The weekend before, we had gone clam digging ourselves, but we had done it the old-fashioned way: diving down and scooping up handfuls of seafloor silt and then filtering through it until we were left with nothing but clams in our palms. The four of us (penny, seung-hee, ryan, and i) probably latched on to upwards of 150 of the little suckers, which we will get around to eating at a later date. These men, however, were engaged in a different manner of digging up the clams, though I’m not sure it was altogether more efficient.

They had, attached to a rope, a device that resembled the mouth of a robot, should a robot have a mouth built specifically for being dragged across the seafloor in order to pick up clams. The contraption was cubically rectangular, had wire mesh that acted to filter out the sand while retaining the booty, and had a gaping mouth on one end to which both the lower and upper jaw had a row of jutting teeth in which to dig itself deeper into the seafloor. One of the gentlemen would hurl the robot’s mouth as far out as the rope would allow, perhaps 20 meters, and then a group of as few as two but as many as four—depending on the size of said mouth, and they had two: a small one and a large one—would work together to pull the sucker in. if it sounds like overkill to have so many men pulling on a small apparatus like this, one must consider that pulling through 20 meters of silt while battling currents and waves isn’t as easy as being a dumbass is.