What we were talking about in particular is growing our local oysters to be singles.  At one point, Bull’s Bay and surrounding areas were loaded with single oysters.  That is no longer the case, but what if you could have an oyster with the shape of an Apalachicola, but the taste of a Bull’s Bay oyster?  You can, and hopefully soon you will have the Bull’s Bay Single.  We’ll keep posting on our progress.

The water is well into the 50’s now (actually 58 at Fort Sumter), so the oysters should be filling out their shells nicely now.  Now is the time for an oyster roast, so give Jeff a call and get your order in.  I’ll be watching the sunrise on Bull’s Bay for the next few days, and if I’m not frozen in pluff mud, I’ll post an update.

I went out with Stephen and we basically followed King Saul, Sarge and Mary.  I say ‘basically’ because we let them beat us to the bank and start working before we decided where to go.  When Stephen and I got to the bay we saw their two boats up on the bank about 200 yards apart; we couldn’t see them working, but Stephen figured they were up in the marsh digging for clams.  We split the difference and beached the boat right between their two and went to work. 

Clamming is hard on your back.  Simply put, it’s like tilling up your front yard, the whole yard, with a three-tined rake and collecting the rocks in a basket as you go.  I’d say that in an average spot you would get one bag of clams, 250 per bag, in an area of about 25’ by 10’.  That comes to about 1 clam per square foot.  Today I dug 500 clams, two bags, and my back is killing me!  Stephen dug 1000.

There are a few tricks you can do to speed up the process.  First of all, if you want to get your boat floating as soon as possible then don’t load your clams or oysters in it while it’s ebbed out, just set them in their bags or baskets next to the boat; the weight of a couple bags of clams or bushels of oysters can add an hour or more to your wait.  Also, if you have a flat bottom boat, you can spin your boat around so the bow is facing the incoming tide and as the tide fills in underneath your bow, you can load a few bushels as far forward as possible; this can help to lift the stern of the boat where most of the weight is due to the engine, fuel, and battery.  If you have a couple other people with you then you can also push the boat through the mud and into the water, but this is often not possible…so don’t count on this approach.  I’ve spent the better part of a night being ebbed out and it’s no fun.  It can get cold with a dew or fog and a cool breeze and you’re almost always wet to begin with if you’re trying to get your boat floating again.

One afternoon my brother-in-law and I went exploring in a new creek when the tide was falling with the sun.  We went way up in to this new creek and started to find good clams.  We loaded the boat and started out of the creek about an hour before sunset.  What we didn’t realize is that on the way in to the creek, we crossed over several sandbars that were not visible on the higher tide.  When we started out of the creek we realized that these sandbars were now exposed and we were like fish trapped in a pond.  We couldn’t get the boat across these dry sandbars and the tide was still falling.

About an hour or so after dark, we had enough water to push the boat over the first sandbar, so we unloaded all of the clams and got in the water and pushed.  We were in waist deep water pushing and pulling the boat on both sides of the sandbar.  When we crossed the first bar we re-loaded all of the clams and started motoring out of the creek; we were soaking wet, but we were so happy to heading home that we both opened a beer to celebrate the near disaster.  We noticed the fog was setting in, but it didn’t matter because we were on the way back to the dock and back to the house where a hot shower and a hot meal was waiting for us.  Then all of a sudden the boat came to a grinding halt.  We had hit another sandbar.  It was about six inches under water but it was also about twenty feet long which gave us little hope of pushing the boat across until more water filled in.  So we unloaded the clams again, got wet again, and pushed and pulled and waited for the tide.   Needless to say, with our luck this night, we encountered another sandbar further down the creek, but that was OK because we had the process down and we set to the task again of getting the boat across.  Once we crossed the third and last sandbar we thought we were home free so we loaded the clams back into the boat, pushed off from the sandbar and tried to crank the motor.  It didn’t crank.  Our battery gave out on us either due to the fog or the water that was splashed over it during the process of getting the boat across the last three sandbars or just plain bad luck.

It’s now about ten o’clock at night in February, we had a cool breeze mixed with fog or dew.  So, we rigged a sail with a paddle as the mast and a tarp as the sail.  We used the foot of the motor as our rudder.  Using this jury rig got us all the way out of the creek and onto the Intra-Coastal Waterway, but once we got there, the wind was no longer helpful and we had to drop the sail.  We got the boat to the bank where we could get out and push it down the waterway in about thigh deep water.  However, we could only push it so far before we came to another creek mouth that was too deep to walk across.  We were too cold to swim it across and the wind wouldn’t allow us to drift across so we beached the boat on the West side of the waterway.  We had no other option but to hunker down and wait for help.

We were wet and cold and the fog was relentless.  It was after midnight at this point and we could see the lights coming from the warm houses on the Northern end of Isle of Palms; it was a miserable feeling.  We didn’t have mobile phones back then and the handheld radio had a limited range, not to mention that it was such a nasty night that nobody in their right mind would be out on the water in a boat nearby.  We draped the tarp across the bow and crawled up under it to keep the fog off of our already wet and cold bodies; we hadn’t started to warm each other up by hugging or bundling together, but we were very conscious of the fact that at some point we might have to.  We laid there on our backs looking up at the blue tarp that was inches from our faces; we focused on how much the tarp was helping us to not get any wetter, but that was about as positive as we could get.

After about an eternity we heard our names being called out of the darkness; or we thought we heard our names then thought we were just going a little crazy.  Then it happened again and again.  It was a miracle.  Three of our friends had put their boat in the water at midnight to come searching for us; my wife was the catalyst for this rescue mission.  They found us some time after midnight and towed us back to the marina.  Needless to say, I will not be exploring any new creeks or clam beds when the tide is dropping with the sun; you can get into trouble that way.

So Stephen and I towed the boat to the landing and we were getting ready to put in when we ran into the other clammers; their boats were already in the water and they were eager to get out there.  King Saul, Sarge, and Mary have been clamming forever, basically.  When I first started working on the creek the owner of the fish-house told me that there was a guy in Awendaw that always got 4 bags a day; he was twice my age and could dig 4 times as much as me at that time…so King Saul became a sort of motivator for me.  When I would have a bag or two and the tide was rising, running me off the bank, I would think how King Saul was going to beat me if I didn’t hustle.  This thought often pushed me to get more than four bags when earlier in the day it felt like I would never even get more than two.  Sarge and Mary are the same way; they would consistently get a minimum of four bags, which is 1000 clams (250 clams per bag).

So, at the landing, King Saul and Sarge were shouting to us, “Where are the clams today?” and Stephen yelled back, “We’ll just follow you, wherever you go!”  King Saul and Sarge laughed and said, “We’re following you, so you can show us your best spots.”  Which is kind of a joke because they know all the best spots so we pulled out the charts and King Saul and Sarge came over to the boat to look at them.  King Saul put his finger on the chart pointing to a creek that cuts over to the Bull’s Bay and said “Go down this creek and take a left when you hit the bay.  There’s clams all up and down this bank.”  This information was as good as gold to me, and I would follow them every day because they know; King Saul, Sarge, and Mary, they know where the clams are.  So it was decided and we started to back the boat down the ramp.

Stephen ‘threw me in’ which basically means that I was in the boat, he was backing the truck down, and the boat was not hooked to the trailer so when he slammed on the brakes the boat would go skidding off the trailer into the water.  This method takes a few things for granted, for one, the engine will start, and for another, the plugs are all in.  So the boat floated off the trailer and the engine started and the plugs were in so Stephen pulled the truck up and parked it.  When he came back to the ramp to get in and go I put the engine in reverse and kind of leaned backwards in anticipation of moving in that direction; however, the boat actually went forwards and rammed into the concrete landing.  Pretty funny.  So, I put it in neutral, but the propeller was still spinning indicating that the engine was still in gear.  What?  I looked down at the shifter cable and realized that it had broken and the engine was stuck in forward gear.  Thunder started rumbling in the distance.  There was no way we could go like this.

King Saul, Sarge, and Mary waited no longer, and they sped off down the creek to dig their clams.  Stephen backed the truck down again and we loaded the boat up and took it back to the yard to start fixing the cable.  Thirty dollars and four hours later and I’ve got a new shifter cable; now all I have to do is put the cable back on and the throttle control back together and we’re good to go.  By the way, I’m sure they got their four bags; I actually heard that one of the others, Lamar,  got eight bags…Opening Day!

Dredging Oysters from Jeff Spahr on Vimeo.

Filling up the barge from Jeff Spahr on Vimeo.

Taking the barge in tow from Jeff Spahr on Vimeo.

“Planting” the oysters and oyster shell from Jeff Spahr on Vimeo.

We harvest our oysters when they are exposed on the banks during low tide; therefore, our schedule depends on the tides.  Some days we are on the water before sunrise, harvesting on the flood tide (from low tide approaching high tide), then processing and making deliveries throughout the day then back on the water harvesting on the ebb tide (from high tide approaching low tide), then processing the next days oysters until well into the evening.  Depending on the times of the tides, this schedule can continue for several days before we can work a full low tide in the morning again.  So we may not get to check email until late at night or early in the morning.  Also, we are commercial fishermen, not computer programmers, and though we should be commended on our attempts to expand our customer base via the internet, sometimes emails get unexpectadly lost in the ether…long story short - if you don’t hear from us within 24 hours then just give us a call at 843-367-3177.