ELLSWORTH — If you heard a whooshing sound at noon today it was probably a collective sigh of relief from local Marine Patrol officers marking the close of the 2012 elver fishing season.

When the season opened 11 weeks ago, elvers, which not so many years ago were worth just $35 per pound, sold for $2,000 per pound.

This week, as the end of the season approached, dealers like Randy Brann were paying as much as $2,600 per pound for the juvenile eels that fishermen harvested from streams and rivers along the coast.

Last year, Maine dealers reported elver landings of 8,585 pounds to the Department of Marine Resources (DMR). At an average price of $891.48 per pound, the total value of the catch was just over $7.6 million.

This year, the average price for elvers has stayed well above $2,000 per pound throughout the season. Before this week, fishermen and dealers regularly reported that the going rate was in the range of $2,200-$2,300 per pound.

With dealers paying unprecedented prices, virtually every one of Maine’s 407 licensed elver fishermen were hard at work, harvesting the tiny juvenile eels with dip nets and from fyke nets stretching from the bank out into the state’s streams and rivers. All evidence is that the harvest this year has been good, with warm water encouraging the early arrival of the elvers in Downeast waters.

“I’ve had a good season,” Ellsworth fisherman Jeff Card said Tuesday morning as he poured elvers from a bucket into Brann’s fine-meshed net with the rain pelting down.

If landings were the same as last year — the DMR has not yet released any landings figures — an average price of $2,200 per pound would mean fishermen harvested almost $19 million along with their glass eels.

Jim Card, owner of Card Enterprises, a used car dealership and automobile service center on Route 1A in Ellsworth, said he has seen the effects of the money that is flowing from the elver fishery.

“I have people buying cars, getting them fixed,” Card said Tuesday morning as he watched a group of fishermen that included his son exchange their elvers for Brann’s cash. “I see a lot of people getting current with their payments.”

For more maritime news, pick up a copy of The Ellsworth American.