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Last edited by holzbt; 01-21-2011, 05:32 PM. -
Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)
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Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)
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Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)
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Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)
Thanks for that, Roger. Those were some good days.
I put together a pair of tongs last year to do some digging off the catboat. A set of heads I found in a yard sale and a pair of handles that I made from some Doug-Fir stair tread. Eighteen footers to get to the deep shell beds off Patchogue. Guy tells me that I could get fined for using them. Crazy, I mean, I only want to get fifty or so, how many can you eat and give away?
Lucky are the ones who get sent to sailing school and provided with Beetle cats at a young age, though I never met any. Those old tong boats were my first view into a world fast fading, though I didn't realize it at the time. A different school entirely.
Guy named Mickey first took me out tonging around the time of this film. He had an old bay boat, named Traveller, built by Weeks in Patchogue in the Twenties. Worked with another guy on his boat, the Far Fookin' Out, a composite sort of boat, the bow of oneboat fastened to the stern of another and kept afloat by the liberal application of roofing tar. Being young we'd be out in these leaky boats all winter and not think a thing of it.
Here's a picture of my first boat, the houseboat. The tonging garvey was my second build. This picture was taken on the beach across from East Quogue.
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Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)
That video is great!!!
That reminds me....
There was a documentary on PBS or WLIW about a decade ago on the baymen of Great South Bay. I thought it was very well done. Always wanted to see it again, but I don't even know the name of it.
Do any of you know what I am talking about?Comment
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Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)
The BAYMEN video was done by cablevision/news12. It was very good but I've no idea where to find it.Comment
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Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)
I think this is it.
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Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)
I never met a "bayman", well, maybe Louie Duffy, but he wasn't the kind of baymen that they preferred down at the Suffolk Marine Museum. They love a "bayman" over there , but look down their noses at clammers, not that any of them actually dug any clams, but they love the idea of a respectable bayman and if they thought you wuz one they'd record your bull**** for the future generations of dentists to believe. Louis Duffy lived with all the other Duffys in a run-down house on Swan River. There's only Flo Duffy left now, all the others having succumbed to the same kind of cancer. Flo was a phenomenal treader, ten to fifteen bags was not an unusual day for her, big stuff mostly, like treaders tend to get, but that's a lot of clams. Louie didn't have too many teeth, and the ones he did have were none too good on account of all the soda he liked to drink. He had a great loud voice that you could hear clearly a hundred yards away on a windy day, usually laughing at some joke he made while he put up two for your one. One time we're selling clams on the dock and Louie says to me "Wanna rabbit?" and opens his trunk and it's full, FULL, of rabbits he's shot.
Edited to add...Flo Duffy is actually Flo Sharkey mentioned in the video in the above post.
Here's a nice shot, scanned, of the bay in the morning with some snow on top of the skim ice from inside a tongboat cabin.
Last edited by Jim Ledger; 01-22-2011, 07:27 AM.Comment
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Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)
I grew up on the North Shore so the tonging that partly put me through college was from a 12' dink that I rowed out into the creek. Up here, the tong clammers use big home-made skiffs - more like home slapped up - plywood flatties about 24' long, about 8'-10' at the transom with but the slightest curve and about no flare to the sides and a workboard a bit ahead of amidships. Great ugly plywood brutes. I'll have to get a picture.
Anyway, point is I envy those bay clam boats.Comment
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Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)
There were a couple of winters in the late Seventies that were colder than any I've seen since. The bay froze up completely for about six weeks. These pictures were taken in 1979. This is an old VW that we used to drive out on the ice...
...with a younger, fitter, stupider version of my own self.
And this...is what we drove two miles out on the ice to do...remember the stupid part...chainsaw holes through the foot-thick ice and tong up the clams, using ranges we knew to get on spots where there might actually be some.
Here you can see the shore, just, that's in the middle of the bay off Blue Point.
Anyway, there were three of us one morning in late February with all our gear, packed up and ready to go. The ice was getting soft during the day but freezing hard at night. It was still a foot thick, so no problem. So, out we went. It was warm that day, probably got up into the forties with the sun getting stronger. By lunch the ice was crunchy underfoot, but it was still a foot thick. By three o'clock the top two inches of the ice was Swiss cheese, and so was the bottom two inches.
In fact the whole surface of the ice was one big puddle.
It was time to go.
Into the VW we loaded eight bushels of clams into the backseat. The other two guys stood on the running boards with the doors open, ready to jump. I drove. The ice was so soft I couldn't get the car out of second. I can't be sure, but I think the ice formed a bow wave in front of the car, which might further explain the lack of speed. 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...
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Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)
Geez Holzbt, some of the boats in the more recent photos look pretty interesting, any idea how old they are? A couple look like they might be old sail boat hulls.Which comes first," someone asked Ira Gershwin, "the words or the music?" "The contract," said Gershwin.
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Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)
This is a typical oyster sloop of around 1900. Remove the rig, add an engine, shorten the bowsprit and put a doghouse over the sliding hatch and you would have something very similar to the old style tong boats.
A lot of the tong boats were also made from cut-down hulls, the 36' plywood landing barge being a favorite.
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Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)
Great stuff. I didn't know the bays' clamming boats were that nice . Jim ; your clamming exploits on the ice are incredible! I visited a maritime museum on lake Superior once ,near the Apostle Islands . In the past there gill nets were set through 2 widely separated holes in the ice, somehow fishing a messenger line through to start .Last edited by Bill Perkins; 01-22-2011, 09:34 AM.Comment
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Re: The Life of a Clam Digger (1972, Long Island)
Thanks, Bill, we never made it to shore.
Tongers off Patchogue back before anyone here can remember. They were probably tonging oysters in this picture. The oysters were farmed, the beds cultivated and planted with seed stock and harvested with hired labor. When the oyster fishery collapsed the interest switched to clams, wild stock harvested by independent diggers.
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