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Why the Nation’s Most Famous Clammer May Be Giving Up
In Charleston, coastal development and climate change are making sustainable harvests close to impossible
I was hunkered down on an overturned bucket, wind whipping my face, as David Belanger rushed his worn skiff toward the 30 watery acres he leases for clam beds 20 miles north of Charleston, when we ran over a lead line. It was tied, improperly, to a buoy belonging to a dredger employed by the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the Intracoastal Waterway navigable. My knees whacked the deck and I skidded, scraping the skin beneath my jeans.
I righted myself, and Belanger motored over to give the guy in the dredger’s high window an old salt’s tongue lashing. The guy yelled right back: “Go around it! There’s nothing to say we can’t have that ball there.”
It was a painful lesson in the ruthlessness of the seas, and we weren’t but a stone’s throw from shore. Indeed, shellfishermen in this South Carolina city battle everything from dredgers and jet skis to poachers and predators and the blazing sun. Nowadays, though, this aging cohort’s struggle for a living appears increasingly complicated by larger anthropogenic pressures.
