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| That's a limit. |
Finally, got on the road. We took a quick drive up the road to Potlatch State Park to try our hand at clamming. I found that the descriptions on the State Park website, of the camping sites themselves was a bit scarier than the actual conditions. I figured that just showing up, our site would stink, but it was very nice. Not as private as some, but nicely tree shaded by big old maples. We immediately hit the beach for clamming. The tide was less than optimal, but Colton and I both managed to dig up limits of varnish clams. I had never heard of them before either. But we did discover the next day that they steamed up very nicely. Tasted great. We enjoyed Costco Lasagna for dinner and looked forward to a lower tide in the morning. And we did actually crawl out of bed in time to hit the beach before the 8:05am low tide. The tide was considerably lower than the afternoon the day before. We used Jana's entrenching tool from the army, and a clam rake that she had picked up Friday morning at Sportco. On my first attempted raking, one of the tines broke off. And it didn't get much better from then on out for the rake. It's all bent up. Anyway, I went to the entrenching tool, which we found had a tendency to bust up clams. But, I did limit on Butter clams, Native Littlenecks, and Manila Littlenecks. That was some hard work, and took about an hour and a half. I got a bit sweaty as I started with a sweatshirt on. Colton went back and limited on mostly varnish clams again. We had the first day's catch for a lunch/dinner. I have to admit, I was less than enthusiastic about getting up Sunday morning to go out and clam again. Saturday morning had worn me out. But we once again managed to get down to the beach for the best tide so far. After about three or four minutes digging into my first hole with the shovel, I had an epiphany. I found that once I moved the surface rocks away, I could just dig into the sand with my hands and find the clams. It only took about a half an hour doing this to limit on mostly butter clams. And the added bonus being that it was much less physically taxing. We made quick work of them, limiting out easily. Of course, time to leave came much too quickly. We are planning on going back again, and are now looking forward to our next trip, this time east of the mountains for some sun and heat!
