take flight by running across the water. I’ve brought fins instead of water shoes, because I’m told we’ll encounter potholes several feet across and six to eight feet deep, and the buoyancy of saltwater makes diving without fins a challenge. Scallops like to hang out in the grass around the rim, but some rest on the floor of the sandy potholes, easy pickings.

It’s hard to stay focused in this ever-surprising environment, and I quickly discover that fins are useful for chasing after darting fish or diving down to dip up a pretty shell. Before long, I’ve given in to immersing myself (as much figuratively as literally) in this intriguing, exotic environment. On the ride out, Erickson had prepped me for what we might see—tiny tan sea horses, spotted eagle rays as big as the hood of a car, or maybe Florida’s state shell, the dramatic orange horse conch. Sure enough, I catch a fleeting glimpse of an elegant eagle ray, and here’s a delicate sea horse, its tail wrapped around a blade of grass. But Erickson forgot to mention the sea turtle that swims past me, looming larger than life and unconcerned by my presence. Somehow, the scallop hunt doesn’t seem so compelling here, where simple observation and appreciation feel as satisfying as a bucket of dinner.

Our final take is two gallons of scallops; a handful of shells gleaming like tiny, glistening coins; the knobby spiral of an empty whelk shell; mental snaps of exotic creatures; and the excitement of seeing a sea turtle. With all that, we climb into the boat, pole out of the shallows and turn toward the marina, basking in a glow matched by a radiant red sun dipping low across the silvery blue sheen of St. Joseph Bay.