A Day With Derek

What a day. Clear. Warm. And complete with a chance to spend some time with Derek and to spend some of that time out on the oyster beds and clam flats doing what we like to do- harvest the sea. It was a family-hunter-gatherer kind of day.

We started by gathering and shucking some oysters on the outgoing tide, giving the clams a chance to run, ....make that DIG and hide.

Once we had the oysters shucked and on ice we headed back out after the clams. We found little necks, manilas, and cockles for the most part, although we found a few eastern soft shell clams as well. The tide was not enough of a drain to find any geoducks, so we put that on the target list for next year, and I'm already looking forward to that.

 

While we were picking clams, Derek came across a Northern Kelp Crab (the first I have ever seen other than on my ID chart) who had captured and was in the process of wolfing down a sand worm.

The area we were working adjacent to today is one of the coastal shellfish farming areas belonging to the Taylor Shellfish Farm we had visited the day before. Here, oyster shells are washed and "sterilized" before being seeded and returned to the beds where the oysters begin a next generation.

After our outing on the flats we stopped into a local cafe and grabbed a bite before heading back to our respective home bases. On the way home, Marilyn and I stopped along the roadside by Hood Canal and picked a mess of berries. What a day!

What The Heck Is A Geoduck?

Let's get started. It is NOT pronounced geo-duck. Nope. That would be too easy. It is pronounced gooey duck, from an Indian word that looked more like "GWEDUC," which is loosely translated as "dig deep." Anyway, time and spelling changed as it has a way of doing and we wind up with the absolutely awesome, positively enormous clam they call the geoduck (gooeyduck). Remember the old line about "Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?" Well, at Taylor Shellfish headquarters in Shelton, Washington, the wall of the retail store is graced by a picture of the stars of the TV show DIRTY JOBS, which asks the question:"Is that a geoduck in your pocket, or are you just 'happy sashimi'?" It is often used in sushi, sashimi and other fine and Asian dining situations or you can just make a chowder, but considering how hard they are to get, or how expensive they are to buy, why would you?

Want some averages? OK. The average farmed geoduck is raised for 5 years, weighs 2 1/2 pounds and costs, are you ready, about 15 dollars a pound, give or take a little. So a thirty dollar bill will buy you ONE geoduck clam at Taylor Shellfish. Man, that's a lot of clams for just one clam. Especially for one that is just plain, well, a tad on the obscene side- hence the 'happy sashimi' line above works pretty well. Wanna see what I mean?

 

 

So if you have never seen or heard of these before, now you get the idea, huh? Above, a single geoduck and then a case of them.  From the very beginning, this type of clam is too big for its shell- and it only gets worse with ensuing years of growth. Even the siphons you see on these clams can extend for about three feet- which helps to explain why the clam is named the way it is- it literally lives 3 or more feet deep in the mud flat and at the very edge of the low-water tide range. So a person who wants to try to capture a wild geoduck must wait for a drain tide, then dig a deep hole and dig it fast. If you are a YouTube user, there are some pretty hysterical videos on line about people out trying to dig these clams up. And I would especially like to recommend that you visit Taylor website and then click on the video page and see the great videos they have to offer for your viewing pleasure. Here is a link: Just click on it to visit their site....and check out those videos.

 Taylor Shellfish Farms

In the wild, these clams can grow as large as 15 pounds! 15 pounds! I have dug just about every kind of clam this great land has to offer, but I never did find one of these. But I will. Sooner or later.  Now where did I put that bucket list?

But Taylor's is not just about the geoducks. They also farm blue mussels, manila clams, and a whole host of different oysters. On this visit we did not see the mud flats where these delicacies are farmed, we visited the headquarters and saw the processing and shipping facilities. We enjoyed the tour so much that we actually went through a second time. Owing to the nature of the work, the plant is largely damp, quite cold, and has low light, making it hard to photograph fast moving objects- like say the hands of the oyster shuckers. Those individuals can shuck an oyster and move on to the next one faster than I could even focus the lens! Some of them were incredibly skilled at the process.

One thing we found interesting about both Washington and Taylor Shellfish is the ownership rights permitted in this state that are most assuredly not available in other states. Here, an individual or a company can actually own the tidal lands- meaning that they can own the land below the water, and they can own that land all the way out to the dead low water line. Like mineral rights ownership, you may own a property and NOT own the tidal land in front of it...or vice versa. But the very idea that someone can come out from their house on the shore and tell you to "get off my land" a half mile out on the mud flat in front of their place is odd. Especially since they explained at the farm that a lot of individuals think they own the tidal rights in front of them, but may well not. Good to know! Here are some images from the day:

Oh, did I mention you have to wear a hair net in the plant? Just wondering....

Beating The Heat In Washington

We hadn't had the high temps across the rest of the country while working our way up what I like to call The Left Coast. The heartland it ain't! It had been beautiful temp wise, even if foggy quite a bit, in Northern California and Oregon, but we started to hit the mid to high 90's of late here in Washington- The state, not the D.C. We have done our first-as-always exploring what is around us and then started to do some of the things we love to do- found some oyster beds, some clam flats, and took a look up and down the waterways from our base in Potlatch, WA. It's a beautiful area and we especially like life on the Hood Canal so far and are looking to come back again next summer- late summer or early fall.

But hot is hot. And since the oyster bed right in front of our camp site is seasonally closed right now to oyster harvesting, I took out the 3 mil wet suit and did a little free diving on the bed to see what I could see. That will cool you off in a hurry. But it was very interesting. You certainly see things on the beds when they are under water that you will not see while they are exposed by the low tide- tiny little snails crawling all over the oysters and a few of the oysters open to the point where you can take a peak inside at those juicy little morsels that close up tighter than a drum once the water heads back out to sea on the outgoing tide. The underwater camera that I was using is merely a point and shoot uw camera- nothing real high tech- just water proof to 15 feet. Apparently, though I didn't think so at the time, I dove a little deeper than that because I did have a bit of water invasion into the camera, but nothing that a warm fresh water bath and a blow dry wouldn't fix- lucky for me. You will see some fuzziness in a number of the shots. Keep in mind that water, though it may look crystal clear to the naked eye, is seldom that. Add to that the loss of light at depth and the thermoclines- the layers of relatively warm and cooler water that overlap each other- create almost a wavy vision of the underwater world, especially increased the further you are from the object, or in this case, the bottom of the sea floor. In this dive location there was an ice cold stream entering on one side and a river that had been warmed by a power source nearby, so the water was especially perplexed.

Slide show will introduce you to the surroundings and then under we go......