You might call it a tale of two clams, soft-shell and hard-shell. Or of two states, Maryland and Virginia. Or of watermen and entrepreneurs figuring out how to make the best possible living in a shifting environment.
While seafood companies near the Chesapeake Bay Bridge are processing oysters from Texas and Louisiana and crabs from North Carolina, my thoughts turn to a plate of delicately fried steamer clams and a heaping bowl of spaghetti dotted with delicate steamed littlenecks. And, as luck would have it, the largest producer of farm-raised hard-shell littlenecks in the United States, Ballard Fish & Oyster Co., is harvesting those little jewels all along Virginia’s Eastern Shore.
At my request, Tim Sughrue, owner of the Congressional Seafood distributing company in Jessup, arranged a clam tour late last month. We started in the upper Chesapeake Bay just off Kent Island, where independent clammer Bill Benton was harvesting wild soft-shell clams. (More on that later.)
From there, we drove 120 miles south and crossed over to Virginia’s Atlantic coast, where Mike McGee loaded us into his 17-foot Scout motorboat and showed us hundreds of beds of hatchery- and nursery-bred hard-shell clams being grown for Chincoteague Shellfish Farms. McGee owned that company until 2007, when he sold it to Ballard Fish & Oyster Co. At 65, with neither of his two children interested in the business, he figured it was the right time for him to sell. Now he runs the division for Ballard, with a proprietary eye.
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