A Rake’s Progress
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the industry. “I think we’re going to lose a big chunk of the full-time
workforce,” he says. “And I’m worried that the dealers we sell to
won’t have enough product coming in the door and won’t be able to
keep their doors open. If a dealer goes from having twenty to thirty
guys selling to him down to just ten, that might be enough to force
him to close. And when dealers close, that’s bad for the industry.”
It may already be happening. One dealer closed in 2019, and
another started a price war by raising prices paid to quahoggers
to attract more quahoggers to sell to that dealer.
“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
“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.” — JEFF GRANT
Quahogger Jeff Grant
cleans his catch.
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
PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF URI GRADUATE SCHOOL OF OCEANOGRAPHY/RHODE ISLAND SEA GRANT.
108 RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY l AUGUST 2020