By Roy L Hales

Scallops are for sale on Cortes Island

“For the first time, this morning we will be selling scallops off the dock. While supplies last, there will be scallops available at the Gorge Harbour store. Tell all your friends. We’ve got a quarter million of them, so there is plenty to go around,” reported Erik Lyon of Rising Tide Shellfish yesterday morning.

Scallops, with sweet potato and ox tail in the center by stu_spivack via Flickr (CC BY SA, 2.0 License).

Gorge Harbour Store received a shipment of scallops yesterday afternoon. They were packaged in bags of 10 scallops for $15 and there is a limit of two bags per customer. The scallops are being sold on a first come, first serve basis and reputedly sell out fast.

Lyon described this weeks sales as the result of a venture he launched almost two years ago.

“We got seed in September 2019 and the first of them are just hitting market size now,” he said.

"Luckily, one of our buyers, Victor McLaggan of the Outlandish Shellfish Guild on Quadra Island, is willing to custom process them so that we can sell them right here on the island," he added. "We want to work with the locals as much as possible to make local food available locally. So these are scallops that were grown right there at Gorge Harbour at Bee Islets.”