ASSAWOMAN BAY, Md. (AP) — The sun is just barely up and Gary Tull already has his dredger in the shallow bay between Ocean City and the mainland, a few plastic mesh bags full of the hard-shell clams that he’s caught all of his life.
Mr. Tull clams as if it’s second nature. He drops the most-valuable clams, little ones for steaming, through a slot into a bucket. He pops bigger clams, some as big as a bagel, into another bucket — without mixing them with less-valuable razor clams or the mud and crabs that come up from the bottom of the Assawoman Bay.
But his decades on the water might be coming to a close at the end of the month, when Maryland closes the power-dredge clam fishery in the Atlantic coastal bays. The state legislature mandated the closure amid complaints from sport fishermen that dredging hurts fragile underwater grasses, although state fisheries biologists did not recommend the closure.
The law means that come Sunday, Mr. Tull will take his 30-year-old wooden boat home to Crisfield and give up watering, maybe forever.
“I’m 56,” he said. “What am I going to do? I don’t know.”
These are uncertain times for the handful of watermen who still make a living dredging hard-shell clams out of the back bays. Soft-shell clam dredging in the Chesapeake Bay will still be allowed, but that practice is so hit-or-miss that no waterman makes a living doing it. Hand-tonging for clams will be allowed, but the days of making a living catching clams and oysters by hand are past. Mr. Tull and his fellow clammers say the Maryland clam industry will die at the end of the month.
While the plight of Maryland crabbers has grabbed the public’s attention, with the female blue crab harvest cut by a third this year and calls from politicians and crabbers to subsidize crabbers hurt from the decrease, nobody’s talking about the clammers.
A bill to compensate the clammers for their dredge equipment failed in the General Assembly, and Mr. Tull and his colleagues have not been able to see Gov. Martin O’Malley, a Democrat, to beg for state assistance.
The clammers say it’s almost as if nobody cares.
Clam dredging is more disruptive to the bay floor than oyster dredging because oysters live atop the floor, but clams burrow a few inches down, requiring more mud to be scraped to retrieve them.
About half the Maryland back bays and all coastal bays in Delaware and Virginia already are off-limits to power dredging.
However, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, which regulates commercial fishing in state waters, did not argue for the clamming closure, and the practice is legal in federal waters.
In fact, the agency last year tried unsuccessfully to amend the dredging bill, to allow regulators to reduce dredging without closing the fishery.
The agency said there were as many as 22 clammers earlier this decade.
Mr. Tull and the other remaining clammers say they’ve had a good season. Clams are sold in bags of 100, going for $14 or $15 apiece at a seafood wholesaler. Mr. Tull hauls in 40 to 50 bags a day and grosses about $80,000 a year, earning about $40,000 after expenses, notably a fuel bill that can top $1,400 a week when he’s busy.
When the clam fishery closes, Mr. Tull will perhaps join a tugboat crew.
Other clammers don’t know what the future holds.
“I’ll take the boat home and try to scrape up enough money soft-shelling,” said William Ryan, 62. “I don’t want to go crabbing. That’s dying, too.”
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