Isaiah Scheffer does, that’s who. Spend a day with this shellfish constable, who gets his hands dirty all year round to help maintain the shellfish populations and fishery on Martha’s Vineyard.

Isaiah Scheffer is a multi-generational islander. He’s a Larsen on his mom’s side, a name that is synonymous with fishing on Martha’s Vineyard, and his dad was a commercial fisherman. Isaiah is the Shellfish Constable for the town of Chilmark on Martha’s Vineyard. In this job he is responsible for seeding shellfish in the Chilmark ponds for commercial and recreational fishermen to catch. Shellfish are an essential part of Martha’s Vineyard’s ocean and pond ecosystem. Shellfish filter out nitrogen and help the flow of oxygen throughout the ponds, making the ponds healthier. Last summer, on a sunny day at the end of August, Isaiah took me out on his boat and showed me a day in his life on Menemsha Pond.

Emma Finkelstein: Can you take me through your family’s history of fishing on Martha’s Vineyard?

Isaiah Scheffer: I come from a fishing family. My dad was a commercial fisherman. He was running a dragger, and he was sword-fisherman. And then when the swordfishing collapsed, he moved over to dragging full time and he was running my grandfather’s boat. And so I would go out on trips offshore. We dragged the bottom for codfish and lobsters and flatfish, and the regulations that came down for the boats and stuff just really, really hurt the smaller guys. Factory boats always seemed to make out okay, but it really hurt the smaller guys. Eventually, Rick Karney from the [Martha’s Vineyard] Shellfish Group got this grant to do an aquaculture training course. In the early ’90s my dad took the course.

E.F.: How did you decide on this as a career?

I.S.: For a year and a half, I sat in a cubicle doing AutoCAD work [in Boston]. It was probably the most miserable time in my life. Being a young person, sometimes you can be naive about how things are going to work in the world, or what you’d be doing. And I suddenly had this epiphany. I was like, I’m gonna sit behind a desk for the rest of my life, and I just couldn’t handle it. I was like, I’m moving back to the Vineyard and I’m gonna figure something else out. I started working for my aunt, helping her run her fish market, Larsen’s Fish Market. I was working with my dad in the wintertime, helping him with his new oyster farm. I was a commercial fisherman for a while, oystering in Edgartown and clamming in West Tisbury. 

Then [the Shellfish Constable] job came up when I was around 31 — it was 2007. I’m pretty good at adapting to whatever I’m thrown into. I just started learning whatever I could about bay scallops, oysters, and quahog aquaculture propagation. I knew enough about oysters working with my dad that I knew I could do that. I knew I could just adopt all these same principles and make a difference.

This [aquaculture propagation] program is completely mine, it’s all my design. I really like efficiency, I want my time. I want to do as much as I can for Chilmark, but time is always the most pressing thing. Everything’s growing fast at the same time, and then you’ve got to be able to get all this equipment out in a timely manner, so you’re not doing it in the middle of winter. So I’ve designed all this stuff to be super efficient.

E.F.: What types of shellfish do you farm?

I.S.: I’m focusing on the things that really people want the most. Right now, quahogs, oysters, and scallops, but I’ve done steamers in the past, and butter clams.

E.F.: What do you do as the Chilmark Shellfish Constable in the winter?

I.S.: In the wintertime, we do a lot of gear work. We’ll be releasing scallops pretty much all the way ’til December. Then we switch over to gear work because it’s just too cold. And then it’s bringing everything out in the spring and setting it up. Right here, these are quahog rafts. All these lines have to be sliced, and the actual docks have to be repaired, and then everything’s got to be coated with this environmentally friendly bottom paint. In the summer, we start [seeding] shellfish. It’s obviously more time in the summertime and less time in the winter.

E.F.: What is a challenge you face?

I.S.: The crab activity. Crabs are the number one predator. Green crabs, spider crabs, lady crabs, sand crabs, and blue crabs. They all love shellfish. And if I put these [oysters] down at a small size, I probably wouldn’t get any. They would all be demolished. We do 100 crab traps per week. We take out probably about three totes of green crabs [from the Menemsha Pond] every single week throughout the entire summer. And we still don’t ever put [the amount of green crabs] down. They come in through the channel.

E.F.: Can you take me through the importance of eelgrass?

I.S.: Not only does [eelgrass] increase the amount of oxygen in a pond, because it’s photosynthesizing, it creates cover. It’s the bay scallops’ number one habitat. Crabs come along, they can’t see the bay scallops well. At a certain point, the scallop starts to grow on the eelgrass and then falls down. But hopefully, at that point you have enough scallops in that area, because the crabs are always going to get there [first], and we get what’s left. 

E.F.: How long do shellfish live?

I.S.: Bay scallops live mostly just two years. Oysters in perfect conditions probably live 5-10 years, and quohogs live an even longer time. I’ve heard people say that they remember seed sets and fishing on that seed set for 25 years. Some chowder quohogs that are really, really big can be 25 to 35 years old.

E.F.: What are things Islanders can do to make this pond healthier?

I.S.: We import a lot of food from off-island, and essentially it’s nitrogen that ends up back in the water. We can eat more locally. We grow our food and eat our food. It takes a lot of fertilizer to do it, but we can use our compost as our fertilizer, and really take care of our farmland. Then, essentially, you did not add anything. There’s no way we could ever have them grow enough food on the island to feed the whole population here, but we can just focus on doing a little bit less of bringing our food from off Island, and then you’re not upsetting that cycle.

We try to make as little of an impact on our carbon footprint, but when we put chemicals down our toilets and in our sinks everything goes in the ponds. If you’re putting pesticides and herbicides on your lawn because you don’t like crabgrass, well, eelgrass is just an aquatic grass. So if those [chemicals] end up in your ponds, it starts killing eelgrass, then it affects everything. 

Read another piece from a student who did a four-week internship with the MV Shellfish Group last summer.