It’s been more than a year since the Mass. Division of Marine Fisheries closed shellfish beds along the North and South Rivers. Dozens of people gathered in Scituate to protest the closure, on what would have been the first day of the new season.
WATDs’ Lenny Rowe has this…
Close to 50 people dressed in waders and shell fishing gear gathered at the Driftway Conservation Park in Scituate.
Officials from the Division of Marine Fisheries say the Cohasset and Scituate Wastewater Treatment Plants pose an issue for beds along the North and South Rivers. They follow standards from the National Shellfish Sanitation Program.
Local residents, like Captain David Dauphinee, say the risk is minimal, and different rules should apply for recreational shellfishing.
“It’s more than the basket of steamers. It’s deeper. It’s deeper in our community, our coastal community. I’m a 50-year waterman, my dad was a lobsterman before me, my brother’s a lobsterman,” said Dauphinee. “We’ve worked on the water, we live on the water, we live from the water. It’s natural to us, to have it removed, so that we legally can’t do it, it’s nothing more than taking our activity and holding it hostage by the state.”
November is typically the start of the clamming season in the area, which includes more than 606 acres of recreational shellfishing beds.
State Rep. Patrick Kearney says the water is tested on a regular basis, and there’s no documented cases of people getting sick from shellfishing in the area.
“The most frustrating thing is I represent these communities, and we have heard from the Department of Marine Fisheries that it was due to a USFDA regulation,” said Kearney. “Then we heard from the USFDA that they had no interest in regulating the recreation-only zoned area. So you’re getting the runaround from different government agencies, while the clam flat is choking itself out. It’s going to be setting us back 20 years on the healthiness and the work that we have done and the [North and South Rivers Watershed Association] has done to create a healthy and sustainable river.”
Captain Brad White says the beds were shut down without much input.
“The FDA required the Division of Marine Fisheries to shut down and they have no jurisdiction. What a lot of people don’t know is over 200 licenses are sold between Scituate and Marshfield,” said White. “They feed hundreds of families, clams are great protein, there’s over 700 acres out here to be clammed, and we, the folks that use and harvest from the clam flats also repopulate them. Every other year we come down with several thousand dollars worth of clams in 45-foot trailers and repopulate the river, because the clams clean many gallons of water every day. They’ll choke out if we don’t get them harvested.”
A petition and more stories can be found at Shellfishin’ is Our Tradition on Facebook.
