Thursday, March 23, 2023. Razor Clamming at Copalis Beach

 Thursday, March 22, 2023

It was a good thing to set an alarm clock to get us up at 7am because we were otherwise going to sleep in past the low tide.  It rained sporadically during the night, but towards the morning, it became pretty steady.  We did make it onto the beach at 8am, and there were plenty of people out clamming.  The beach access is a pedestrian bridge over a creek.  From the corner of the RV park to the surf line was no more than a quarter mile, so that was pretty convenient.  There is limited parking at this beach access with only enough room for 4 or 5 cars. But when we walked out over the dunes to see the beach, there were many cars and trucks near by so there must be other beach accesses fairly close.  

The upper part of the beach is covered with thousands of “shows” but these very quickly proved to be sand shrimp burrows and not razor clams.  We did find razor clams at the bottom of the beach where water receding back into the surf briefly forms a thin film that can demonstrate an occasional clam squirt, or if you looked carefully, you could see depressions of a clam show which would yield a razor clam.  However, many still turned out to be sand shrimp burrows.  We really had to work hard to find the clams as the tide hit -0.3ft at 8:30, and then the tide started coming back in quickly, pushing clammers back up the beach.  We ended up 3 clams short of double limits, but had daylight to deal with putting the clams up.  Yesterday, we parboiled the clams to get the shells off. Today, Ben shucked them with a knife to cut the two shell closing muscles.  Perhaps, not parboiling them will result in less tough cooked clams, but overall, it is quicker and simpler to parboil them, even though that requires having ice on hand to plunge the parboiled clams into to prevent them from cooking.  

The weather turned for the worse as the day progressed, with the wind blowing and sheets of rain intermittently drumming on the roof of the RV.  We had hoped to do some agate hunting at Damon Point, but with this weather, we will sit this one out.  The tide at Damon Point was at 2’ at sunset at 7:30pm.

We relaxed in the RV and had Costco’s Miso Ramen kit for dinner.  It was comparable to the bad airport ramen at SeaTac, but hard to beat for convenience.  

We’ll hope for better weather and clamming in the morning at Mocrocks.