Vineyard harbors have emptied. Mooring balls that bobbed up and down through the summer were replaced by floating blue and white stakes. The osprey are gone and herring gulls dominate the shoreline.

In the early morning chill, harbors wake up with the noise of fast-moving fleets of shellfishermen. The outboards are loud against a still landscape. In Vineyard Haven more than a dozen boats leave the floating dock at Maciel Marine as the first school buses roll. Boaters wearing slickers and rubber overalls dodge the prevailing November northeast breeze, on their way to the bay scalloping grounds in Lagoon Pond.

At the finger piers in downtown Edgartown, the color and bustle of summer regattas are gone, replaced at sunrise by town watermen headed to Cape Pogue for a day’s work.

Before the morning is over, the commercial fishermen will have landed 120 bushels of bay scallops.

At the Chappaquiddick ferry point, a seal pokes its head up, looking at first like a dog with whiskers swimming in the harbor.

“This is the time of year we can get our work done,” said Steve Ewing of Aquamarine Dock Builders. “We haul out the mooring mushroom anchors. We haul out the swimming ladders.”

Harbor waters are clearest now with a view right down to the sandy bottom. At Caleb’s Pond on Chappaquiddick, Warren Gaines, deputy shellfish constable for Edgartown, guides the town skiff alongside a raft which is in fact a floating shellfish nursery. He checks bay scallop seed.

On the shore the boats of summer are shrink-wrapped in white plastic now, silent and waiting for next season.

The ponds and harbors belong to bay scallopers, and shell heaps grow at the foot of Skiff avenue in Vineyard Haven and off Clevelandtown Road in Edgartown.

At the Martha’s Vineyard Shipyard Cory M. McGowan and Rob Roy take advantage of a sunny afternoon to inspect two moorings in Vineyard Haven harbor. The two men operate a 14-by-40-foot barge named Hercules. Using the power of a gas engine and hydraulics, the barge lifts a 2,000 pound concrete block easily. With rope and steel engaged, the motor strains and moans, and at times the barge shakes. Then the work is done.

The shipyard will haul boats through Christmas, Mr. Roy said.

As he and Mr. McGowan attend to a mooring ball with the word Glimmer written on its side, a lone catboat named Bella sails by.

At the Gannon and Benjamin Marine Railway off Beach Road in Vineyard Haven, shipwrights are working on a Crosby catboat, nearly a century old, named Compass Rose.

Ross Gannon, co-owner of the boatyard, devotes his attention to the interior of his new 44-foot sloop which will be christened and launched next summer. A few feet away, a crew planks a 28-foot double-ended sloop that was lofted just a month ago. The boat will be launched in May, just as the harbor and Island waterways become busy again.