11:30 am - 51 degrees out - scattered clouds...
Eating locally grown food is
great, but when you are able to go directly to the foods source and harvest it
yourself, that’s even better!
Our last trip to the Long Beach
Peninsula, (which was a couple weeks ago) just happened to coincide with
clamming season. Yea!!!
The kids and I have never been
digging for clams before. There is a
stock pile of clam-digging supplies at our beach property, but we’ve never used
them. But this trip, we thought
we’d give it a try.
Long Beach locals swear that
clam-digging is in their blood. But, for
us newbie’s, it was a very fun (and gross) learning experience.
First, we dug out our
clam-digging supplies and made sure there were enough clam guns for
everyone. Then we ran into town to get
our clamming licenses at Jack’s Country Store along with a list of the clamming
tides. All clam-diggers 15 years of
age or older must have an applicable clamming license to harvest razor clams on
any beach. Children don’t need a license
as long as they’re with an adult who has one.
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| Swung by Jack's Country Store to grab a clamming license. |
After not so patiently waiting
for the clamming tide to come, I got all the kids (4 total) and supplies loaded
into our rig and we headed for the beach – with no clue how to properly clam
dig!
We dragged our clam guns and
netted bags down to the wet sand, to an area that was still nice and smooth,
away from all the other clam-diggers. We
were told to look for air bubbles or dimples in the sand, so we started
wandering around looking. After about a
minute or so, we found a “dimple”. I
called the kids over so we could all see what would happen when I plunged the long,
cylindrical tube of aluminum into the sand, plugged the tiny air hole on the
handle, and pulled it back up out of the sand... and was rewarded with jumping
up and down and shouts of excitement since we had just dug up our first clam!
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| Our first razor clam! |
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| Razor Clam |
Things got a little crazy after
that first clam was dug up. Kids were
running back and forth shouting “I found a dimple!”, “ACK, it squirted me!”, “GOT
ONE!” and so on. It was quite amusing to
watch as they ran around from dimple to dimple, placing their clam guns over
the center of the dimple, and do their little squiggle dance as they plunged
their gun into the wet sand. When they
pulled up all the sand contained within the gun, dumping the contents to the
side, they quickly dug through that pile or dove down into the hole to grab
that clam.
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| We found dimples! AKA Razor Clam Show. |
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| Clam-digging cousins. |
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| Our last razor clam of the day. |
It only took about a half an
hour for all of us to reach our limit of 15 razor clams each. Being new to this, our razor clams weren’t all
perfect, we did manage to cut a few in half when we plunged the clam gun into
the sand, but all clam-diggers are required to keep the first 15 clams they dig
up, regardless of size or if you accidentally cut them in half.
Everyone had a lot of fun
digging for the clams, but the clean-up...well that wasn’t as much fun. In fact, it was gross, but we got the job done. If you want to clean your own clams, it’s a
good idea to look up how to clean them first so you may clean them safely and correctly (click here for instructions). Of if you don’t
want to clean them yourself, you can drop them off at a local seafood store or
cannery to have them professionally cleaned and vacuum-packed.
We really did luck out. We had an absolutely perfect evening and great
success for our first clam-dig.
