Forrest had a grrrrrreat time, and I'm pretty sure he had a lot of "firsts" that day. When we got on the Mukilteo-Clinton ferry, his tail went WILD. And he got the crazy eyes!
Sadly, dogs aren't allowed on the passenger decks so we hung out near the car. No worries though, only a 20 minute ferry ride to the island. When we got to the beach, there was a music festival setting up, and we were really lucky to be there early. At 10:00 AM the parking lot was already full, and we parked about 20 cars down the road from the park entrance. The walk out to the water was nice, lots of ocean life to see. And Forrest got to run free!
In fact, at one point, he was so excited to see the crabs that he turned into a sloth!!!!
When he didn't have other dogs to play with in the area, Forrest was poking his nose into crab bellies... that is, until he got snipped by one! He didn't play with crabs after that. =) There was lots of sniffing and exploring happening for Forrest while we dug for clams. Matt was on rake duty, I was on trowel duty, and Mel was on shovel duty. We poked around for a while before we found the sweet spot where all of the clams were hanging out. It was near the shell/rocky land, just like at Dosewallips! We ended up finding PLENTY of large horse clams but no other kind of clam. Although, I kept finding enormous mollusks - like the size of my head!
We certainly each caught our limits, and hauling the large horse clams back to the car was.... a gruesome trek. It was a good workout though, hopefully burned enough calories to make up for the chowder binge in advance!
Cleaning horse clams was... not fun. Matt was particularly bad at it, so I ended up doing almost all of our share of the haul. It must have taken well over an hour to get through all of them! And my hands and arms were tired already.
We seared some of the precious tongue meat and seasoned it with sesame oil, soy sauce, and chili paste for "dinner". We were too exhausted to do any real cooking. It was good though, almost like sashimi!
Today I made chowder with the rest of the clam meat, and oooooooh booooooy we have chowder for daaaaaays! I think I *may* have overdone it when eyeballing the measurements for this recipe...
After I packed two soup bowls for the freezer, and after we both ate dinner, we still have plenty of chowder left.
Aaaaaand a close up.
I'm pretty proud of myself for this "living off the land experience" -- dug 'em out, cleaned 'em, cooked 'em up, and now I ate 'ems!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment