August 23, 2021 — On a damp, cloudy morning in April, Marsden Brewer drove his 38-foot lobster boat out into the middle of Penobscot Bay. Other than a few buoys and the occasional gull, the water was calm and empty — a vast, gray expanse leading to pine-topped islands in the distance.
You certainly couldn’t tell that, just below the waves slapping against the hull, there were hundreds of thousands of sea scallops, swimming, squirting and cavorting in a series of nets, all part of Mr. Brewer’s aquatic farm.
Mr. Brewer and his son, Bob, pulled up a long algae-covered net and scooped scallops into a bucket of seawater, where they zipped around, moving a whole lot faster than you’d think bivalves could. Most would go to Glidden Point Oyster Farms. The rest were about to become lunch.
A third-generation commercial fisherman, Mr. Brewer has witnessed firsthand the instability of the wild fisheries around him, watching the fluctuations of the lobster catch, and the once-plentiful stocks of cod, urchins and shrimp all but disappear.
“What I’ve seen over the years has not been good,” he said as he shucked a scallop, revealing its pale adductor muscle — the white disk we think of when we picture scallops — nestled against a pillow of orange roe.
“It’s made me think, maybe it’s not that there are too many fishermen, but that there’s not enough fish. So, I thought, how do we make more fish?”