Glen Melvin started digging clams when he was 15 and has never stopped. In that time, he went to college which led to a seven-year stint in the tech industry. But too many bosses, too many niggling problems sent him back to clamming full-time where he’s outdoors and responsible only for himself. It’s been a decent living. Glen is Vice-Chair of Waldoboro’s Shellfish Conservation Committee. He spearheaded the Medomak Project to clean up the river, for which he won 2017 Mitchell Center Sustainability Award. He lives in Waldoboro with his two children, Zach and Shania, who, on top of their other jobs, dig clams also.
Clamming really hasn’t changed in the 46 years I’ve been at it, and I’ve dug almost every inch of the river. We still have pickers (using hands) and diggers (using a hoe fork), we still use hods and bags.
Some days, the clams just show better. You see more holes. But you might go down on a day when the wind’s pounding the mud, and you won’t find a single one. Or after a rain when the holes close, you’ll think the place is dead. Not true. Go down two weeks later, the place is solid clams.
I play a couple of factors in deciding where to go each day. The weather’s one, so I may go to a place that’s out of the wind or where I believe the most will show that day. The bottom line is, you want to be in a place that is productive or has been productive in the past. Because it’s all about the dollar. So, some years I’ve been a hero and some years, a zero.
Some people claim there are less clams than there were back when. But I’ve seen years when we pounded the Medomak, and the river loved it. She came back better. And I’ve seen years when we pounded it and it didn’t fare so well. Mother Nature is a tough chick. Figuring out what she wants to do is anybody’s guess, because she’ll do it her way, and you’re not going to stop her, no matter how smart or big you are.
Back in the ‘70s we could dig anywhere. I used to dig Wiscasset, Damariscotta, Thomaston. I liked Wiscasset in January and February because the nuke plant was there and it warmed the water, and we loved telling the out-of-towners, “We like Wiscasset because the clams glow. We can see where they are.” Before town laws, we dug everywhere.
Town laws came in the ‘80s to protect individual rivers, the thinking being, each river is unique, so each town is best equipped to regulate it — in coordination with the Department of Marine Resources. So, you needed a Shellfish Warden. And a Shellfish Committee. The Committee issues the licenses, caps the number, and has the right to close coves. It can allow or prohibit things like night clamming. Here in Waldoboro, night clamming’s welcome. It’s the same as day-clamming, except with headlights. The mud doesn’t change. I used to do it on hot summer days because at night it’s cooler. And quieter. And here’s the neat thing: in the daytime, you’re checking the tide because it tells you when to punch out. But at night, you can’t see the water until it’s by your feet. That is Mother Nature telling you it’s time.
Waldoboro takes great pride in not telling any other river what do or how to run their programs. The Shellfish Committee funds all its programs, including the Warden, with the dues from license fees. It funds itself without anything coming from the taxpayer. I only know of one other town like Waldoboro in this.
We have 150 commercial diggers, and a lot of us have been doing this for a very long time. So, when it comes to figuring out how to make the flats more productive, we have a lot of experience. We’ve tried a lot of things. One year we bought clam seed and tried seeding it, but we didn’t get much bang for the buck. Another time, we re-seeded — taking seed from an area where the seed’s so thick they almost can’t grow and putting them out in the mud. Well, some spots took off and others completely died. Now, we’re trying upwellers – floats filled with adult clams whose seed drifts out with the current into the flats. You see, back in the ‘90s a guy set one in a cove, and it appeared that the clams around there were really prosperous. But when he pulled it up, the clams seemed to fade away. So, we’re revisiting this with two floats this year, built and paid for by the clamdiggers. No one else in the state has gone down this avenue. But everyone in the state has their theory on how to make clams grow. And that’s the beauty of it. There’s no one answer. Just more of Mother Nature doing what she does.
What a lot of people don’t know is that on average, we’re number one in the State of Maine for soft shell clams. Some years we bring in $1.5 or $2 million, just the 150 clamdiggers. Add in the local restaurants and buying stations, and that’s a huge economic blast for the town. We’re not just guys in rusty trucks digging enough to buy a bag of pot. We wouldn’t have the numbers we have if we were.
To keep those numbers, we’ve had to chase down pollution. Back in 2009, the Medomak was so polluted that the DMR internally talked about shutting it down because it was too expensive to open and close all the time. By 2012, we all were working only half of the time because of the closures. That’s when we started the Medomak Project — brought in state agencies, environmentalists, people from U Maine, even dogs, and all we did was chase pollution. After three, four years, we got our river back. It’s as clean as it’s ever been, and we are not going back. We’re not giving up the Medomak for anything.
So, aquaculture is not welcome in Waldoboro. The Department of Marine Resources issues those guys permits for individual lots of “river.” With oysters, it’s a small group of people, and those few make a tremendous amount of money. But they take the cove. Literally. You can’t harvest clams near them because there’s boundaries. It becomes “theirs.”
Waldoboro doesn’t believe in that. You do not own the ocean. You do not rent the ocean.
Moreover, where in those towns where aquaculture is flourishing like in our sister town Damariscotta, they don’t have clams any more. Some people say that an oyster filters maybe five, ten times more water per day than a soft shell clam does. So, are we also fighting for food? I don’t know. The ocean is a big place. Lots of theories.
So, we don’t want you here, and we are not risking the number one soft shell clam industry in the state of Maine. We’re “the wild clam industry of Waldoboro”, and we plan on staying that way.
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