Digging for Rhody gold

        Just as the sun peeks above the East Bay, Jody King completes his 500-foot commute to work, from his home in the Oakland Beach section of Warwick to his 25-foot boat docked at the marina at the end of his street. As soon as he starts the engine, he takes off across the water. Today his destination is a few hundred yards off Barrington Beach, where he will spend four hours digging for quahogs.
        It’s a job King stumbled into in his 30s, and it’s a job he lives for. A year-round commercial shellfisherman for 25 years, he repeatedly claims he wishes there were eight days in each week so he had another day to go quahogging.
        Drifting in 15 feet of water, King assembles his gear – two telescopic poles called stales clamped together with a handle at one end and a bullrake at the other. The rake, a square steel basket nearly two

Photo by Julia Hopkins

feet wide with pointed tines that dig into the sediment, is manipulated with a series of tugs on the handle as he walks backward across his boat.
        “They call this bullraking for a reason,” King says. “It’s the hardest job you’ll ever love. I’m 59 and in as good a shape as I was when I was 25. I’m strong like an ox. Just don’t ask me to run more than 100 yards.”
        Soon after he slides the rake into the water, he knows it’s not going to be a lucrative day. King aims to harvest 600 clams each day in the winter – 1,000 in the summer, when the quahogs aren’t as deep in the sediment – but to do so requires a little wind to ensure that the boat drifts just enough to keep his rake moving across the bottom. He figured out that the optimal winds will push his boat at .35 to .39 miles per hour. But on this day, there is no wind whatsoever.
        “The quahogs aren’t in one spot, so in order to catch them you have to drift through miles of bottom,” says King, who teaches a class for the general public called Come Clam with Me. “Sometimes it’s the wind that pushes me, sometimes it’s the tide, and sometimes I have to push the boat myself. Today is one of those days.”
        Despite the lack of wind, King seems to dance with his bullrake, creating a distinct rhythm with each tug on the handle as he does a two-step across the deck. “The sound is mesmerizing,” he says. “Every time the rake shakes, I hear a quahog go in.”
        King is one of about 500 licensed commercial quahoggers in Rhode Island, though only about 100 of them work full-time and year-round. It’s an iconic industry in the state, but it’s one that is facing considerable challenges as its workforce ages, profits are inconsistent, and demand for quahogs ebbs.
        And yet those like King who have made quahogging their lifestyle can’t imagine doing anything else. “Every day is a great day because I get to do something I love,” King says. “The only time I don’t love my job is when it doesn’t give back to me, when I don’t make enough money. But overall, it’s given back to me 100-fold.”
        After 20 minutes of tugging and dancing, he’s ready to haul in his catch. So he takes a rope tied to his rake and wraps it around an electric hauler. When he turns on the machine, it retrieves the rake from the bottom. King then shakes out the mud and the clams too small to keep, and he dumps the rest in a sorter. As he sorts and counts the quahogs by size – from smallest to largest they’re called littlenecks, topnecks and hogs – he calculates how much money he made. Not much.
        But he’s not discouraged. Holding up a littleneck, he says, “I paid for my house with these little guys, and multiple trucks and multiple motors on my boat. I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have clams to dig.” Quahogs have been harvested from Narragansett Bay for millennia. Archaeological sites at Point Judith Pond and Pottowamut documented large piles of empty quahog shells at Native American camp sites that date back hundreds...
        

Read the rest of this article in the August 2020 issue of Rhode Island Monthly magazine.