Cashing in on geoducks

ALLYN -- In sand-crusted hip waders and a soaked T-shirt, Michael Booth crawled across the cultivated tidal flats of North Bay, dragging an industrial water gun.

Hose in hand, Booth shot holes in the sand, in hot pursuit of Puget Sound's hottest cash crop: geoducks.


		Dan DeLong / P-I
	Michael Booth of Taylor Shellfish Farms in Shelton uses a pressurized water hose to ferret out farm-raised geoducks on North Bay.

Spotting the tip of a creamy white neck, Booth pounced. He blasted a narrow, 3-foot-deep pit and reached in. His face almost to the mud, he grabbed the giant clam's limp neck and pulled the creature to the surface.

"It's like an Easter egg hunt for adults," said Booth, holding up his prize: a 2 1/2-pound geoduck the size of a deflated football.

"That's a $24 clam."

Never before has the hulking mollusk, a native of the Northwest, been so valuable. Commercial harvesters such as Booth, eager to cash in, are now turning to shoreline geoduck farms to augment the carefully regulated wild stock.

And as pressure builds to increase the year-round harvest, scientists are racing to figure out what environmental impacts that may have on Puget Sound.

In less than two decades, the wholesale price and market for geoducks has soared -- from 50 cents a pound and fodder for Ivar's famous clam chowder to a $10-a-pound delicacy flown to Asia.

The industry was spawned by a growing appetite for geoduck sushi in Japan and the opening of a seemingly bottomless market in China, where the oversized bivalves are relished.

Washington is expected to produce 5 million pounds of geoducks this year -- more than half the world's supply. Wild geoducks are found on the West Coast, but only in harvestable quantities in Puget Sound, British Columbia and southeast Alaska. Divers harvest them at depths ranging from 18 to 70 feet. The rest of the supply comes from shellfish farms, where the clams are plucked from sandy tidelands in staggered harvests.

The fishery is managed by the state Department of Natural Resources, not unlike public forestlands. Underwater tracts are measured out, biologists estimate the size of the crop and harvest rights are auctioned off, with the winner paying a "stumpage fee."

To fetch top dollar, clams must be defect-free, with long white necks weighing between 1 1/2 and 2 1/2 pounds apiece. They also have to be delivered live.

That means a quick ride from the tidal flats in an aluminum skiff to a processing plant, where the clams are bubble-wrapped and boxed with gel ice packets. Shipments are then rushed to Sea-Tac Airport, most bound for Singapore or Hong Kong.

From the mud of Puget Sound to a fancy restaurant in Beijing -- the journey usually takes less than three days.

Tough learning curve

Bill Taylor followed that path last spring and spent 10 days in China, learning first-hand how much the people there love clams. The bigger the better.

Downtown restaurants served up $100 geoduck platters, he discovered, and proudly display the live clams in large tanks.

Taylor grew up on the mudflats near Shelton, where his family's aquaculture business specialized in small clams and oysters. As a part owner of Taylor Shellfish Farms, he was the first to figure out how to make geoduck aquaculture work.

He started experimenting with raising geoducks in the early '90s. Today, Taylor boasts the state's biggest geoduck farm and says his company is finally turning a profit on geoducks.

The learning curve was steep.

The mortality rate of baby geoducks was high -- up to 60 percent. The baby clams would be carefully planted, only to fall victim to a rainstorm, a heat wave or powerful wind and waves. Others were gobbled up by ducks and crabs.

"There are about a hundred things that can happen to you in raising geoducks," said Tom Hayes, who manages the company's geoduck operation. "About 90 of them are bad."


		Dan DeLong / P-I
	Al McIrvin plunges his arm into the sand to pull out a geoduck for Taylor Shellfish Farms.

At one point, Taylor said his company was sinking a quarter-million dollars a year into the geoduck enterprise with little to show for it. "We told our geoduck manager, 'We could have sent you to Harvard or Yale ...,' " he recalled.

But no one had successfully grown geoducks before, Taylor said, and the only way to learn was by trial and error.

The farmers learned to plant their crops on cool, calm days. And they protected the baby clams from predators by putting them inside half-buried PVC tubes covered with plastic netting. After a little more than a year, the protective tube is removed. The actual harvest must wait for the crop to mature -- in another five to nine years.

Booth, a four-year employee of Taylor Shellfish, harvests geoducks whenever the tide is low. Once out of the mud, the geoducks are helpless -- unable to dig their way back into the sand.

By the time the three-member harvesting crew is done, the 1 1/2-acre beach will have been turned upside down -- a moonscape yielding hundreds of pounds of high-grade geoducks and a bycatch of any worm or clam that was living in the sand.

From there, the clams are sent to the company's refrigerated processing plant in Shelton to be packed in 40-pound boxes. Each will retail for $400. Ten times that many oysters would fetch half that amount.

About 90 acres of tidelands are currently cultivated for geoducks around the Sound, all privately owned. Commercial harvesting is only 3 years old, according to the Pacific Coast Shellfish Growers Association, but it's responsible for doubling the value of the crop since 2002, when it was worth an estimated $2.5 million.

The only limit to the growth of geoduck aquaculture is the amount of beach available, and Taylor said the state owns the vast majority of the viable shoreline property in this region.

In November, DNR will hold a conference to discuss whether state-owned lands should be opened to geoduck farming. State officials will be unveiling formal studies assessing the feasibility of expanded aquaculture.

And researchers will be taking the first hard look at potential environmental impacts.

Geoducks shrouded in mystery

Diving for geoducks in 40 feet of water in Freshwater Bay near Port Angeles, Rob Mead suddenly felt something pushing him down.

At first he thought it was his partner standing on his back. Then he was pushed into the mud.

Then it started to hurt.

Then he couldn't move.

Then the weight was gone, and Mead found himself engulfed in a cloud of sediment. He swam to clear water to get his bearings and found himself eye-to-eye with a gray whale.

"He's looking at me and I'm looking at him," Mead recalled of his encounter this summer. "I didn't know what his trip was."

For researchers, the incident highlights how little is known about the Sound's complex marine ecosystem. Gray whales have been studied for centuries and their feeding habits are still not understood. Geoduck research is less than four decades old, and even the basics of how much water a geoduck can filter in a day isn't known.

"It's frustrating that we don't know more about geoducks," said Brent Vadopalas, a researcher at the University of Washington's School of Aquatic & Fishery Sciences who has been studying the clam for nine years.

"I don't believe we are aware of any indicator species that are dependant on a 'stand' of geoducks," said Vadopalas, who compares geoducks to an old-growth forest. "But there are a lot of fascinating critters out there that we don't know (much about)."


		Dan DeLong / P-I
	Hugo Garcia packs the farm-raised geoducks for shipment to Japan, where they are served as sushi, and China, where they are featured on $100 platters.

Scientists, for example, are still working to understand the rate at which geoduck populations recover after a harvest, and the effects of modern harvesting, Vadopalas said. Some nearshore areas appear to recover in less than 10 years, but others, mysteriously, can take decades.

"Often, fishery exploitation is way ahead of understanding what were doing," said Glen VanBlaricom, a UW professor who is studying the effects of wild geoduck harvesting.

"The geoduck fishery appears to be in really good shape right now," he said. "Now is the time to do research. We should not wait until it collapses. I don't want to presume that, although there are plenty of other examples of other collapsed fisheries."

The researchers say they're impressed with the conservative approach to the fishery that state and tribal regulators have taken so far.

While the state could be making more money auctioning off more tracts for harvest, it is using a conservative harvest rate of 2.7 percent to prevent over-fishing.

It's still largely guesswork, the researchers said, because the fishery is so new.

The 4.6 million-pound quota allowed for wild harvests in the Sound will not be increased until a better understanding of the geoduck's recovery rate is reached or more geoduck beds are certified as non-polluted by the state Health Department, state officials say.

DNR collects nearly $7 million a year auctioning off harvesting rights, making geoducks the agency's most valuable fishery.

The crop is a $13 million windfall for local tribes, which are entitled to half the geoduck fishery. For the Suquamish Tribe, income from geoducks is second only to its casino.

The biggest downside to the rise of geoduck harvesting has been a related jump in poaching.

In December, a man was sent to prison for 14 years for stealing more than a million dollars' worth of the clams from the South Sound. In 2000, an estimated 70,000 pounds were illegally harvested, then dumped in Hood Canal because they weren't top grade.

DNR has countered with tough regulations and enforcement boats equipped with underwater cameras. Commercial boats are searched randomly, and there's a mandatory weigh-in of each day's catch.

Divers doing the harvesting must also submit to background checks, and a log is kept of the exact location of every boat in operation during wild harvests in case any evidence of wrongdoing is found.

"This is by far the most closely regulated fishery I know of," said Todd Palzer, DNR's shellfish program manager.

Even so, Palzer concedes that the agency does not have the budget to stop illegal harvesting. Even if there were dozens of patrol boats and officers dedicated to watch over Puget Sound's geoducks, poachers would be hard to detect.

Currents quickly shuffle the sediment to hide the holes the underwater thieves leave behind.

As the industry matures, Palzer believes enforcement will be easier. There will be many more people invested in making sure the fishery is sustainable for the long haul, and they will help the state protect it.

Taylor hopes he can continue to expand his geoduck operation. He wants to keep filling the Asian pipeline.

"At these prices," he said, "it's a good business to be in."

GEODUCK FACTS

Geoducks are found in harvestable quantities only in Puget Sound and inland waters of British Columbia and southeast Alaska. The Washington Department of Natural Resources estimates there are 682 million pounds of geoducks in state waters. Other interesting facts:

Oldest geoduck recorded -- 164 years (measured by counting growth rings in the shell)

Heaviest: 14 pounds

Length of neck: Up to 3 feet

Average age of wild stock: 30 to 40 years

How to eat: raw or lightly cooked

Where they're found: in tidal flats and near-shore waters at depths up to 350 feet

Sources: DNR, P-I research

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