The Mast-Head: Clams, Big and Otherwise

Evvy, our middle child, was delighted Monday after school when she learned that she was a winner in the East Hampton Town Trustees Largest Clam Contest. Her 12.3-ounce hard clam was big enough to claim the top spot among kids in the Accabonac division, and earned her a basket of prizes.

We had missed the judging Sunday at the American Legion Hall. I had to take her little brother up the Island for a jiu jitsu belt ceremony, and things like clam contests tend to be my area in our family division of labor. Clamming, too, is my thing, though Lisa was happy to watch from the truck when we were out scratching around on the Bonac Crick flats on the first official day of the competition.

Getting out in the sand-and-salt mud this time of the year is a pleasure, as long as you are properly prepared. Digging for the contest began on Nov. 7, and, as the weather was fine deep into the fall, the kids were happy enough to get suited up and get into it. 

Evvy pulled on a pair of waders and grabbed my clam rake. Ellis, our 5-year-old, who had an entry as well, a single tiny clam he was able to find with his half-sized rake, wore a wetsuit with a windbreaker on top. My job was to move back and forth between them, offering encouragement and keeping the slowly filling basket close at hand.

A couple of days later, a friend and I went scalloping, but I took a break and spent about an hour clamming, hauling up a quahog that was hands down the largest I had ever dug. Thinking that fewer people might have taken part this year becausethe contest had been moved from October to November, and that I might stand a chance to win, I went to Stuart’s Fish Market to enter. I should not have bothered.

As it turned out, Susan Ceslow’s winning clam, from Napeague Harbor, was more than a full pound heavier than the one I found, getting pretty close to twice as large as mine. Even that harbor’s youth winner’s clam could have mopped the floor with mine. As Laura Donnelly says in her food column in this issue, these things are b-i-g big.

Oh well, maybe next year for me, but, as I said, Evvy’s over the moon.