A Rake’s Progress: Commercial Quahogging in Rhode Island

“That’s going to result in smaller dealers not being able to stay in the game at high dollar prices,” says Gregory Silkes, general manager of American Mussel Harvesters, the largest shellfish dealer in the state. “And if you don’t have an outlet to move your clams to market, that will be a problem as well.”
To hedge his bets, Grant now harvests quahogs only about half the year and participates in a variety of other fisheries the rest of the time. He spends a couple months each year in Alaska as a crewman on a halibut boat, uses gillnets to capture fluke and bluefish at the mouth of Narragansett Bay, maintains a floating fish trap off Newport and builds nets for other fishermen.

“I’m not relying on any one thing. If one thing doesn’t do well, something else will,” he says. “I’m always looking for something new.”

One thing Grant wasn’t expecting was a pandemic, which cut deeply into Rhode Island’s quahog industry. The fishery was shut down completely for five weeks in March and April, and with most restaurants closed through May, shellfish dealers had few places to sell their products.

“The quahog fleet is less than a third of what it was prior to the pandemic, as some dealers didn’t reopen or diggers didn’t want to go for the reduced prices the dealers were offering,” says Grant. “We’ll have to see what happens when more diggers start up and we start catching more in the summer. I’m afraid that without restaurants, we’ll flood the market channels and be back where we began.”

King says the pandemic is especially challenging for older quahoggers who are most susceptible to the virus and new fishermen who just entered the industry.

“Half the workforce is staying home because they don’t want to take the risk, and some of the new guys have to find something else that will give them a paycheck today,” he says. “It’s like plowing in the winter when there’s no snow. We’re all going to take losses this year.”

But everyone expects the industry will rebound. Rhode Island commercial quahoggers dug twenty-one million quahogs in 2019 with a total at-the-dock value of $5.35 million. The number of quahogs harvested has remained stable for several years, though their value varies as dealer prices change from season to season and year to year. Grant recalls getting about fifteen cents for each littleneck he dug in 2014. This year, thanks in part to the price war, he’s been paid more than twice that. “But I’m only catching about half as much, so it evens out,” he says.

Where do all of those millions of quahogs end up? Mostly out of state. There aren’t enough clam-eating Rhode Islanders to purchase all of the quahogs harvested in the Ocean State, even if they increased their intake considerably. So local dealers ship most of the harvest to wholesalers in cities around the country, and from there the majority are sold to restaurants.

“Most are consumed raw on the half-shell or in some kind of pasta dish. Bigger ones end up as clams casino, and the biggest are used for chowders or soups,” says Silkes, whose company, pre-COVID, shipped between 1,000 and 1,500 pounds of quahogs out of Rhode Island every day. Numbers tanked when restaurants closed, he says.

Plenty are sold at Rhode Island seafood markets and served at Rhode Island restaurants as well, but in-state demand is inconsistent around the year. Demand is highest in summer and during occasional holidays, but winter can be very slow. So the state of Rhode Island launched Quahog Week five years ago as an annual event in late March to get Rhode Islanders to eat more quahogs during the winter slow period. The week-long event — one element of a plan aimed at boosting consumption of all Rhode Island-caught seafood — features quahog-inspired specials at area restaurants, discounts at seafood markets and two public events at which quahogs are served free by the fishermen who harvested them earlier that day. (The 2020 events were cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic.)

Although oysters don’t get their own state-sponsored festival, their rise in popularity has been a surprising boon to Rhode Island’s quahoggers. Rather than competing in the marketplace, McGiveney believes the growth in demand for fresh oysters led to an increase in the number of raw bars and seafood restaurants with quahogs on their menus.

Even quahoggers’ concerns about the effect of the oyster aquaculture industry seem to be abating. No longer are aquaculture farms being proposed for sites that have been historically harvested for quahogs, perhaps because the aquaculturists have learned that quahoggers have the clout to ensure those permits are denied.

Safeguarding the quahog fishery not only means monitoring the population of quahogs in the bay but also paying close attention to water quality so the shellfish do not become contaminated with pollutants. The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management collects about 2,500 water samples each year from 300 sites around the bay and sends them to the Department of Health for testing.

“Based on our history of monitoring, we have a good handle on which shellfish waters are polluted and which are safe, as well as those that are safe during dry weather but not during storms,” says Angelo Liberti, the DEM administrator for surface water protection who oversees the water quality monitoring. “Unless something unusual happens, there isn’t a lot of change from year to year.”

Heavy rainfall, however, can alter things rapidly. Because rain carries pollutants from land into the bay, some quahogging areas are closed for a week or more after a certain amount of rain falls, including parts of Greenwich Bay, Mount Hope Bay and upper Narragansett Bay. That forces quahoggers into smaller, less productive areas until the pollutants disperse and the closed areas reopen. Water quality improvements have reduced the number of closures in recent years, though those reductions have been somewhat offset by the increasing number of severe storms.

For the first time in seventy years, DEM and DOH plan to open an area north of Conimicut Point to shellfishing later this year. The plan is somewhat controversial, however, because DEM research has found that a large percentage of the quahogs found throughout the bay are spawned from shellfish growing in formerly closed areas of the Providence River.

“Some shellfishermen are dying to get access there, while others are concerned about the golden goose that’s feeding the other areas,” Liberti says. “There’s also concern about flooding the market, with new people jumping into the business to take advantage of the quahog population there and depressing the market price.”

Even without the new area opening up, Narragansett Bay appears to contain plenty of quahogs to keep the industry going. DEM conducts a variety of surveys and research studies each year to monitor the quahog population and learn how climate change, pollution, food availability and other issues may affect the fishery.

According to Conor McManus, deputy chief of the DEM Division of Marine Fisheries, the quahog population is stable in most parts of Narragansett Bay and some areas have even experienced an increase.

The quahoggers themselves have a hand in ensuring the long-term viability of the harvest, too, by helping to grow quahog seed and transplanting them around the bay. They also helped to establish the Rhode Island Commercial Fisheries Research Foundation to conduct research to support the sustainability of southern New England fisheries.

Thomas Heimann, a fisheries scientist at the foundation, says there is a “fairly substantial” distrust between the industry and the state in how quahogs are being managed, especially over DEM’s use of a hydraulic dredge to assess the quahog population. “DEM is basing the entire abundance estimates on a survey the industry says doesn’t catch quahogs well even in the best conditions,” Heimann says.

So the fisheries foundation launched a Quahog Research Fleet in 2016 to compare the efficiency of bullraking to the hydraulic dredge. It found that bullraking is a more efficient harvest method, meaning that DEM has probably been underestimating the number of quahogs in the bay. “The fishermen love that they were right, but it didn’t change any of the long-term trends in quahog abundance in the bay,” says Heimann.

Three hours into his four-hour workday, Jody King notices a slight breeze in the air. Glancing at his boat’s GPS, he notes that the boat is now drifting at .27 miles per hour, just below what he considers the ideal speed for quahogging. It enables him to rake at a faster pace while using less energy. After ten minutes, he hauls in his rake, sorts his catch and announces, “That’s thirty-five bucks just for pawing around on the bottom. I need ten hauls a day like that.”
But he doesn’t get even one more.

Instead, after slipping his rake into the water one last time and digging for a few minutes, he feels it strike a large rock on the bottom, which causes him to twist the rake. “I probably just dumped forty quahogs on that rock,” King says. “But that’s okay. I’ll get them next time. It’s part of the deal.”

As he disassembles his stales and packs his equipment, he bags up a total of 221 littlenecks and a handful of topnecks. “Not a great day, not a good day, but not a bad day,” he says. “God said, ‘No clams for you today.’ ”

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