Weekend Activities: Clam Digging

Hey everyone,

Happy Monday! How's everyone doing?  I hope everyone is adjusting to the daylight savings time.   I'm already loving the idea of sun in the evening.  The weather in Washington is awesome! It pretty much feels like spring here.  I can't wait until summer because that means we can start to hike.  I can finally see if my jog-walking on a steep incline has made any difference to my endurance.  We want to try to climb mail box peak in North Bend.  I'm more afraid of heights then the actual workout...eeek. 

This weekend, we went clam digging...razor clam digging to be exact.  It was really fun, and I was pretty excited to be able to do it in my first year of being here.  Clam digging officially began on March 7th and will last for a few a days.  The tentative dates for the next dig will be at the end of March.  Digging times correlate with the toxin levels released by the native algae as well as low tides . 

We headed out to Aberdeen in the afternoon and arrived at the beach at around 2 pm.  At first we didn't notice any diggers and parked pretty far away from the beach.  Having arrived at the beach we then realized everyone was parked on the beach itself.  We thought this was kind of strange, but by the end of the day we realized why people parked at the beach! With all the equipment and bucket of clams, you don't really want to walk too far away.  Plus after a day of digging, or in my case carrying the backpack and clams you're drained.  Anyways, at the beach we kind of walked around and experimented with digging.  Basically you're suppose to look for tiny blow holes in the sand and start to dig.  Let me tell you that it is pretty challenging spotting tiny holes in the wet sand with the sun reflecting off the water.  There are 2 ways to dig clams.  You could use shovel or a clam gun which is a hollow tube with a plunger top.  It basically sucks up the column of sand as well as the clam. 

Mr C was really good at spotting these holes, and by the end of the day we could differentiate the holes belonging to a big or small clam.  You want to pick wisely as you have to keep the first 15 clams you catch.  There are park rangers around so you want to follow the rules as over fishing etc can lead to hefty fines.  At around 3-3:30 pm, the area was packed with diggers! It was amazing because along the stretch of the shore all you saw were people packed together.  3 pm was also when the tide was low and we soon discovered that more and more blow holes could be seen.  It was much easier to catch something around this time! It was amazing because these clams sort of cluster around one area.  As soon as you were digging up one clam, another blow hole could be seen behind or in front of you! It was so exciting digging them and seeing if you caught a big clam!  Watching them trying to run away while squirting water is also a sight to see.  Be warned that it is pretty messy so wear rain boots as well as rainproof pants and jackets.  We weren't really well prepared so most of the time we were running away from the waves.

Overall it was an amazing day! I would definitely recommend checking it out.  If you're a city person like me, the first clam you catch will be a "WOW!!!" moment.  Anyways, after a long day we got home and realized we didn't know how to gut and clean these little suckers ;P Don't worry we figured it out with YouTube.  Let me tell you they tasted so good.  This was our first time that we caught our own food.  Yummy. 

See ya!

Janet