Make A Living Alongshore...Digging Clams

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The inside dimensions of each hod were 9 by 9 by 19 inches, and each held two 12quart buckets of clams, or two-thirds of a bushel. We filled five hods for each three-bushel barrel, with the extra bucket for shrinkage. Today, even though so many clams are being sold by the pound, the hod is still a good container, because it can be set on the edge of the tide line, just underwater. The clams are washed, kept cool, and to a certain extent left to spew out the sand or mud that they inhale while they are being dug.

Standard hods (and there were a great many that did not conform to the standard, of course) had two square ends (usually made of scrap lumber). The hods themselves were made either of secondhand laths set a lath's thickness apart and cut 20-1/2 inches long (to allow for the 3/4inch-thick ends), or-in later years-they were covered with cellar window wire and battened at the corners with laths for reinforcement. The handle was usually a piece of 3/4inch rope secured on the outside just above the middle of each hod end. Or it might have been a thinner piece of rope threaded through a short length of old garden hose so the rope wouldn't cut through your hands if you had to struggle across a hundred yards of sticky mud with a hod full of clams in each hand. The clams can be rocked gently underwater in these hods . . . until they settle. And then, they can be rocked with a slight up-tossing motion from end to end until all the mud or sand has been washed out.

Half-bushel wire baskets are good if you can afford them. However, not only do they cost more . . . (and I don't wish to impugn anyone's honesty) but they also have a mysterious way of disappearing if they are left around the shore.

SELLING YOUR CLAMS

You have your gear and your clams. Now you need a market. Fishermen generally forget that the better condition their catch is in when it reaches the market, the surer they are to receive top price. If a fisherman consistently brings in clams that are clean of mud and sandif there is minimum breakage, if "short" clams are never brought in-then on the days when the market is slack, his clams will be the ones the fish buyer wants.

I hold no love for fish buyers (having fought with too many in my day) but you have to remember that they are in the business to make money, too. There is another angle from the fish buyer's point of view: He has to be able to depend on you. He has had to fight the fish market for a place to sell your clams, and-in all probability-he has had to promise to deliver a specified amount of clams at certain times. If you have a hangover, or if the tide or weather is "phew", or if you feel like a holiday, the fish market couldn't care less . . . and the fish buyer is caught in a bind. Guess whose clams he is going to buy the next time there are more clams available than there is a market for? It seems fundamental, but think about it.

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