. Coast watch. Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology. 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 ; "The person immerses himself in the water and crawls along the bottom on his hands and knees," he says. "All the while he's feel
. Coast watch. Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology. 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 ; "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 ; 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 ; 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
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