Clamming Up : Pismo Beach Has Hopes It Can Get Sea Otters to Share

After a decade of decline, the famed Pismo clam appears to be making a comeback, raising the possibility that clamming could return as one of the Central Coast’s most popular pastimes.

The sight of hundreds of people padding along these beaches with their clam buckets is a pleasant memory to longtime Californians.

But more recently, there has been another sight--sea otters floating on their backs in the surf, breaking open the clam shells and gorging themselves on the succulent meat.

Since the influx of otters in the late 1970s, humans rarely see clams larger than 4 1/2 inches in diameter, the only ones legal to harvest.

New Surveys

But now, reported Laurence (Bud) Laurent, a marine biologist with the state Department of Fish and Game, new surveys of the clam population at Pismo Beach, Morro Bay and Monterey show a startling increase of 1- and 2-year-old clams.

“Every year, we dig a series of 6-inch-wide, 6-inch-deep, 200-foot-long trenches on . . . Central California beaches to monitor Pismo clam numbers,” explained Laurent. “In 1984 and 1985, the numbers were as low as 10 in some of the trenches, and the average has been between 30 and 40 per trench.”

This year, he said, the numbers have jumped to between 400 and 900 per trench.

The biologists do not yet know the reasons for the increase. But it has so impressed Laurent and two other state biologists that they have asked the Department of Fish and Game’s Marine Resources Division to consider “the feasibility of . . . opening up a ‘steamer’ clam fishery to the public,” Laurent said.

Commercial clamming, banned in the 1940s, would still be outlawed.

The key element of the biologists’ proposal would allow the taking of clams as small as two inches in diameter. There would be no competition from the sea otters because they apparently do not eat clams smaller than 3 1/2 inches.

“The otters smash one shell against another with their paws to break open the clams and get to the food,” Laurent said. “It could be the smaller shells don’t fit in their paws or are too hard to break.’

Earl Ebert, the Marine Resources Division supervisor for Central California, said the proposal to increase clamming by reducing the legal size limit would have to be monitored closely to prevent decimation of the species.

“If it is decided there is a surplus of clams and the smaller clams could be utilized without hurting the resource, then I’m sure the department will OK the reduction in the legal size,” Ebert said. “Harvest would be in limited areas along the California coast, and at any time if we had a sense of over-harvest, we could shut it down.”

The proposal for size reduction is now in the hands of Al Petrovich, chief of the Marine Resources Division.

If he approves the proposal, it will be forwarded to the Fish and Game Commission next month. If the commission approves the idea, clamming could start again on the Central Coast as early as Jan. 1, 1990.

That would be welcome news to the small Central Coast town of Pismo Beach, which years ago proclaimed itself “Clam City, the Clam Capital of the world.”

The town still holds its Clam Festival each fall with a big parade that includes a float carrying the Clam Queen and her court seated on giant clam shells. There is even a clam chowder cook-off each year.

But for years the clams everybody eats at the annual festival have come from New England and Mexico, among other places.

Millions on Beaches

“There were millions of Pismo clams on Central California beaches during the first part of the century,” Laurent said. “They were so dense, my grandfather recalled that he would drive a buckboard along the beach and plow up thousands at a time to be ground up for hog food.”

Helen Phillips, 67, who has run Brad’s Restaurant since 1952, said that decades ago, there were days when Pismo Beach would be so jammed with clammers “that people could hardly move.”

“Then the sea otters came,” she said, “and the clams disappeared.”