By Scott D. Johnston
Based on the harvest so far, the recreational razor clam season on the North Coast will likely continue through the end of April, according to Dan Ayres, Coastal Shellfish Manager with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
An Aberdeen native who has worked for WDFW since 1980, Ayres said the harvest on the Copalis beach, which includes the Ocean Shores peninsula, and Mocrocks, north of the Copalis River to Moclips, is at about 62 percent of the season’s quota. That means the season should continue through the last weekend of April, when diggers can enjoy morning tides as low as -1.8 feet. He said the season at Mocrocks may even extend into May.
“We’re in ‘Razor Clam Central’ … really good habitat,” he said, during a talk he gave Saturday afternoon at the Razor Clam Festival in the Ocean Shores Convention Center.
More good news comes from the fact that “right now, the ocean is pretty cold,” Ayres said. Warmer water aids the growth of the specific type of algae that produces domoic acid, the marine toxin that causes amnesic shellfish poisoning. While not a problem here this year, it has shut down the south coast beaches of Twin Harbors (Westport and Grayland) and Long Beach.
Ayres said the warm water “blob” in the north Pacific helped cause dangerous domoic acid levels in 2015 and warm El Nino water produced similar results in 2016, resulting in the closure of the entire season at Twin Harbors. But that may be about to change.
Toxin levels at Twin Harbors spiked in December and early January. However, toxin levels have declined over the past two months and consistently are meeting public health standards. “If this next round of testing at Twin Harbors comes back good, we’ll announce tentative dates through April at the beach,” Ayres said. That includes digs this Friday through Monday evenings, if samples taken Monday show levels below that 20 parts per million level that is the cutoff for allowable domoic acid concentration.
The good news may also soon extend to Long Beach, which has been closed all season due to high domoic acid levels, but tested at 9 ppm on March 12. Ayres explained that two consecutive tests below 20 ppm are necessary for digging dates to be scheduled.
The North Coast beaches have shown low domoic acid all season, with 8.0 ppm at Mocrocks on January 15 the highest level reached on either beach so far this year. So, the digs are on for Friday and Sunday, March 24 and 26, at Mocrocks and Saturday and Monday, March 25 and 27, at Copalis. These are the last evening tides digs of the season.
On Thursday, March 30, the first morning tide dig of the season will take place at Mocrocks on the 8:58 a.m. low tide of -0.6 feet. Mocrocks will dig again Saturday, April 1, while Copalis will have morning digs on Friday, March 31 and Sunday, April 2. Additional digs at Mocrocks and Copalis are tentatively scheduled for April 13-16 and April 27-30.
Despite the popularity of morning tide digs in the Spring, which sometimes creates long lines of vehicles headed to the beach, Ayres said the actual peak number of clam diggers always occurs in February. He said economic data suggests that the recreational razor clam fishery in Washington generates $30 to $40 million annually along the coast.
