Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
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100 | JULY 2015 nshoremag.com right to fish international waters, after the government changed its regulations to require expensive equipment that made little sense for a small operator with a single 35-foot boat. When Bates first started diving in 1970, he and the three or four other divers working the North Shore had what he calls a "gentle- man's agreement" to limit their harvest to scallops over four-and-a- half inches across, and not to take too many in a day. "I'd go back the next season and the bed would be fully rejuve- nated," Bates says, noting that back then, it was not unusual to find scallop shells that were eight inches across—a rarity now, he adds. That "gentlemen's agreement" was good for the fishery, says Dr. Joe Buttner, a professor in the Department of Biology at Salem State University. "Scallops larger than four inches shell height will have had opportunities to spawn multiple times," he says, while those smaller ones may not have spawned at all before appearing on dinner plates. Even on the North Shore, where many people make a living from the sea, hand harvesting is rare. So-called "diver scallops" command a premium in seafood markets and restaurants for good reason. Scal- lops are found in a minimum of 50 feet of water, preferring the grav- elly seabed to the sandy shoreline. It would seem that Bates prefers that same environment. He was drawn to the underwater world from an early age and first got a taste for SCUBA diving while watch- ing kids dive for octopus in the South of France, one of many ports where his father was stationed in the Navy. His book, Shipwrecks North of Boston, Volume 1: Salem in-depth LIVE Bay, which was re-released as an eBook last year by Trajectory, Inc., features a picture of Bates at age six, wearing old-school snorkel gear. He paid his way through college by diving, and then after a year of a "real job" and much to his father's chagrin, sold his Jeep and headed to California, where he de- voted a year to studying "hard-hat diving"—commercial underwater Bates has been diving since he was six years old.