Volume 14, Number 2 • March-April 1996

To Catch as Bay Scallop

On the opening day of scallop season Mike Picciandra spent the morning on his knees in his small green, home-made skiff. This is the position he assumes for "dipping" - one of the odder, older ways to catch a bay scallop here on the tidewater ponds of Martha's Vineyard.

The "dipping" position looks a lot like the praying position. On his knees, he leans against the gunnel, glances at the heavens, then bends over and peers down at the bottom of the pond. Wielding a long-handled net, he plucks scallops off the bottom of the pond - one scallop at a time.

To find his prey, he buries his face in his "peeper," a home-made, four-sided funnel with a plate of glass on the bottom, a viewing port on top and a lot of duct tape in between.

By placing the glass on the water, he flattens out the surface chop. And voila: he has a clear view of the bottom of the pond and whatever scallops are growing there. He also calls his contraption a "Buck Rogers," because it looks sort of space age. Sort of.

In the "dipping" position, peering down through his "peeper," Mike Picciandra looks like an ancient oracle trying to decipher the future by reading the entrails of animals or the tea leaves at the bottom of his cup. What he sees through his peeper is enough to drive a man to prayer or to drink. "It looks like the surface of the moon down there," he groans.

'Twas not always so. When he is not trying to read the future, Picciandra reads up on the past, and finds it a happier story. "In 1945 and 1946, right after the war, we had 260 fishermen in the town, in the ponds. Four years ago we had 280 fisherman, and now we have 80 licenses with 60 of them given out to people over sixty. And I'm right in line for mine."

Those great days could come again, says Picciandra, an optimist by nature, who dreams of peering down at a pond bottom paved over with shellfish. Edgartown's seed planting program is helping, and so is its bounty on predators like green crabs and spider crabs. But he would also like to see redredging and reductions of nitrogen from the sewage treatment plant.

"This pond does two things for the people of this country. It provides a place for those little bay scallops to spawn, and it is also a catcher, a fisherman. If the pond is environmentally sound, it has the ability to catch spat," he argues. "And there is more shellfish spat in this pond right here than there are pennies in the national debt."

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