How We Beginners Learned to Catch and Cook Razor Clams at the Pacific Ocean

My wife enjoyed digging razor clams so much last year that she requested that we go again this year. I think it might become an annual event. This time she invited her Ukrainian coworker Masha, and her sweet ten-year old daughter Yana. I decided we’d go to Westport (Twin Harbors State Park) rather than Long Beach, since it’s quite a bit closer.

That Saturday after lunch we packed up our clam guns, rubber boots, buckets, and portable electric cooler. We picked up our guests on the eastside, and drove about two and a half hours, first south to Olympia, then west towards Aberdeen, and finally to the coast. We got there early enough for dinner at Marino’s, the famous casual seafood joint which offers fish and chips with your choice of rockfish, lingcod, halibut, albacore tuna, or salmon, all locally caught. Then we climbed the observation tower to give our guests their first-ever view of the Pacific Ocean. We visited a gift shop, then walked along the docks, admiring the hundreds of fishing boats based there. We turned in early to our two adjacent hotel rooms and agreed to meet at 5:30 a.m. to greet one of the lowest tides of the season.

In the morning we drank a little hotel room coffee, hopped in the car, and headed to the beach just five minutes from our hotel. The sun wasn’t quite up yet and we were the first ones in the parking lot. I started to wonder if I had screwed up the date or something. It was only a few minutes though before people started showing up and unpacking their clam guns, which gave me reassurance. We walked a few hundred yards over the first dune to get a glimpse of the great Pacific Ocean.

When we first got to the beach we were a little discouraged. In the past we had not been very successful in spotting the tiny holes which indicate a clam siphon, and initially we didn’t see any. However, we chatted with a local man and his wife who were quickly filling their nets with clams, and got a few pointers from them. They marked one for us, and we took turns digging out our first clam. Pretty soon all of us started spotting the holes everywhere, and each of us in turn got to experience the taste of success. It was fun to watch the ladies, especially little Yana, start to gain confidence in their harvesting skills. Clamming takes your mind off the troubles of the world; for an hour or two it focuses only on the beach and where the next clam might be hiding. By 8:15 we had our limit of 45 clams, and we gleefully headed back to the car with our bounty.

Back at the hotel, we were under pressure to clean all those clams before our 11 a.m. checkout time. Typically you pop the shells open by dumpring the clams in boiling water for ten seconds, and we had brought a large stock pot and a colander with us for this purpose. However, after a solid hour, the water still hadn’t boiled yet on the little hotel stove. We finally decided to use the water as it was, hot but no boiling. It still worked, but the clams didn’t all just fall out of the shells like they are supposed to. Many of them we had to separate by hand, which wasn’t difficult but it took a little longer than we wanted. Many hotels in the area have a full clam cleaning station, or sometimes even a special indoor room, just for that purpose. Although ours was an otherwise nice hotel, they had nothing but a cheap plastic outdoor table, to which you could connect a hose, with a sink that drained onto the gravel below. It sufficed for the job.

We set it up assembly line style. I trained little Yana on how to do the first step of cutting the clams open with scissors and removing the neck. I did the next part, which was to cut the organs off the clam, leaving just the meat. My wife had the final part, which was to carefully clean all the sand and shell bits off the finished clams. Yana’s mom went back and cleaned up the mess we had made in the hotel room while separating the shells. We had a large bag of cleaned clams when we were done, which was surprisingly heavy.

When we got home, I still had more work to do. I rinsed all the clams again to get every bit of sand, shell, or organ material off of them. Then I patted them all dry and neatly packaged them up with my vacuum sealer. I had seven bags of six clams each. I spared three clams for my wife and I to sample. I coated them in flour and deep fried them in olive oil. They were delicious! We all had a great time, and look forward to doing it again next year.