Some Scallops Off Kalmus Look Finished. The Town Says They Aren't

A line of buoys runs from the way to the water at the end of Estey Avenue to the southern tip of the East Jetty in Hyannis. The water north of it, off Kalmus Beach, is known to Barnstable permit holders as the "no dragging, no boats zone." Anyone after scallops in there is working on foot, with the tools the town allows: hands, a rake, a dipnet, a plastic tote.

What they're looking for is a shell with a ridge across it. The town's shellfish FAQ boils the scallop size rule down to one phrase, "well defined annual growth ring." The full rule is fussier than that, and starting Thursday, Oct. 1, inside that buoy line, it gets fussier again.

The town's 2026-27 scallop season notice, signed by Town Manager Mark Ells, opens bay scallops to recreational and commercial harvest that Thursday. Off Kalmus, though, a ringed scallop now also has to measure 2.5 inches.

So why would a town ask people to put back a scallop that already has its ring?

Start with what goes home. The recreational limit is one level tote basket per permit per week, and Barnstable's shellfish code is exact about the tote: 2,746 cubic inches, shellfish level with the top. Heaped doesn't count.

Then there's the day of the week, where two parts of the rulebook seem to disagree. Barnstable's general shellfishing rule limits recreational permit holders to Sundays, Wednesdays, Saturdays and town holidays, "except as otherwise stated." Scallops are otherwise stated. Both the season notice and the town's recreational scallop section say the weekly tote "may be harvested daily." So Thursday, Oct. 1 is a legal scalloping day, as long as the area you're standing in is open. Going out every day doesn't reset anything, though. It's still one tote a week, and the town's week runs Sunday through Saturday.

Commercial permit holders get up to four level totes a day, and the notice prohibits commercial scallop harvest on Sundays.

The size rule itself comes from the state and runs longer than the FAQ's phrase. The season notice reprints it: a well-defined growth line, measured from the hinge of the shell, with one exception tied to a 2.5-inch shell height. The practical version is plain enough. Legal scallops have to meet the town and state size and growth-line rules, and off Kalmus this season there's one more number on top.

In an August memo on the Kalmus rule, the Natural Resources Division explains what it's protecting. For the second year, the town bought seed scallops and planted them off Kalmus, 50,000 of them at half an inch this time, with plans for a nursery system that would let it buy them smaller and release them bigger. Eelgrass monitoring turned up a wild population the memo calls "relatively poor."

And a good share of what's there has a name.

Scientists call them nubs. They come from a late-summer spawn, and by the memo's account they can grow a nice raised ring and look like a scallop in its second year, the kind that's harvested near the end of its life. The memo says they aren't. Born late, they have another winter in them, and the town would rather they be harvested the following year. The memo leans on Dr. Valerie Hall's research on Nantucket, which found late-spawned scallops can reproduce through their second summer, something early-spawned scallops can't do, and that they help carry the population through years when the main spawn fails.

The town's conclusion is pointed. Nubs have been taken in past years because they carry the ring, the memo says, and that "may be why" populations have been declining.

So for the 2026-27 season, any bay scallop taken inside the Kalmus buoy line has to measure at least 2.5 inches. The Shellfish Committee received the idea unanimously on Aug. 12. The division calls it a way to keep Kalmus open to both recreational and commercial harvest and still have scallops left for 2027. Seed stays seed, too: everywhere in town, anything short of legal goes straight back in the water.

Season open is not the same as every flat open. The state's Division of Marine Fisheries closed all Massachusetts shellfish areas as a precaution at a half hour before sunrise on Saturday, Sept. 26, ahead of the storm. Its Sept. 28 partial reopening notice reopened SC18 and SC21 through SC64 at noon that day. SC19 and SC20, the growing areas Barnstable shares with Mashpee around Popponesset Bay and Shoestring Bay, were not on that list.

That was the picture on Sept. 28. It can change with the next rain or the next notice, and town-specific closures apply on top of the state's. Before you go, check two places: the state's emergency closure notices and Barnstable's open and closed area maps. When we checked on Sept. 30, the state list showed nothing newer than the Sept. 28 notices.

Out past Kalmus on Thursday, the buoys will be where they were all summer, and the eelgrass under them won't look any different. What's changed is what a ring on a small shell can tell you. A ringed scallop under 2.5 inches off Kalmus could be one of the town's planted seed, or a late-spawned nub with another spawning season ahead. You can't tell which from the shell, and inside that line you don't have to.

The weekly limit is still one level tote. Off Kalmus, the new rule changes which scallops can go into it.

Some will have to go back.

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