A Rake’s
Progress
Rhode Island’s quahoggers are a resilient
bunch, even in the face of a pandemic.
BY TODD MC LEISH
JUST AS THE SUN PEEKS ABOVE THE EAST BAY,
Jody King completes his 500-foot commute to work from
his home in the Oakland Beach section of Warwick to his
twenty-five-foot boat docked at the marina at the end of
his street. As soon as he starts the engine, he takes off
across the water. Today his destination is a few hundred
yards off Barrington Beach, where he will spend four
hours digging for quahogs.
It’s a job King stumbled into in his thirties, and it’s a job
he lives for. A year-round commercial shellfisherman for
twenty-five years, he repeatedly claims he wishes there
were eight days in each week so he had another day to go
quahogging.
Drifting in fifteen feet of water, King assembles his gear:
two telescopic poles called stales clamped together with a
handle at one end and a bullrake at the other. The rake, a
square steel basket nearly two feet wide with pointed tines
that dig into the sediment, is manipulated with a series of
tugs on the handle as he walks backward across his boat. >>