Clams Ahoy!

We took the opportunity of super low tides this past weekend to go on our first clamming adventure. We had quite the harvest, and decided the most appropriate portrait of the moment would be most exemplified by the above picture: the purely puritanical American harvest portrait. Frumpy wife next to farmer husband, the tool of torture positioned betwixt us and our farmland. Oh the clams! Growing up in Washington, I already had the skills to hunt and conquer the amazingly fast razor clams.  Tyler, being an Iowan native, can expertly pick out a corn field from a soy bean field, but lacked the razor-sharp clam-o-vision my Washingtonian eyes had already fine-tuned. He had never been clamming before. Yes, it really is true--I knew more about hunting and harvesting an animal than Tyler did! Hooray! I have finally won some man-points! Our first day on the beach, we dug up just over 60 clams, which is no easy task with those fast little shellfish. 

We spent the rest of the day in Homer, on the other side of the Kenai Peninsula from Seward. I had been there a few times for work, but Tyler had yet to venture to the 'hip' town of the peninsula and also the 'halibut fishing capital of the world'. So, once again, I got to be the expert. It was really quite a head-inflating trip for me. We stopped at the most widely known bar on the peninsula- The Salty Dawg. It's in the middle of the Homer Spit, which is a 4.5 mile long sand spit. We ordered some tasty local Homer Brewery beer, which Tyler is holding in the above picture. And no, it's not in a pint glass, but rather in a recycled Sobe container. Tyler kept imagining his beer tasted like Sobe flavors. Personally, I think he just had to light of a beer. You may be asking what's in his other hand--a pocket tool and a re fabricated ball point pen! While at the pub, our one and only pen broke while discussing our clamming operations for the next day. So Tyler, being Mr. Can-Do-With-A-Multi-Tool disassembled the pen, evaluated the situation and fixed the problem. We then had an operational writing utensil and could finish the our plans to seek out and conquer the quick-footed razors. 

After a day of sight-seeing and sun-bathing, we camped right on the Homer spit. We were lucky to just miss all the memorial day traffic, so we had a nice secluded spot on the beach. By about 11pm, we were privileged to a glorious sunset, too, with reds and purples and a lot more color than we've been seeing in Seward. Most likely, it had to do with the notorious volcano Mt. ReDoubt that we could see steaming across from the spit. Volcanic ash makes for the most colorful of sunsets. 

The next morning, we woke up, hit my favorite restaurant in Alaska, Twin Sister's Bakery, for breakfast, and headed out to a new beach for more clamming. Above, Tyler is digging like crazy for a fast little bugger! It took both of us digging, one with the shovel, the other with our hands, to get to the clam fast enough. As soon as the clam feels the digging vibrations in the sand, it starts booking it, digging deeper and deeper into the sand. It was all we could do to keep up with them. We definitely did better than anyone else we watched on the beach--and I could feel the results in my arm muscles the next day! By the end of the day, we had 99 clams in about 4 hours of work! We packed up, headed home, and cleaned and cleaned those clammies for hours on end. I made clam chowder with them yesterday. Thanks to Dad's recipe, the chowder was AMAZING!

This is a view we had from one of the beaches we were on--the only place in Alaska that launches boats with a tractor! There were stacks of corroded, worn tires next to the office building. Tractors aren't built for salt water. It was fun to watch a tractor push a boat into the ocean, though! And when the boat comes in, a poor grunt has to go out in hip waders to hook them together. It's really dangerous work most days, when the surf's breaking on the beach! Tyler met one of the guys who does that for a living. He had broken teeth.