Photo by John Rottet 



A Cedar Island clammer 



months, says Marcus Hepburn, a re- 

 searcher at the Institute for Coastal 

 and Marine Resources at East 

 Carolina University. As part of a UNC 

 Sea Grant research project examining 

 hard clams, Hepburn is finding out 



more about the people who clam. 



Hepburn describes one method of 

 harvest called "swimming for clams." 

 "The person immerses himself in the 

 water and crawls along the bottom on 

 his hands and knees," he says. "All the 

 while he's feeling the bottom for clams 

 with his hands, knees and feet. When 

 he finds a clam he deposits it in a tub 

 that sits in an inner tube. The tube and 

 tub are pulled along by a rope at- 

 tached to the clammer's leg." 



Lionel Gilgo, a retired clammer from 

 Atlantic, says he clams by the sign. It 

 seems clams sometime give away their 

 position while they're feeding by mak- 

 ing a small hole in the sand. "You've 

 got to know that sign from the other 

 signs on the bottom," Gilgo says. 

 "They'll only sign certain days and 

 they only feed on the tide, but never 

 on the ebb tide. And they won't feed 

 every day." 



Until the mid-1970s all North 

 Carolina clams were harvested by 

 hand. But then two mechanical 

 methods of harvest were introduced, 

 kicking and dredging. Kicking and 

 dredging are winter fisheries, limited 

 by the N. C. Division of Marine Fish- 

 eries. Last year, 30 percent of the 

 1,458,000 pounds of clams harvested 

 in this state were kicked, four percent 

 were dredged and 64 percent were har- 

 vested by hand methods. Clams 

 brought North Carolina fishermen 

 more than $5 million in dockside 

 revenues during 1981. 



After the introduction of mechanical 

 harvest and a jump in clam prices from 

 seafood dealers, clamming became an 

 important seasonal fishery in North 

 Carolina. Clam landings doubled and 

 dockside values quadrupled between 

 1977 and 1979 alone, Hepburn says. 



Though clam landings have re- 

 mained constant in recent years, two 

 problems face the fishery — exploitation 

 and pollution. Fishermen, scientists 

 and resources managers are worried 

 that clam stocks may be becoming 

 overfished. Sea Grant researchers 

 Charles Peterson of the UNC Institute 

 of Marine Sciences and Marcus Hep- 

 burn are taking a closer look at the 

 hard clam and its harvest methods, 

 hoping to answer some important 

 questions about the fishery. 



Some clams are unharvestable 

 because they bed in waters polluted by 

 sewage treatment plants, malfunc- 

 tioning septic tanks, farm drainage 

 areas, construction sites or industry. 

 Mark Sobsey, another Sea Grant re- 

 searcher from the University of North 

 Carolina at Chapel Hill, is examining 

 contamination in oysters and clams. 



So while the hard clam lies snuggled 

 beneath its estuarine blanket, those of 

 us topside worry about its fate. Fisher- 

 men are concerned about having 

 enough clams to fish; resource 

 managers are worried about managing 

 stocks, and scientists are anxious to 

 learn more about both the clam and 

 the people who fish for them. 



Clams today, none tomorrow, say kickers 



Thin sheets of ice weave a collar 

 around Core Sound during a mid- 

 January freeze down East. Charles 

 Gilgo, a clam kicker, sits by the fire in 

 his Atlantic home, hoping for a thaw. 



"I came back in this morning after 

 my first three bags froze on the boat," 

 Gilgo says. "It was too cold for me." 



A cold snap may keep Gilgo off the 

 sound for a few days but he knows it 

 will pass. But what really worries him 

 is a bigger problem — one that could 

 keep him by the fire in winters to 

 come. And that problem, he says, is a 

 scarcity of clams in Core Sound. 



"I got started kicking because the 

 money was good," Gilgo says. "You 

 could make better money clamming 

 during the winter than doing any- 



thing else. I've stayed in it because the 

 money got even better and I didn't 

 have to go far from home to clam. But 

 if we continue kicking this year and 

 next, there may not be many clams left 

 in Core Sound." 



Gilgo is worried that the clam stocks 

 in Core Sound are being overfished and 

 he may no longer have a winter fish- 

 ery to rely upon. 



His father, Lionel Gilgo, blames the 

 declining harvests on mechanical kick- 

 ing. Before retiring this fall, Lionel 

 raked clams from Core Sound for 15 

 years. 



"Kicking has just about destroyed 

 Core Sound," he says. "They've 

 caught about every clam out there and 

 now they're very, very scarce. Raking 



is no good anymore. 



"I told my son it was wrong when he 

 started kicking. But I know there's 

 money in it. And what are you going to 

 do when everybody else is out there 

 doing it? But they're catching less and 

 less every year. Before long they're go- 

 ing to reach a point where their ex- 

 penses overpower what they make." 



Many a temper has flared and a 

 heated argument ensued over clam- 

 ming in Carteret County. Tradition- 

 ally, most clams harvested from North 

 Carolina sounds were raked. But the 

 invention in the mid-1970s of the 

 kicker plate, an inexpensive metal 

 plate welded to the rudder of the boat, 

 changed the complexity of the fishery. 



Clam kicking works this way: The 



