The fact that anyone went scalloping on opening day in spite of the consensus that there weren’t any scallops is testament to the fortitude, and perhaps stubbornness, of the few who did go.

Tim Sweat, a full-time commercial fisher, left Greenport before sunrise loaded with dredges to increase his chances of making the 10-bushel limit. He returned 10 hours later with about 150 scallops — too few to sell. “I’m scared,” he said on the dock where his boat, Next Step, was tied up. “I don’t know what I’m going to do at this point. This is what I was banking on.”

Ken Homan of Braun’s, a longtime distributor of bay scallops, has seen years that were down, but never a year when his best suppliers decided to skip opening day. By the end of the day Monday, Braun’s had sold 24 pounds of Peconic Bay scallops, down from 2,000 pounds on opening day last year.

The season in Massachusetts opened a few days before New York, and baymen there were finding a solid set of bay scallops this year, after a bad 2018.

But New York’s bay scallops are living close to the edge, unable to tolerate water hotter than the mid-80s. They are particularly stressed by temperature spikes that also stimulate them to spawn. Water temperatures reached the mid-80s several times this past summer, according to a U.S. Geological Survey station gathering data in Orient Harbor.