Two weeks ago my girlfriend, her daughter, and I drove all the way to Lilliwaup in search of large butter clams that I heard could be found there. Low tide was close to sunset, and we had the beach to ourselves except for a young family with four kids from Orting. We watched as they gathered their limit of butter clams from a deep hole they dug, while I only managed to forage a handful. At least I’ll get to find out what they taste like, and my girlfriend shucked a bucketful of oysters. We also had some amazing scenery of a part of the Hood Canal I’d never explored before.
We have decided that Penrose Point is our favorite clamming beach so far, but it’s only open for digging in March and April. We discovered that the butter clams we went all the way to Lilliwaup to find didn’t actually taste as good as we had hoped. So today we went back one more time to Penrose for Manila clams, native littlenecks, and some more oysters. We figured out how to work together to shuck oysters in assembly line fashion. I’m good at bashing holes in the oysters to get a knife in, and she is good at cutting them free from the shell. We got our shucking done in record time. The forecast was gloomy, but in reality it turned out to be a gorgeous day on the beach.
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