Churbuck.com

Geno in the comments brings to my attention another Cape Cod-based maker of clam rakes — K.B. White. He even has a blog to spread the news.

http://shellfishing.blogspot.com/

K.B. White is based in Falmouth and sells online. I can’t testify to their quality as I am a Ribb Rake guy at present, but I will check out their stuff the next time my rake needs put me in the market.

I spent a rainy Saturday in a wobbly chair in a lecture hall at Cape Cod Community College because of a newspaper headline that said words to the effect of “Cape Coastal Cleanup Could Wind Up in Court.” My curiosity piqued by the organizing presence of the Conservation Law Foundation – a non-profit that literally sued the shit out of Boston Harbor – turning one of the nation’s worst polluted bodies of water into one of the cleanest – I did a little homework, crawled into the back row, and watched a panel muddle their way through a well-intentioned discourse on the disgusting state of Cape Cod’s estuaries, bays, harbors, and coves.

Dead harbors make me mad (after all this blog is devoted to clamming strategies).   Flush a toilet on Cape Cod and eventually, not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually, the result is going to make its way into the water. There, the waste over-nourishes the environment and promotes algae blooms, which in turn cloud the water, blocking sunlight from hitting the bottom. Lack of light and the suffocation effects of the algae kills off the  eel grass where the scallops live and breed. Eventually, over three or four decades, the result is a turbid soup of slime and inedible spider crabs.

The situation sucks and is getting suckier, despite a well intentioned panoply of studies, proposals, committees and coalitions.

Enter the Conservation Law Foundation, a non-profit environmental advocacy group that does one thing very well – it sues polluters and gets stuff cleaned up. When the CLF starts talking about litigation, politicians pay attention, and now the selectmen and town councilors of Cape Cod’s 15 towns are realizing that they may not have decades to figure out how to get the nitrogen out of their harbors.

Yes, sure, there are reasons to let the Cape figure this one out on its own. (There is a pool of zero interest cash available to fund these projects, cash that goes away if the borrowers are under court order) But the implications of a massive “big pipe” sewer system, one built regionally to pool the effluent from those 15 towns, is both expensive and staggering to behold. To say taxpayers aren’t going to like it is an understatement. Residents who live inland, away from the Gatsby mansions of the waterfront, are going to be hard pressed to accept any responsibility for nitrogen loading – yet, as we live on a so-called sole source aquifer – a giant sponge of sand, everyone, including me and my septic tank, are going to have to buck up at some point and pay to have our houses connected to a big pipe that will route our personal emissions inland to a big treatment plant. It’s the only way. We can haggle over in-ground nitrogen mitigation solutions, we can blame lawn fertilizer, birds, and dog poop …. But in the end it’s all septic and it’s got to go.

The CLF can accelerate that. It would start by convincing the EPA that the Cape is broken, in violation, and in need of a cleanup. Then the screaming starts. The municipal bonds, the massive infrastructure disruption, the trenches, the plants, the equipment ….

And, even if a massive sewer is put in place (and the voters of Chatham are moving closer to becoming one of the first towns to go down that road to save their beloved Pleasant Bay), it will be decades before the benefits are realized. In the department of unintended consequences, when you take away septic tanks and their discharge as the gating factor in land use, you can suddenly argue that a 12 story condo with 90 units is okay on that little patch of waterfront scrub pine. Can you say Florida or Long Island? The Association for the Preservation of Cape Cod is right – this is a big infrastructure issue and it’s cheaper to treat a cluster of customers than a lot of sprawled out ones.

I’m voting with my checkbook and joining the CLF. I want them to be the catalyst that binds the 15 towns of the Cape together in a truly regional compact and gets my harbor cleaned up.

This is the first time I have written about sewers since I covered the town of Salem. NH for the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune in 1982. I vowed then it would be the last. It isn’t. Sewers remain the most tedious topic on the planet, and yet, one might argue, one of the more important.

via Friendship – Clam rake tussle leads to charges – Government – VillageSoup.

Nothing like a clam rake fight to start off the spring clamming season.  Here in Barnstable the KlamKops pack guns. Now I know why.  Up in Friendship, Maine…..:

“Around 1 p.m. on March 7, Shellfish Warden Neil Pollis saw two men digging clams off Cushing Road. He approached the men to issue a shellfish violation for digging without a license.

The two men became agitated and a 17-year-old male circled Pollis with a clam rake, while Jason Olsen, 24, of Friendship threatened Pollis with a clam rake. Olsen and Pollis got into a struggle and during the altercation Pollis was hit with the clam rake, according to Knox County Sheriff’s Deputy John Palmer. Pollis, who said he received some puncture wounds on the arm, was not seriously injured and was not transported to the hospital.

Pollis also had issued Olsen a violation about a week prior to the incident, he said. In addition, he had warned him on shellfish violations on other occasions.”

Tip o’ the hat to Cousin Tom in Damariscotta for the clip.

via CapeCodToday Blog Chowder.

“In the nightmare, the waiter puts a plate of steaming blue mussels on the table. But when his customer digs in, she recoils in disgust. Then she raises her fork and glares: On it is a tiny, dead crab.

Shellfish farmer and dealer Bill Silkes is haunted by scenes like this, both real and imagined. For far too long, his nemesis has been a parasitic crustacean – so puny it’s nicknamed the pea crab – that stands in the way of a thriving mussel aquaculture industry in local waters.”

In my alimentary experience, mussels are the riskiest clam for food poisoning and a sure bet for a long night on the bathroom rug. I haven’t knowingly had a mussel since  1983 at the Union Oyster House in Boston.

So, the parasite thing doesn’t weird me out. I’ve eaten fiddler crabs in Tokyo — shells and all — and a pea crab sounds like a fishy baby aspirin. But a bowl of gaping, labiate orange and black mussels steamed open in a bath of bad chablis and shallots?

Andy Buckley — I discovered this one this morning on Cape Cod Today. His bio:

“Novelist, politician, photographer, game designer, master mariner, clamdigger and investigator, Andy Buckley is an eleventh-generation Cape Codder with a Renaissance flair. His Tours of Cape Cod (Schiffer Books) will be published in May 2008. Read Andy’s Monomoyick column in the Cape Cod Chronicle and visit Monomoyick on YouTube and on Panoramio. Andy can be emailed here.”

“When I bought my commercial shellfishing license towards the end of the May 31 deadline, the number of my license caught my attention. It was low. In years past, if I waited this late to fork over the $200 to the town, the number was close to six hundred. Instead this year, it was about half of that.

“It shouldn’t be too surprising. With the proliferation of aquaculture in neighboring towns and the region, as well as the discovery of a large bed of ocean quahogs in Nantucket Sound, the price of littlenecks clams has fallen from over 20 cents a piece to below ten. Often, four hours or less of work could bring close to a hundred dollars in the summer. Not a bad way to supplement income from other work, and pay the high cost of living in Chatham.

Buckley’s Blog.

He blogs at http://www.monomoyick.com

Seen in Osterville a few weeks ago.

Five pairs of waders. All of them leak.

Row out to motorboat with wet feet, wet socks, inside of expensive wet cracked boots at low tide, 8 am, blustery warm November morning, going to get some clams. Get onto motorboat which is awash in rainwater. Bilge pump has failed. Battery dead. Row by towing the 18-foot water laden dead motorboat with dinghy. A gazillion itty bitty strokes into the blustery wind later, get motorboat to ramp. Get crescent wrench, pop the terminal leads off the battery, load into the back of the car, take home to charge. Will haul boat later today on the high tide and leave it on the trailer.

And so ends the boating season of 2008. Leaky waders. Dead boat. No clams.

Foggy Saturday afternoon in November with temps in the 60s and a low tide means it was time to go clamming after seeing the clam police had opened up my favorite clam spot for fall harvesting. This is a spot you need a boat to get to, so it tends to be hardly hit by the recreational crew. As a somber aside, in my daily sculling this fall I have seen a massive increase in the number of clammers out looking for clams. It makes me wonder if some of this activity — both commercial and recreational — is driven by the economic cycle and the simple fact that people are looking for some income and some protein.

Anyway, I needed some quahogs for chowder and stuffed quahogs. All waders were leaking, including a hardly used pair of new neoprenes some f%$king rodent like a mouse or chipmunk decided to chew up for nesting material. All the other pairs were cracked, a sign of either ozone rot (never store waders near anything with an electric motor, like a refrigerator) or old age. So … I know what I want for Christmas.

When we went to the landing to get the boat I discovered some Cape Cod version of a horse thief had taken a set of bolt cutters to my dinghy’s lock-up chain. Fortunately the dinghy didn’t get pinched, but now I am in a high state of paranoia that either some yacht club moron officer is deciding a new policy that no dinghy’s shall be chained to the yacht club fence, or the town is going to get serious about cleaning up the abandoned mess of abandoned dinghies, canoes, catamarans, scows, punts, and skiffs littering the shore around the landing. In any event, I need to go down there with some sort of waterproof plea to leave my dinghy alone as I intend to continue using it until mid-December. Any way, if you who wields bolt cutters is reading this, do me a favor next time? Post a notice or call me?

Like I said, it was foggy. But this time of year there isn’t much boat traffic to worry about, and the course to the clams is basically head due south from the mooring for two minutes and stop.

Son and I focused right on chowder sized clams, the ones with shells as big a closed man’s fist. Instead we found some decent ones — right between cherrystones/littlenecks and true chowders. Here Fisher lives up to his name and demonstrates some jerk rake technique (a Ribb jerk rake no less).

I came up with this in my rake, a perfect baby horseshoe crab. Horseshoe crabs are right out of the days of dinosaurs, living tribolites, so I wanted to make sure this one survives to make more. They are hard hit by commercial fishermen who cut them up for trap bait.

I went sculling this morning under grey, windless skies, taking advantage of a rare chance to get out on smooth water in November before things shut down late next month. I walk down Old Shore Road with the shell on my head, and launch at the bottom of the hill next to the new boat ramp. As I stepped into the shallows I saw this cool creature, about eight to ten inches long, dead, but only recently so gauging from its good condition.

This is a mantis shrimp – at first I thought it was a lobster tail some well-to-do bait fisherman had discarded after an expedition for a big striped bass (lobster tails are legendarily good bait, but at current prices, better in one’s stomach) – according to Wikipedia, mantis shrimp are so named for their resemblance to a Praying Mantis, but they are not shrimp. They are also known as “thumb splitters” by scuba divers because of their ability to destroy an appendage brought too close to their mandibles. Indeed, they can allegedly shatter aquarium glass and are apparently highly intelligent creatures.

The Chinese call them “pissing shrimp” for their penchant to void their bowels while being cooked.

I have never seen one of these on Cape Cod before, but know from saltwater fly fishing that they do “move” into southern New England waters in the fall and have the fastest “strike” time of any creature in the world. The Cape is their northernmost range on the eastern seaboard, and I know from experience that the south side of Cape Cod, jutting out as it does into the Gulf Stream, is last stop for a lot of tropical species which work their way up the coast all summer, only to get stunned and stranded by the first chills of the fall. A manatee died last month after making its way to Dennis, and there have been catches of tarpon, barracuda, and tiger sharks in Nantucket Sound in the past.

Here’s a video of one attack a crab.

What could be finer?

1. There is no wind at 8 am so I am about to go for a pleasant fall scull around the harbor.
2. The dogs are frightened and avoiding me because of my bellicose behavior at 1:30 am when J.D. Drew homered to bury the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in the second game of the ALDS.
3. Hence my new motto, courtesy of Surviving Grady is: “WE ARE THE MOTHERF@#KING BOSTON RED SOX, CHUMPS, AND THOSE WHO OPPOSE US WILL TASTE THE LIGHTNING!”
4. I am on vacation. Ten days of being and nothingness. It’s time for the Fall Run and I am off to the Great Backside Beach to stand in foamy surf, sling eels into the darkness, and ponder my existence while staring across the Atlantic at Portugal.
5. I am going to cook a roti de porc au lait for my dinner tonight.
6. Perhaps I shall seek bivalves in the mud later today. Must check tides.

So, whereabouts this coming week? Going nowhere. How to contact me? Don’t. Blog probabilities? Low, except to lie about fish I haven’t caught, and to gloat about the BoSox.

I aspire to earning a nickname when all is said and done. Something like the one the Byzantine Emperor Basil II earned, First I need to do something either heroic or heinous:

“Finally, on July 29, 1014, Basil II outmaneuvered the Bulgarian army in the Battle of Kleidion, with Samuil separated from his force. Having crushed the Bulgarians, Basil was said to have captured 15,000 prisoners and blinded 99 of every 100 men, leaving 150 one-eyed men to lead them back to their ruler, who fainted at the sight and died two days later suffering a stroke. Although this may be an exaggeration, this gave Basil his nickname Boulgaroktonos, “the Bulgar-slayer” in later tradition.”

Basil II – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

I noted a while back the controversy over dinghy storage in Chatham. Let’s tag this one under the “clamming” strategy aspect of this blog, as part of my ongoing crusade on waterfront access, riparian rights, water quality, and the old ways of life around the Cape Cod shorefront. Expect more ranting on my part through this fall as beachwalk season commences and I start to spend more time contemplating issues ranging from the dredging off of 600 feet of Sampson’s Island to nitrogen loads in Cotuit Bay to the evolving nature of waterfront policy around Cotuit and the Cape at large as population pressure and escalating waterfront values pit the public against the private. Anyway — here’s the Cape Cod Times on a compromise in Chatham to let people continue to store dinghies on the beach. This is an issue in Cotuit and I find myself fiercely guarding my dinghy slot by being the first on the beach every spring. Yet the beach is cluttered with abandoned hulks and needs to be purged.

“CHATHAM — The dinghies can stay, but only if their owners play by the rules.

That is the essence of a new policy that grew out of a confrontation over the winter between a Stage Harbor property owner, the town and the owners of small skiffs used to access boats offshore. The small boats have historically been left on private beaches around town.

Harbor Master Stuart Smith and the owners of the property near the town landing at Champlain Lane, identified as Champlain Realty Trust, have agreed on a solution that will preserve the age-old tradition and allow the owners to have an orderly, clean beach.”

CapeCodTimes.com – Chatham resolves dinghy controversy.

Mister O’Grady is on vacation in Wellfleet, and posts an excellent discussion on the state of shellfishing, invasive species, and other bellwethers of coastal life. Good fodder for the lagging clamming content lately. I have seen no Chinese clams yet.

“What I did on the Day Two of my vacation: visited an oyster farm in Wellfleet, MA. For serious. These sustainable – “call it green, sustainable, whatever you want” said one oyster farmer today – shellfish fisheries are an interesting canary in the coal mine in several respects. As we’ll see.”

tecosystems » What I Learned Today: Shellfish, Fisheries, Oil, and More.

Ben at Walking the Berkshires and the Cape Cod Times (and its excreble daily video show CapeCast) are sounding the tocsin over that-which-should-not-be-eaten, Tomalley, or the vile green goo found inside the bodies of lobsters.

Apparently lobsters, who personify the term, “bottom feeder”  are utter scavengers who dine on whatever lands on the bottom, store a lot of toxic crud in their tomalley, which is essentially a two-organs-in-one deal for the lobster, playing the role of both liver and pancreas.

Lobsters lying in state

Sorry, but I don’t know about you, but I tend to use my liver to deal with stuff like toxins. Indeed, back in my glory years when tequila shots were my bane, anyone who ate my liver, Prometheus style, would have been struck dead faster than a spy biting on the cyanide molar implanted in their jaw.

My mother, a native of the New Hampshire sea coast, gets more mileage out of a lobster than a parasite. We’re talking Outer Limits/Twilight Zone sort of behavior — with much meticulous sucking and picking away until there is nothing but a red husk on the plate. She is one of those whack jobs that declare “tomalley” and its nasty red twin, “coral”or the roe, to be a delicacy. Ben’s mom apparently is the same way. Me, I believe tomalley is a soft, meconium sort of substance that one usually finds on a dock after a flock of sea gulls meets the fleet on a hot day.

So when the State of Maine health department and then the Massachusetts BOH declare tomalley to be bad for you, I’ve got to ask: “Who in their right mind ate it anyway?”

Check out the photo on this Cape Cod Times story. Hungry? And my respects to anybody who would brush their teeth with tomalley, you are my hero.

This weekend:

1. Walked Dead Neck with my wife late Friday afternoon. I found no lures but did see a piping plover and some coyote tracks.
2. Got some serious quahogging in on Saturday afternoon.
3. Finished preparing the flower beds – three weeks early this year – planted the fancy dahlias I mail ordered in February, and put in the herb bed for the kitchen.
4. Watched the Sox sweep Texas.
5. Avoided my PC until now.
6. G0t in some good workouts (alas none on the water) in preparation for Speedo Season.
7. Made this awesome (soon to be posted) documentary with Fisher on how to (or how not to) open a wily clam.

Whereabouts this week:

April 21-22: Cotuit (Olympic Bloggers, budget, TV ads)

April 23-24: RTP (workshops)

April 25-27: Cotuit

Around Barnstable – Barnstable, MA – Wicked Local Barnstable
It’s a start:

“Barnstable town councilors unanimously approved a shellfish overlay district for areas of Cotuit Bay, West Bay, North Bay and Nantucket Sound. The approval finally came after many months of discussions and many amendments were made to the original proposal. The proposed ad hoc committee to be appointed by the town manager will stay in the approved ordinance. Bulkheads will not be affected by the 18-month pier ban. A sunset clause proposed by councilor Greg Milne was defeated. The new ordinance also requests review and simultaneous comparison of the coastal management study that was completed in 1990.”

I have my shiny new family shellfish permit and that means the clams are scared. One of these years I am going to get a single digit license, maybe camp out in a lawn chair at the Department of Natural Resources and be first in line like a teenager trying to cop some Hannah Montana tickets.

The boat is launched. The waders need patching and tomorrow on the tide I intend to go in search of some serious mercenaria mercenaria, aka the Mighty Quahog, and make me a mess of chowder.  The shellfish warden asked me, as she handed over the newly laminated license: “Where’s your favorite place to clam?”

That’s like asking me what my bank balance is.

But I told her and in return she pulled out the map and showed me some good spots where the volunteers have been broadcasting seed and and transplanting dirty clams to clean water. They were all shore spots — the kind for people who don’t have boats — and therefore the ones I tend to leave to the guys who trudge down the sand to find their bivalves. I have a boat, so I go to the places where clammers with boats can only go.

And I’m not talking about them, in fact, I am turning into one of those wiseasses who when asked at the dock, “Where did you catch that fish?” say, “In the lip.”

I impulsively got the boat in the water today. Didn’t wait to paint the bottom. Just gave the battery a quick charge, screwed a skid plate into the skeg of the dinghy, spliced on a new paintaer, hooked it all up to the back of the car and ten minutes later discovered my new Stearns waders had a leak in the right boot.

Boat started right up, slick as could be, so I towed the dinghy out to the mooring (still in summer mode without a winter stick because I stayed in the water so late last December the mooring guy could’nt service it), tied it off with a bowline on a bight, then tightened down my hat, zipped up snug and floored the Honda for a quick tour of the three bays.

I brought the Flip cam and even tried some narrated tour for those faithful readers who have no clue what Cape Cod looks like in late March. The wind noise is wicked and the image is all over the place.

A fishing tradition keelhauled in Chatham – The Boston Globe

Dinghy Wars erupt in Chatham. We have a problem here in Cotuit – but it’s not dinghies per se — we’ve got knuckleheads parking full boats in the grass.

“Locals say it is about Chatham’s soul being eroded by newcomers with thick wallets, newcomers whom they refer to as “wash-ashores.”"The problem that I have with it is, these people come down here and say, ‘Oh, look. Isn’t it cute? Isn’t it wonderful? Look at that cute little fisherman out there working hard,’ ” said Sean Summers, a Chatham native and local selectman. “Then they buy in and say: ‘We’re going to do things my way now.’ “

Comes down to one flaw in the Commonwealth’s laws. Property owners own their beach all way way down to the water. Most states they own to the high tide mark. This makes for a massive pain in the neck and constant battle over rights. I predict — in my lifetime — a repeal of the low water ownership and a rollback to the highwater mark. Until then, watch the washashores break out the bolt cutters and start putting the dinghies on their beach some place else.

Me? I chain mine to a chainlink fence on a public beach and get there in the middle of March to stake out my spot. Sooner or later I guess I’ll have to get a permit for that too.

Two-year pier ban proposed – News – The Barnstable Patriot – Cape Cod & Islands
David Still at the Barnstable Patriot reports the Barnstable Association of Recreational Shellfishermen and Cotuit town councilor Rick Barry are trying again on the pier ban that was defeated by a minority vote of the town council in January.

“A more limited pier and dock ban with a two-year sunset provision will be considered as a compromise to a more extensive proposal that failed to gain the support of the town council last month.

Under the latest proposal, a two-year ban on new docks would cover portions of the three bays area only. The idea is to would allow time to develop a harbor management plan for the area.”