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JORGE SANCHEZLooking for adventure and a treat for your taste buds? Try harvesting bay scallops from local waters.
HOMOSASSA - Most people are familiar with bay scallops only as a tasty offering from a seafood restaurant. But for a true Florida adventure, take a boat out and pluck a bagful of the tasty critters fresh out of the water grasses.
Scallop season opens Tuesday, and the waters off Pasco, Hernando and Citrus counties are open to scallop seekers for a second season after a lengthy ban.
All it takes to gather a meal of them is a boat, some basic diving gear and a mesh bag to hold your catch.
To make things legal, scallop seekers also will need a saltwater fishing license and a diver down flag.
Scallop gathering is all about poking around sea grass beds, trying to spot the tasty mollusks and then grabbing them quickly. It's best to go when the tide is slack and the blades of grass straighten out, revealing the scallops.
But don't expect the scallops to surrender meekly from the thick beds of eel and turtle grass. They're pretty adept at camouflage. And unlike clams or oysters, scallops can scoot: They quickly shut their shells to whoosh out a jet of water and are out of arm's reach in a flash.
A scallop lives its entire life cycle - about 18 months - in the general vicinity of where it was born, one of about 1-million eggs a female scallop produces. This makes it sort of easy to scout the prime scallop fields in advance.
"They're out there," said Capt. Mike Millsap, who operates Capt. Mike's Sunshine River Tours in Homosassa. Millsap loads passengers aboard his pontoon boat and provides dive masks, snorkels, fins and mesh bags. His territory is an area between the Homosassa and Crystal rivers.
"It's about waist-deep water, which gives people a chance to stand up and rest, because we're out there about five hours," Millsap said.
Opening weekend takes a heavy toll on the scallops, but Millsap said they will replenish.
"By the third week of August, the second wave of scallops comes in. They're bigger, about thumb size," he said, referring to the adductor muscle, which is the edible part of the scallop's innards.
- Information from Times files was used in this report.
RULES OF THE CATCH: Limits are 2 gallons of whole scallops per person, 10 gallons per boat with five or more passengers. If you clean the scallops before returning to the dock, the limit is 1 pint of scallop meat per person with a maximum of a half-gallon per boat. Unless the scallops are running large, the 2-gallon whole scallop limit cleans out to considerably less that 1 pint of meat.