On Chincoteague, littleneck clams at a breakneck pace
Antulio Gomez stands at the top of the grader with hundreds of clams. To the untrained eye, the clams look the same size, but the machine knows better.
With a laser, the grader measures each clam as it rides down a set of rollers. The differences are measured in eighths of inches.
The clams come down by the dozen, and the machine is sorting them and feeding them into various chutes into mesh bags.
“When I first came here, it just blew me away,” says Billy Wharton, plant manager at Tom’s Cove Aquafarms in Chincoteague.
That was about 15 years ago, and now Wharton knows the business inside and out, says the aquafarm’s owner, island native Tommy Clark.
“He can tell you everything you need to know,” Clark says.
But still, to a visitor’s eyes, it’s hard to fathom the technology today in an operation that grew from the island’s heritage of working watermen.
Chincoteague seafood has been in demand for generations. “Salt oysters” from the island have been on the tables of presidents and world dignitaries.
The seafood still is in demand — now more than ever, it seems — though most people never see where the clams and oysters started.
Once, harvesting oysters and clams was back-breaking labor, and it still is. The only difference is the typical one-man operation years ago dealt in hundreds of bivalves on a good day.
Now there are 100,000 clams, along with up to 10,000 oysters, shipped from Tom’s Cove Aquaculture in an average day during the busy season.
From sea to plate
It’s late morning at Tom’s Cove Aquaculture. Besides Wharton, there are several men working this day — and a woman working in the office — but they’re inside, working in high gear, just like the machine.
They are washing clams and shucking oysters. All of the seafood was in saltwater that morning. By nightfall some of it will be at Grand Central Station, New York for an appearance at the world landmark’s oyster bar.
Clark, Wharton and the others know how to keep the supply equal to the demand. The aquafarm ships clams and oysters six days a week. Hundreds of thousands of them. Millions more wait in the water.
The old seafood rule no longer applies, says Wharton. Old-timers knew to eat oysters only in “R” months, or months with the letter “R.”
Back then, eating an oyster between May and August meant eating an oyster in the summer when oysters spawned. The meat would be thin because the oyster’s energy went into reproduction.
Plus, in the days before reliable refrigeration, the meat could spoil and the seafood would be unsafe to eat.
The old adage doesn’t apply today. Aquaculture has raised the waterman’s art to a new level.
“We make them think that it’s summer (all the time),” says Wharton.
But it takes hard work and long hours to replicate what Mother Nature does only from May through September.
“You’ve got to be doing it because you enjoy it,” Wharton recalls Clark saying.
Bivalve science
Spawning seafood is a science — at least at an aquafarm.
Clark starts the process with his own algae made in sea water. He examines the starter algae under a microscope to ensure it’s healthy. It’s what baby clams and oysters like to eat.
The bivalves themselves are spawned in test tubes. After 24 hours, Clark examines each larvae to determine if it’s male or female. He keeps the female spawn and discards most of the males. Only a few males are needed to renew the process.
As the larvae grow, they are moved to larger flasks. After a few days, the oyster spawn go into a large outdoor tank full of empty shells, to which they attach. In another week, they go into floating, netted “culture systems” so they can grow in sea water. The briny taste is what makes a Chincoteague oyster different, says Wharton.
“Our salinity is 32 parts (per million),” says Wharton. “In some places it’s down to half that. They have no salt at all.
“It’s like eating a piece a piece of meat with no seasoning. Our seafood comes out of the water with that seasoning.”
Growing under ideal conditions, the oysters are more plump and firm, and therefore more marketable. However, some people prefer their oysters the old-fashioned way, and the aquafarm harvests and markets “wild caught” oysters, too.
The clams are started much the same way, except the juveniles are planted in selected bottom sites, where they feed only on natural food sources.
Eventually, they are harvested the old-fashioned way — with a hand-pulled dredge.
Eric Wells, who’s helping bag clams, indicates how the dredge operates.
“It’s not that hard to pull,” says Wharton. “You guide it along. Water pressure from the pump blows the clams inside the basket.”
Seafood demand
The 7/8ths clams go in the red bag. The one-inch clams go in the blue bag. A basket in center collects ones too small to sell, so they can be replanted.
The machine counts the clams, too. As soon as 100 clams fill the bag, the machine signals a worker to cinch the bag and to hang a new bag.
Nearby, Wharton’s brothers, Ricky and Johnny, are shucking wild-caught oysters. Their cousin, Bruce Dorsey, also works there.
They were raised in the seafood culture, they say.
“From the time I was small (and) up,” says Johnny Wharton.
Ricky Wharton is talking and shucking, though his favorite part of the job is “going out on the water.” He doesn’t mind working for his brother, he says with a laugh.
The shucked oysters are packed into pint or gallon containers and refrigerated. The live-in-the-shell oysters are boxed and refrigerated, too. Likewise, the clam bags are filling quickly, and so is the walk-in refrigerated room.
It’s all done at a breakneck pace, but every package and every load is documented and traced to its destination.
The demand for the seafood is just as great as it was 150 years ago when Chincoteaguers — despite being part of a southern state — voted to stay in the Union. Their seafood markets were in the North, as are Tom’s Cove Aquafarms customers mostly today.
Customers are used to eating fresh seafood year-round now, says Wharton.
“Now you can continue pretty much all year long. Twelve months out of the year.”
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