Clamming!

We went to the beach house to try clamming for the first time and enjoy a gorgeous weekend at the coast. Netarts bay, just north of Pacific City, is great for clamming and crabbing and its so close! Eventually we'll rent a boat and try crabbing there with the kids, but for now we decided to get the clamming thing down first. We looked up the tides and low tide was at 4:00pm, but we ended up going a little early just to be sure we knew what we were doing and didn't waste any time. One of Brian's co-workers had let him borrow a "clamming gun", which looks like a cylinder shovel. It takes out a tube of sand around where you think a clam is and then you dump it out and dig around for the clam. Well, we tried it a bunch of times as we headed out to where a group of people who looked like they knew what they were doing and had no luck. Apparently the clamming gun is best for Razor clams which are found further north in Seaside or Astoria. The kids were so excited too and you could see them loose enthusiasm each time we pulled up an empty tower of sand. Once we walked out almost 1/2 way into the bay, though, we finally found where the clams were and got some very helpful tips from some very helpful people. Cockle clams aren't very deep and to get them you find a pool of water and rake the surface, once you hit what feels like a rock, that's the clam and you dig it out. Then for the butter clams, you find a quarter size hole, put a stick down into the hole to see how far it is, dig to the side of it and reach in to find them. If you dig straight down, you break the shell, which we did on the first couple of one's. If the clams are facing up, some of them grab onto the stick and you find it in their shells when you dig them out. Kid of funny to see, feisty little buggers! These are the clams that you have to get down and dirty to get. We didn't figure all of this out until the very end and the kids were cold and ready to be done with the whole experience, so I took the kids back to the car while Brian dug for another 1/2 hour or so and got another 15 clams after we left! We ended up with about 36 total. He also came back with a dungeness crab that he found in one of the pools as he was walking in one of the pools on the way back to the car. He cooked it up and we had it for lunch the next day. Brian enjoys the tedious part of cleaning the clams, so he was happy taking care of all of that. It's a lot of work for a little meat, but he made an awesome clam chowder when we got home. I think there's something to knowing how hard you worked to get the food on your plate. We explained to the kids how it wasn't always so easy to get the food we eat. It used to be that people had to do stuff like clamming, hunting and fishing to get all of their food. They didn't have grocery stores like we do. That made them think!

Having our morning coffee and hot chocolate on the beach.  What a way to start the day!

For some reason dragging kelp on the beach is really fun

Practice for climbing the big sand dune.  This actually became our sand sledding hill later in the day.

1st attempt at clamming until we finally figured it out

"Nope, nothing??? Hmmm, this clamming thing is not easy!"

1st clam found

If you look close you can see water shooting out of the sand where the clams are.  Isaiah is jumping on the sand making them squirt