Commercial Razor Clam Digging on the Long Beach
February 10, 2009
Dig It – Commercial Razor Clam Digging on the Long Beach Peninsula
By Laurie Choate
We grandchildren always called him “Poppy” though no one could remember why. He was very much the storyteller, so it was sometimes difficult to determine whether he was spinning yarns or telling true tales from his younger years. When he talked of razor clamming in the old days, it was easy to imagine these stories were just more exaggerations of an old man.
My grandfather was Fred Wiegardt, of the oystering family in Nahcotta, Washington. The Wiegardt family has been in the oyster business on Willapa Bay for many generations; what’s not so well known is that Wiegardts also canned razor clams in the 1920s and 1930s.
Poppy told of professional diggers lining the ocean’s edge, and as fast as they could scoop a shovel of sand from the beach, a clam would be captured. Diggers could take, he said, hundreds of pounds of clams every day. Considering that I always struggled just to get my limit of 15 clams a day, the stories seemed unlikely.
Not long after my parents’ death in 2007, a box of scrapbooks containing old newspaper clippings came my way. While most of the articles concerned oystering, a few were also about clamming. Could the old stories from Grandpa be true?
Professional razor clam diggers numbered in the thousands along the shores of the Long Beach peninsula each season in the 1920s and 1930s. Mostly working as independents, the diggers worked each low tide during the clam season in early spring. Most often the season, set by the Washington Department of Fisheries, opened in March, and ran for several months until the clams spawned in May, signaling the close of the season. Along the north end of the Long Beach peninsula a sandbar ran out in the ocean just far enough to be accessible only during the lowest of tides. It was here that the digging was the easiest and yielded the most clams, but was also the most dangerous.
Razor clams live less a foot beneath the surface of the sand. Incapable of much lateral movement, the clam can move vertically very quickly. Clams can dig down at a rate of nine to twelve inches per minute, so speed is essential to the clam digger.
Diggers used a clam shovel, and carried a long sack made of netting, held open by a hoop maybe a foot or 15-inches in diameter. The digger, bent over at the waist, stood with legs spread far enough apart to keep the hoop between them. Marching along the sand in this awkward position, he scooped out the clam and threw it into the net. In this way he worked along the beach, dragging the sack behind him until too full to be manageable. At this point, he walked back to the hard sand, and dumped the clams into a wooden box. The boxes used by the diggers were all alike-used coal oil boxes. Of course the clammer was racing the tide, and digging was possible for 3 to 4 hours and perhaps up to 5 hours on the longest of tides.
The scrapbook newspaper stories verified that an average yield for a digger was well over a hundred pounds, with proficient workers taking two hundred pounds of clams each day, each pound yielding four to seven clams. A Chinook Observer newspaper article dated April 20, 1945, tells of the record dig of 581 pounds by one digger, Harold Sprague of Ocean Park.
So, lets say that if a digger dug 150 pounds of clams in 3 hours, and each pound yielded 5 clams, that’s roughly four clams per minute, or an average of one every 15 seconds. Obviously these men were not digging on their knees or up to their elbows in sand to snag their clams as we do. Perhaps Poppy’s stories were true. To garner that many clams that quickly, the clams had to be abundant and relatively quick to dig.
The very best workers dug with one hand, and threw the clam into the bag with the other. Digging clams is obviously done one clam at a time, so it’s no wonder this labor-intensive occupation yielded strong, lean men. The yellowed photos in the scrapbook show rows of men with broad shoulders and lean builds.
Cannery buyers purchased the clams each day right there along the beach after the incoming tide made digging no longer possible. The pickup trucks from the canneries would arrive and business would commence. The clams were first put on a shaker, an inclined conveyer belt that shook loose sand from the clams. No sense in paying for sand, they’d say. The clams were then weighed on a balance scale. Each box could hold roughly seventy pounds of clams. A digger could fill several boxes each tide.
Prices paid to diggers were always an issue, but in the 1930s the price varied from five to seven cents per pound, increasing to eight cents in the early 1940s. While this may seem insignificant, newspapers of the day advertised a large can of beef stew for only 15 cents.
The clams were then taken to the canneries. Wiegardt Brothers in Ocean Park canned clams in the steam cannery along Bay Avenue. Clams were marketed in a variety of ways, minced and chowder being the most common. Even clam nectar was canned and sold during this time.
By 1939, most of the clam cleaners-who were women-were unionized. In that year, the whole canning season came to a halt when they struck for higher wages. Thirty cents an hour wasn’t enough, so the cleaners walked off the job and held out for forty cents.
The scrapbooks also tell of harvest yields for razor clams during these years. An average season would yield over 2 million pounds of clams from the Washington beaches, but record years were also recorded in the local newspapers. One such year was 1945. The opening of the season saw buyers from Columbia River Packers Association cutting off buying after only two days; it seems the 50,000 pounds purchased those first two days was more than local canneries could process.
Until World War II, commercial digging in Washington was responsible for the highest percentage of clams taken from the beaches. With declining number of older clams, regulatory changes imposed by the Washington Department of Fisheries restricted digging to a shorter season.
Recreational digging began to replace commercial digging after the Second World War. Local residents and incoming tourists flocked to the beaches each spring, and because of dwindling numbers of clams, the commercial clam digging industry also dwindled. Even so, millions of clams are taken from the beaches in Oregon and Washington each year. Tourists continue to flock to the ocean beaches each spring during the weekends of minus tides, the time the ocean retreats far enough to expose the best clam beds. To dig in Washington now requires a clam license, and the season is restricted.
Though the heyday of commercial clamming is long gone, razor clams remain a delicacy and the demand for razor clams still far exceeds supply. Poppy would be glad to know that.