KALALOCH MAY BE closed no longer.
The North Olympic Peninsula’s lone razor clam outpost has been a ghost town each of the last two years.
A healthy cohort of clams at Kalaloch, found during this summer’s coastal razor clam stock assessment, likely spells the return of the shovel this fall.
Olympic National Park coastal ecologist Steven Fradkin said surveys pointed to approximately 3.5 million harvestable-sized razors (four inches) at the park beach.
While that might not be lights out, it’s certainly more than had been there the previous two years when the beach was closed to digging.
“We’ve had some years where we’ve had nine million on that beach, and we’ve had years where it’s just under one million,” Fradkin said.
“They are certainly harvestable at this point. They are just not as big historically as we’ve had at Kalaloch.”
An announcement concerning this fall’s razor clam openers won’t be made until the end of September.
Yet all signs point to Kalaloch being included in the harvest this year.
Both Fradkin and state Department of Fish and Wildlife coastal shellfish manager Dan Ayres sounded as if it was a mere formality.
“Kalaloch looks really good,” Ayres said. “That beach has definitely come back to life.”
The four other state beaches — Long Beach, Copalis, Twin Harbors and Mocrocks — all look healthy as well, according to Ayres.
In fact, Long Beach and Twin Harbors each saw strong increases in clam populations from last year. Copalis saw a moderate increase as well.
Only Mocrocks, which contains Moclips beach, saw a decrease in population size. And that was minimal, according to Ayres.
“Some of the average sizes are close to five inches at both Mocrocks and Copalis,” he said.
“Those two beaches just north of Grays Harbor are looking very good . . . good clams and lots of them.”
A look at this fall’s tide tables points to the weekend of Oct. 17-18 as a prime candidate for opening weekend.
There will be a series of late low tides between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. both nights on the coast. That includes a -1.26 foot low tide at 8:02 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 18.
And, just in case you were wondering, there’s a -1.85 foot tide at 6:56 p.m. on New Year’s Eve.
Sounds like the perfect tide to ring in the New Year.
Public meeting
Olympic National Park and the state will hold a public meeting in Forks discussing Kalaloch’s razor clams sometime this month.
The date should be announced by the end of next week.
Kalaloch’s razor clam population took a huge hit a couple of years ago, likely due to outbreak of Nuclear Inclusion X (aka NIX).
That led to a 65-percent decline in razor clam populations from 2006 to ’07. Even when populations rebounded in 2008, clams still weren’t big enough to open the beach to harvest.
Park biologists have been conducting a study on the presence of NIX in Kalaloch clams the past two years.
With one year left in the study, they hope to attain some sort of idea of how NIX operates within the environment.
“We’re trying to learn something about the dynamics of NIX,” Fradkin said. “Ultimately the goal is to be able to predict or have some sort of clue as to when the situation might be ripe for NIX to really knock a population out.
“Right now we don’t know anything about that.”
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Matt Schubert is the outdoors and sports columnist for the Peninsula Daily News. His column regularly appears on Thursdays and Fridays.
He can be reached at matt.schubert@peninsuladailynews.com.
