The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)

[holzbt]

Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)

Driving home from work this morning I decide to take the beach route to avoid traffic. Crossing the bay bridge I could only see one boat between Islip and Lindenhurst. A far cry from 30 years ago. This is the only boat working this end of the bay these days.

[Harbormaster]

Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)

Where was this photo taken? It looks like Islip. There used to be three similar boats, Prowler, Howler, and Growler around when I was a bit younger.

Neat, you are good. I believe it was Islip. I looked down the forward hatch and found her official number carved in the main beam and looked it up in the Merchant Vessel List - it was Prowler, but now I can't remember when she was built - I'll see if I can find an older copy.

[holzbt]

Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)

Neat, you are good. I believe it was Islip. I looked down the forward hatch and found her official number carved in the main beam and looked it up in the Merchant Vessel List - it was Prowler, but now I can't remember when she was built - I'll see if I can find an older copy.

That would be the creek behind Degnon Blvd., across from the Islip Middle School. I believe there was a rather unique individual living aboard there for quite a few years. I never took a pic. as it was one of those things that was always there, why would it not be there next time? Always wondered what happened to it.

I found GROWLER in the 1894 MVUS list. Built in Bay Shore in 1885 and homeported in Patchoque. Howler and Prowler must have been built after 1893. Probably all as sloops.

[ILikeRust]

Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)

See, when you're driving a car over thin ice, every fiber of your being says to go FASTER, you know as soon as you stop you're going down...

Hey, at least those old VW Beetles floated.

[Thad]

Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)

Not being raised to it I never did any digging myself. Quahogs were the things around East Greenwich Bay for kids I knew going to high school in Warwick, RI. Flat bottom deep and wide clam skiffs were their vehicle, powered by bigger and bigger outboards. One had 2 100hp Mercs. The clam cops kept upping the ante. Bull raking that was, mostly, I think. Thanks for the thread!

[peterchech]

Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)

May I ask, as a young forumite (26), what has happened to this industry? Are there still clams to be taken? Are there environmental problems, or is the price gotten for clams today just too low to really make it worthwhile?

[Jim Ledger]

Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)

May I ask, as a young forumite (26), what has happened to this industry? Are there still clams to be taken? Are there environmental problems, or is the price gotten for clams today just too low to really make it worthwhile?

The clam industry on Long Island collapsed in the early '80's. The available stocks were so depleted that they never recovered. The main causes of the decline are probably overdigging, along with increasing environmental stress from development in the watershed that feeds the bays.

There are still a handful of diggers left, down from the ten thousand licenses given out during the Sevnties. A lot of the ones who kept at it moved to different areas. Rhode Island was hot for a while, Staten Island, Great Kills, the Indian River in Florida. There's a lot of digging going on in Sandy Hook Bay, but it's tightly regulated by new Jersey, because the clams are taken in uncertified waters and then depurated. Forget about getting a license, there are only fifty.

[Jim Ledger]

Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)

Hey, at least those old VW Beetles floated.

Not with the doors open, rust holes in the floorboards and eight bushels of clams in the back seat, they don't.

No, it was the last ride for that little VW . Engine screaming in second...whole car invisible from shore cause of the spray we was throwing up..or so they said, anyway. Soon as we got near enough to shore we could see a little crowd on the beach...they was yelling and jumping up and down...we started yelling back, couldn't hear a thing though.

We almost made it too and probably would have if it weren't for one small detail. You see, whenever a body of tidal water freezes solid there develops a crack around the perimeter where the tide flexes the ice, a hinge of sorts. Well, we hit that crack, which was by now more like a gap, and down she went. Off we jump as she settles in up to the bottom of the windows with only fifty feet left to go. Now it's getting dark, out come the clams, out comes the chainsaw and we start cutting a channel to shore, running that poor chain right into the bottom. The ice chunks were pushed under the solid ice and Tom backs his truck onto the edge of the parking lot over the beach. We grab a grappling hook with a hundred feet of half inch nylon from the boat, tie one end onto the trailer hitch of the truck and hook the bumper of the car with the grapple.


Everybody stands back and the truck starts to pull the car, five, ten twenty feet, the problem is, the car's just sitting there, stuck. That truck must have stretched that line fifty feet before the two fingers of that hook straightened out.

Tom's hanging his head out the truck window when that slingshot lets go and that bent hook goes flying straight for his head at about eighty miles an hour...

[Paul Pless]

Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)

The clam industry on Long Island collapsed in the early '80's. The available stocks were so depleted that they never recovered. The main causes of the decline are probably overdigging, along with increasing environmental stress from development in the watershed that feeds the bays.

There are still a handful of diggers left, down from the ten thousand licenses given out during the Sevnties. A lot of the ones who kept at it moved to different areas. Rhode Island was hot for a while, Staten Island, Great Kills, the Indian River in Florida. There's a lot of digging going on in Sandy Hook Bay, but it's tightly regulated by new Jersey, because the clams are taken in uncertified waters and then depurated. Forget about getting a license, there are only fifty.

Okay earlier in this thread someone mentioned harvesting blue points at what I assumed was Blue Point. So now your saying the fishery has collapsed, but I see 'blue points' (clams and oysters) on menus everywhere on the east coast north of New York, and also in the ritzier seafood places in cities across the midwest. Any idea what gives? just a mislabeling??

[Jim Ledger]

Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)

Okay earlier in this thread someone mentioned harvesting blue points at what I assumed was Blue Point. So now your saying the fishery has collapsed, but I see 'blue points' (clams and oysters) on menus everywhere on the east coast north of New York, and also in the ritzier seafood places in cities across the midwest. Any idea what gives? just a mislabeling??

Blue Point is a village on the bay just west of Patchogue. It gave it's name to the locally harvested oysters during the nineteenth century, as did hundreds of other locations.

The Blue Points company was a commercial clam grower and harvester located in West Sayville. A lot of the shots in the video were taken at their establishment. It's the red barn on the dock, and if you see a mechanical clam dredger. it's theirs. They had bottom leases for thousands of acres, which they planted with seed and were allowed to mechanically harvest. Their property was patrolled, so you couldn't dig there. They went out of business a few years ago, the red barn is now condos.

The nature conservancy is trying to transplant clams on their leases.

Any labels you see attached to shellfish in restaurants are pure marketing, I mean, Blue Points sounds so much tastier than a plateful of Raritans, a most likely more accurate description. There are very few clams coming out of Blue Point. There was a time, when oysters were plentiful and cheap, that the different varieties were distinguishable by a knowlegable clientele, but probably not anymore.

[cdragon]

Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)

Great stuff-thanks - I grew up on the South Shore also, but farther west, before the Great South Bay-I remember the garveys and the clammers-most of the boats I recall were outboards-always mercs too-this was in the early 70's I guess. Knew some guys on the North Shore in the early 80's-Northport area (they had open boats and thought the south shore boys with the cuddy's were sissys)-who "got rich" with a huge calm vein they were on for a couple of years. The story was that guys paid of their mortgages and bought shiny new pickups pver a period of a couple of years and then it was over.
Funny, though-can you imagine today's college kids out on an old garvey digging clams for college money? Or driving a car and cutting through the ice?! They'd all be arrested and medicated for ADHD or something...the good old days sure had some good in them...

[holzbt]

Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)






This is the same boat as the green one in post #3, about 1996.

[holzbt]

Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)




Built by Jimmy Kirkup. Probably late 60's or early 70's in Bay Shore. In for a new deck late 1990's.

[Breakaway]

Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)

Tracey remembers Timmy Hermus.

Just to be clear, I'm talking 'bout Timmy whose 50 and still kickinh. His father, and I believe grandfather, were also "Timmy," owned a boatyard, and built Scooters, most notably,

May I ask, as a young forumite (26), what has happened to this industry? Are there still clams to be taken? Are there environmental problems, or is the price gotten for clams today just too low to really make it worthwhile?

What Jim said. The guys left have to do a variety of things. Catching clams off Staten Island for transplant in Peconic Bay is pretty profitable for one friend whose in on that program. He lives with 8 other guys in a shack for 3-months 80-miles from home to catch his 10 bushels a day at whateber the daily rate is. Also catching bait; razor clams for the Chinatown market; Horsehoe crabs were hot for a while, their blood apparently used for medical research, but they were so easy to gather the price eventually dropped to where it wasn't worthwhile. Mecox Bay gives up some real fat, tasty oysters every year--but not many in the scheme of things; rod and reel fishing for striped bass; work a few trips on a buddy's dragger; eels for bait and the local Polish community; etc, etc etc.

The few guys I know still at it work eight days a week hustling like that.

Back in the day, anyone could go and get a license, put a boat together and have at it. ALmost every one I grew up with clammed to one degree or another. Now, you have to have a different license for almost every activity and you cant get one unless you can prove that the majority of your income over the past so many years came from catching seafood. So its moot whether you could start up anyways.

[johngsandusky]

Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)

There must be money in clams yet, people are digging them out of Mt Sinai even this winter.