Instead, they ended up setting up a stand on the side of the road and selling them there for about a dollar a pound, compared with the quarter per pound paid by restaurants. The Sheats hoped to market the clams to local food markets and restaurants but found little success.
In the subsequent months, they harvested 4,021 geoducks, operating under the company name of Bubble Heads, Inc. The harvest began in May 1970 when Sheats and his wife Margaret dove to the sandy bottom of Thorndyke Bay on Hood Canal and pulled up fifty live clams. Their initial total was 63 million individuals, which led to the state establishing its first ever commercial harvest.ĭespite the lack of a market, unregulated production went from 82,000 pounds in 1970 to 2.4 million in 1975 and ultimately to 8,708,000 in 1977, a quantity that has never been equaled. After reporting his find to state biologists, Sheats worked with them to determine how many geoducks lived on the bottom of Puget Sound. Up to this point, biologists thought that geoducks only lived intertidally (between high and low tide) and no deeper. (The Navy began testing and servicing torpedoes at Keyport in 1914 and continues to do so to the present.) During one such dive deep in Hood Canal, they found geoducks living in habitat far below tide line. Then in 1960, Robert Sheats and a team of Navy divers made an unexpected discovery while conducting their regular job of locating torpedoes lost on the bottom of Puget Sound. To this day, the daily, three-duck-per-person rule applies. Five years later, legislators were still concerned about too few geoducks but decided to reopen the tidelands and allow harvesting but only three per day and only for personal consumption none could be sold or canned.
In response, in 1925, the state legislature banned catching, taking, or possessing a geoduck. Stearns, called the “boss clam of North America,” Puget Sound residents thought the clams were being over-harvested. Like all other similar plans to follow, it failed.Īlthough there was apparently only a limited local demand for what another early enthusiast, R.E.C. Hemphill then proposed a complicated scheme to ship live geoduck to the east coast so that those less fortunate might enjoy the fabulous bivalve. Remarkably, one of the first appearances in print of the word geoduck comes from the February 23, 1883, New York Times, where an unnamed writer described them as the “prince of clams.” The Times reporter had been influenced by malacologist Henry Hemphill, who had visited Puget Sound in 1881 and become smitten: Geoduck were the “most delicious of any bivalves I have ever eaten, not excepting the best oysters,” he wrote. Yet, the very name geoduck, variously spelled gwiduc, goeduck, gooeyduck, and gweduck, comes from the Lushootseed word gwidəq, meaning "dig deep," so clearly the great clams were well known, and probably eaten. They may not have ended up in middens, too, because they were processed on beaches at low tide and would have washed away. No shells appear in the archaeological record - perhaps because geoduck shells disintegrate easily and are therefore hard to distinguish from other shelled critters. Unfortunately, we have no evidence that the early residents ate geoduck.
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