South Sound Sidekick series offers advice from experts living in the, well, South Sound. It posts every Friday. Today, musician Hozoji Matheson-Margullis of Lozen and Helms Alee discusses her experiences harvesting geoducks beneath the surface of Puget Sound.
I started training for my job harvesting geoducks with the Puyallup Tribe in December of 2009. So I'm coming up on my third year of diving. Three years definitely does not make me an expert on the subject, but I have learned a lot about diving, myself, my tribe and our environment in that time.
The word "geoduck" is an adaptation of "gwideq," the Nisqually Tribe's name for the clams. In their language "gwideq" means "dig deep." Harvesting gwideq has been a life source for many of the coastal Salish tribes for as long as we have lived here.
An average adult gwideq can weigh around three pounds. If you manage to wrestle just one of them out of the ground you can feed several people.
Many people today still go down to the beach and use the old school method of harvesting: a shovel, a bucket and patient persistence. The giant clams bury themselves about three feet deep in the sand and then extend their long necks up through the sand to filter feed. When they sense a predator they retract their necks down close to their shell, which means you have to dig all the way down to the base of their shell to get them out.
Washington state has its own geoduck program and each tribe has its own program.
There are gwideq farms where they plant the clams in PVC tubes placed in the tidelands and harvest the mature clams at low tide.
The type of harvesting I do is surface supplied air diving off of a dive boat. Divers wear full-face helmets that provide our air and allow us to communicate with our crewmates on the boat. We wear dry suits to keep warm and carry a back-up tank of air that would give us an additional three minutes of air should the generator up top malfunction. The diver takes a net bag and a high-pressure water nozzle and descends to the seabed to search for the clams. Gwideq can be harvested anywhere from 20 feet shallow to 70 feet deep. Much of the time the clams are completely submerged in the sand and you are looking for just the tiniest divot in the surface or a slight discoloration of the sand. But when you're lucky the siphon of the clam will be sticking out above the sand filtering food. This is common in the summer time when the algae are blooming in our waters and the gwideq are feasting. Come wintertime the clams go dormant.
To harvest a gwideq you grab the neck with one hand and stick the water nozzle down by the shell with the other. The high water pressure blows away the sand around the base of the shell releasing it to be collected.
Being down there walking around feels how I imagine it would feel to walk on the moon. Movement is slowed. The most prominent sound is your own breathing. Fifteen feet visibility is a normal day but some days you can see up to 50 feet. Other days there is almost zero visibility and you spend the entire dive with you face in the sand.
When I signed up for my training I was pretty confident I wouldn't make it through to become a diver. The course was a two-month session taught at Joint Base Lewis-McChord by two former Navy Seals. The Seals' end goal was to push us to our limits of fear and physical exhaustion. I was born and raised in Tacoma and spent much of my life on our beaches but I've always had a primal fear of the dark murky water. The idea a seal or sea lion being anywhere near me in the water sent me fleeing for shore. And back then I had no idea that we have two of the largest sharks in the world in our little bay!
After my very first dive, my mind shifted. I was amazed by what I saw down there. I enjoyed facing my fears. Despite what it looks like from the surface, it is colorful and beautiful on bottom.
Puget Sound is one of the most nutrient rich bodies of water in the world. Because of that we have a vast array of sea life. I highly recommend getting certified and getting down there. There are dive shops in our area that do SCUBA training. It would blow your mind to see what's beneath the waters you have been staring at all these years!
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