We went Clammin'

While living in the Pacific Northwest Doug and I want to take in all that it has to offer. One of my patients told me about clamming. There are set dates with set beaches that everyone, young and old storm at low tide. We set off bright and early on Sunday morning for the pacific coast with a couple of friends that we "talked into" going with us. We all were clamming virgins and didn't have a clue what we were doing. I had done a little research online and was probably the most informed of us all and with that said we were doomed from the beginning :). We stopped on the way and bought a license so we would be legit clammers. On the way we also stopped to find a clam gun. My research told me a clam gun was the must have clam digging device. The unbelievable happened...everyone was all sold out of clam guns. We had to settle for a clamming shovel. I had also been informed by a patient that natives laugh at people with shovels. After about a 2 hour car ride we had finally arrived at Copalis Beach. We pulled onto the beach to find a line of cars stretched for miles and miles down the beach with probably 4 people per car clamming on the shore! We all took a mad dash out of the car.

Not really sure why we ran, I guess we were afraid that if we didn't hurry up they would all be gone. We didn't know what we were looking for much less what we were going to do with them when we caught'em. Everyone around us were digging up clams left and right and we were just banging our shovel on the sand hoping that one would pop up.

Finally we asked some veteran clammers what to look for and they were kind enough to let us use their clam gun and educated us on how to find the clams. The clams leave a little indention on the surface of the sand when they start to dig deeper into the sand, hence why you bang your shovel on the sand to get them to move. This helps you locate where to start digging. Once we knew what to look for we started to collect our limit of clams and had a total of 30 clams when we had to close up shop at noon.

It took us about 2 hours to clean them when we got done. After all that work we didn't even like our fried clams.

We are going to try to make clam chowder with the rest of the them...hopefully we will like that a little better.