JBug's Kitchen Antics: Clamming 101

I learned something on this vacation. Gathering gaper clams is not for the faint hearted. It takes a little patience and a lot of stubborn to bring home this kind of bacon, a lesson I got first hand when I went clamming with the big guy on Wednesday.

Now picture this. It is 6:00 am, the tide is out and I mean really out and the gaper clams are beckoning. The big guy in his waders, with shovels, sticks and pails and me with the dog and a camera walk out fifty feet or so onto the beach. The sand is not packed and pristine white like it usually is. Oh no. There are puddles of muck, and pools of beachy quick sand just waiting to grab your shoe, and your dog. But the big guy's on a mission. He's in his "clamming box". Does he notice the dog disappear into a deep hole? Does he notice his pansy wife up to her ankles in muck? Does he even notice the smell? Not him. He's going clamming.

So now, we're out about fifty feet from the waterline and the lesson begins. First ya' gotta spot 'em. You look for a hole, or indentation in the sand about 2 inches across. The bigger the hole, the bigger the clam. The big guy sticks his bamboo stick into the hole and feels for the clam, then digs to one side of the stick. He places a bucket that has the bottom removed into the hole he's dug, and takes all the stinky guck out of the bucket to reach the clam.

Now these clams are buried really deep ...so deep, he's often up to his armpit feeling around for the clam so he can pull him out. Pull him out, not dig him out. The sand is the consistency of wet cement and there's quite a resistance - in fact, I saw the big guys feet leave the ground on many occasions as he tried to get enough leverage to pull the prize out of the hole. As you can see from the picture, his face is pretty close to the sand - imagine the "Eau de Stinko" from that level? Yikes. Talk about kissing Neptune's butt.

Finally he pulls the gaper out. Success at last! Three hours later we head home with 12 of these guys (the limit). I wish I could have shown you a picture of the "mine field" the big guy left behind on the beach, but of course, true to Murphy's Law, the battery ran out on the camera. For every successful clam the big guy dug up, there were at least 2 holes dug where the clam was too deep for my man to reach it. And while the clams are plentiful, it's a real crap shoot that you'll end up getting any of them.