Hunting the wild geoduck
Really great video!
We lived in a house on Puget Sound for four years and undoubtedly had hundreds of geoducks in the sand-flats in front of the house. They were greatly prized for chowder but hardly used at all because they were so hard to catch.
You went out at low tide in the wet sand flats and looked for the telltale mark in the sand above the top of the geoduck neck. As soon as the clam felt the pressure of your footsteps, it retracted the neck down about four feet - you saw the "real" length of the neck in the sheath they pulled out of the ones in the video.
Then you had to dig down the four feet or so of slumping, wet sand to get to the clam itself. If you succeeded in reaching through the sand to grab the neck and pulled, the neck just broke off, so you had to do the full dig. It took about fifteen minutes (ideally with two people) to finally get deep enough so you could lie down on your belly in the wet sand and run your hand through the sand and get it under the body of the clam, and then pull it up. There was a geoduck-hunter in Seattle who famously said "I'm going to be the first person ever to discover a geoduck with teeth." The hole was big enough to serve as a foxhole.
Very few had the energy or patience for this, and geoduck chowder was a rare, prized dish. There are a lot more easily-available clams and oysters within easy reach.
As we were leaving Seattle in 1971, an entrepreneur invented a way to harvest them. A diver in scuba gear went down from a boat with a high-pressure hose and washed the sand away in the geoduck beds and picked them up. They became a seafood commodity. I saw estimates that there were millions of them in Puget Sound.
I don't know if that kind of harvesting is still permitted - it doesn't sound very eclogically sound to me - but I believe thay are generally available, if not exactly a commonplace seafood. I see them from time to time here in the Midwest, where they are certainly not native. ;)
Mike
