Florida, so I decided to go down and 

 take a look for myself," Tillett says. 

 "It didn't take me long to figure out 

 what was going on." 



Tillett quickly moved his three 85- 

 foot, steel-hulled boats from Wanchese 

 to the Canaveral docks in September 

 1981. "The first three months we were 

 there, we were making big money," he 

 says. "But like every good thing, it 

 comes to an end, and now things are 

 starting to dry up." Tillett says that 

 initially fishermen working his boats at 

 Canaveral were earning $1,200 to 

 $1,500 a week, while now they earn 

 $300 to $400. 



Each boat carries a four-man crew. 

 Originally all of Tillett's crewmen were 

 from North Carolina, but a few tired of 

 being away from home, he says. Each 

 crewman makes four to five trips a 

 week, working continuously from the 

 first trip to the last with crewmen 

 spelling each other for meals and rest 

 during the five- to six-day period. 



A boat geared for scalloping looks 

 much like a shrimp trawler. It pulls 

 two heavy twine nets, heavier than 

 those used for shrimping because of the 

 increased weight and sharp shells of 

 the calicoes. Scallop boats also pull a 

 heavier tickle chain (the chain which 

 precedes the net and "tickles" the 

 catch off the ocean floor) because they 

 must dig deeper into the muddy bot- 

 tom to stir up the calicoes. 



Tillett says he usually harvests 25 to 

 30 bushels of calicoes per net for each 

 10- to 20-minute tow. Over a single trip 

 to the calico beds, lasting about 24 

 hours, one of Tillett's boats will bring 

 in two tractor-trailor loads of scallops, 

 taking three hours to unload from the 

 boat. Like other North Carolina fisher- 

 men in the Canaveral fleet, Tillett sells 

 his scallops to North Carolina seafood 

 processors, who truck them home for 

 processing. 



Tillett is paid according to how 

 many gallons of meat his catch yields. 

 During late March, he was collecting 

 eight dollars a gallon from the 

 processors, an increase of one dollar a 

 gallon from the previous month. Dur- 

 ing winter months, scallops get watery 

 and the meat content drops, much the 

 same as oysters do in North Carolina 

 during the summer, when they are 

 spawning. Biologists believe calico 

 scallops spawn during the winter. 

 Tillett says his yield per catch 

 decreased during the winter, but is on 

 the rise again now. 



Another reason for smaller yields 

 during the past winter came when 

 fishermen had to move from the larger, 

 older beds of calicoes to the smaller, 

 younger beds because of nematodes. 

 "The Florida Department of 

 Agriculture came in and started check- 

 ing our catches," Tillett says. "It 

 really slowed things down for a while. 



They showed the fishermen what the 

 nematodes looked like so when my 

 men went out, they could make a short 

 tow of a bed, open up a few of the 

 scallops and decide if the beds were in- 

 fested. What we finally settled on were 

 the small, young beds of calicoes." 

 But what worries Tillett and others 

 Continued on next page 



Photo by Neil Caudle 



John Maiolo 



Crew sorts sea scallops for on-board shucking off New England 



