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Captain Victor Simmons and his three daughters, Pauline, Rachel, and Stacy, all work as duckers near Olympia, Wash. Gregg Segal
The tribal police are tied up alongside the Ichiban, a broad, aluminum dive boat that bucks against its anchor line 300 yards offshore. Only one of the Ichiban’s two dive lines is running at the moment, trailing off the stern into the granite waters of South Puget Sound. The Ichiban’s captain, Craig Parker, stares intently as the tribal officer finishes his paperwork—capping off an inspection of the Ichiban’s safety procedures and a proficiency test to certify that all members of Parker’s crew are qualified to do their strange work 40 to 50 feet below the surface.
“We did good,” Captain Parker barks over the growl of the compressors after the inspectors have gone. “Everybody passed inspection, and Connie did great.” Connie Whitener, who with her bookish demeanor seems more like a schoolteacher than a certified commercial diver, offers a shy smile, then tugs the collar of her parka against the steady rain. Like everyone on board, Whitener is a member of the 1,000-strong Squaxin Island tribe. It’s been a while since she’s worked a shift as a ducker, and she’d be prohibited from doing so if the inspectors failed her. Duckers dive exclusively for the giant, burrowing clams known as geoducks. According to Indian tribal law, you’re not a ducker if you can’t fill a 50-pound crate of clams in less than 15 minutes. Having filled her crate fast enough, Whitener will now be entitled to an equal share (split seven ways) of the day’s $25,000 harvest.
An adult geoduck (pronounced gooey-duck) averages about three pounds, and while market value fluctuates daily, the overall price for these monstrous bivalves has been climbing steadily for 40 years. This spring geoducks have been going for $10 a pound on the dock at Zittel’s Marina at Johnson Point northeast of Olympia, Wash. Eighteen hours and one international flight later they can go for four times that in the markets of Shenzhen, China, where the clams are a coveted gourmet ingredient known as xiàng bá bàng, or “elephant trunk.” Prized in China for the sweet meat of the siphon, the clam’s tubular organ, and their crisp texture, geoducks are prepared as part of a fondue-like hot pot. In Japan they’re served as sashimi, mirugai, or simply giant clam. Apparently because of their resemblance to a dangling body part belonging to 50 percent of large mammals, geoducks are also reputed to promote male sexual vigor. “There’s no limit to the demand for geoducks from the Asian buyers,” says Casey Bakker, an American who has sold them for 30 years.
For a decade beginning in the early 1980s, the geoduck market was like the ’49 Gold Rush played out on the sandy bottom of the sound. Trade with China was largely unregulated and conducted by a handful of duckers, among them Craig Parker’s father, Glenn, who ran the Ichiban when he wasn’t working as an electrical engineer at Boeing. “When this first started, there were only 10 or 12 [crew members] doing it,” recalls Craig, who crewed the Ichiban under his father. “It was really good money. We were making as much as $20 a pound.” Now that there are 80 crews doing it, he laments, “it’s making a living, nothing more.”
Parker would rather not say how much of a living, but the math isn’t hard to figure—$6 million to $8 million per year shared by the 80 tribe members who dive—and a productive ducker can easily make $75,000 to $100,000 annually. Considering that the median income for Northwest tribes without geoduck divers falls at or near the poverty line, ducking makes a dramatic difference in the lives of the families of the 15 tribes (most with a thousand members, give or take) who engage in the trade. It’s going so well that, inevitably, there’s a fight brewing over who has rights to the geoducks and the unique terms that allow the tribes to duck without bidding on leases or paying income taxes on their harvests.
Geoducks were almost unseen above water until 1960, when a U.S. Navy diver tasked with recovering a wayward torpedo happened upon a prairie of fleshy siphons undulating back and forth on the bottom of Puget Sound. A mature clam lives for about a century (the oldest ever recovered was 146 years old) and passes its time buried three feet beneath the ooze. All that’s visible is the five inches beneath the tip of the siphon as it sways in the current like grass.
