A Day in the Life of a Bayman
George Mathis has watched the bay change—and hung on by changing with it.
You know you’re in the presence of a bayman by the way he guns his boat through a channel. That would be with confident speed, moderately alarming to a passenger in a landlocked trade.
It’s hard to imagine how many times George Mathis has woven through the serpentine curves from Landing Crick out toward his aquaculture leases in Dry Bay, near Galloway in the Edwin B. Forsythe Wildlife Refuge. Thousands? Tens of thousands?
Cutting the engine, Mathis pops one of the spearmint-flavored Starlite mints that he keeps stowed in a cooler bedecked with an American flag and bald eagle. “Why? Because I don’t smoke, and I take one of those every basket [of clams] as a reward.”
It’s a sound strategy. Clamming requires equal parts method and instinct, along with a dash of luck. A successful day on the water is something worth celebrating. As seagulls screech overhead—they’ll steal your lunch right off the boat if you’re not careful—Mathis looks out on waters that reflect an early-day cloudscape, undisturbed and moody at 8am. In the distance, the skeletal structure of neighboring Great Bay’s long-defunct menhaden factory rests untouched, a monument to the bay’s endless capacity for change and the industries that rise and fall in tandem.
“I’ve been out here in some sweetheart thunderstorms,” Mathis recalls, noting how the waters in the channel can drop below the two feet needed to run the boat if a storm and low tide coincide. “Real sweethearts. You can’t do anything when they are coming. What are you going to do? Water’s this deep. Boat ain’t going to run.”
He zips up his wetsuit and smiles. “Well, let’s jump in.”
As he works the bottom, Mathis evokes a waltz, turning, combing the depth, standing tall again. The water has a way of concealing effort. “It all looks easy. Try it for five hours.”
As he sorts the clams by size back on board, the sound evokes a slot-machine jackpot: clap, clap, clap. This is appropriate for two reasons. Clams have been associated with money since Native Americans used their shells for trade. And Mathis wouldn’t be farming here were it not for a series of innovations that started in Atlantic City.
Four-Season Business
Baymen tend to be amused when the land-bound ask to tour their leases. Set off by four PVC posts, there’s a squared-off expanse of water, and that’s that. Everything in clamming happens below the surface. Whether a clammer is treading the wilds (hunting clams with their feet) or raising them from microscopic seed, it’s hard work.
“Though it’s not as totally physically demanding, it’s a lot more demanding of time,” Mathis says of farming clams. “It’s not forgiving. If you don’t do something, it’s like a computer program. Every step must follow in a sequence.” Miss one or experience a setback in the form of a predator or changing water conditions, and years of effort can leave you with nothing to show for it.
Mathis, then, is methodical, aiming for a survival rate of at least 60%.
In late winter / early spring, when the water hits about 50 degrees, clams awaken from hibernation in the bottom where they reside. Though clamming is a 12-month gig, this is the beginning of the rampup toward summer high season. This time of year, Mathis checks in on stocks, gets equipment ready and repairs and cleans his all-important predator control screens—similar to a window screen, but larger and more durable.
Clams burrow, but they are not hidden. Screens keep out hungry, cunning foes like crabs, ducks and the cownose ray. Shaped like a kite with a bovine-like snout and a wingspan up to three feet, these migratory fish bring an appetite. They’re also devilishly persistent and smart as a rat, Mathis says. When they happen upon a clam farm, they will flap those wings and ram the screens to attempt access.
Over winter, screens can get fouled with muck, torn by ice and otherwise disturbed and displaced, leaving the clams vulnerable to such predators. “Sometime after Valentine’s Day, there’s a diatom bloom. The water warms up a little bit and those clams are getting active. I make darn sure everybody’s got a nice clean cover on them,” Mathis explains.
Diatoms, a form of algae, offer a nutritious early season brunch to the awakening clams. Heading toward Mother’s Day, Mathis also makes sure to cover any seed planted back in the fall. Though they used to show up in July, hungry rays are coming into Dry Bay as early as May now. Leave growing seed exposed, and the rays will consider your investment to be a freshly laid buffet, with the yearlings particularly vulnerable. It takes several years to raise a clam to littleneck size.
In the summer, effort shifts toward harvesting efficiently so that happy shoregoers can savor clams in the sun. Ideally, consumers will consider whether those clams came from Jersey. With strong competition from neighboring states like Virginia, that’s not a certainty. In part, this means clammers have as much work off the water as on, selling into diverse markets, from clam houses and restaurants to supermarkets.
Three Generations on the Water
“How did I get here? It started with a father. It started when I fell overboard. It started with a whole lot of things. Actually, it’s three generations that have been on the water. My uncle drowned on the water. I’m the third. My 88-year-old father still wants to go out.”
Mathis’ uncle, by all accounts a stellar bayman, died in the 1960s. “They had small boats back in those days, and he had way too many clams on it. And he was very good. He was a very good clammer,” he recounts. Though Mathis says he didn’t give it a thought when it came time to begin his own life on the bay, he’s sure it affects him subconsciously. “I exhort others sometimes: ‘Be careful out there.’”
As for falling in? Well that just happens when you grow up on the water. Mathis’ family has been living in the region for 300 years. When he speaks about life on the bay, his marine-toned eyes go far away before snapping into present tense.
Mathis caught his first hard clam at age four. As he pulled up the prehistoric creature from the water, it was the first step in a journey that would give him a front-row seat to an industry’s transformation. “I’ve been messing with clams for a long time,” he says. Along the way, his career has taken nearly as many twists as Landing Crick.
As a teenager, Mathis cut town to work the commercial fishing boats off Key West, working Caribbean waters rich with spiny lobsters, mackerel and stone crabs. “I went to high school and did the bay thing and was in love with biology,” he recalls.
“Then I entered the picture of—well, let’s say it was sex, drugs and rock and roll in the ’70s.”
With that out of his system, it was back to wild clamming full time a few years later.
Yet, opportunity knocked. At first, he divided time between the bay and jobs with the Viking and Pacemaker boat works. This led to a gig with Fruehauf in Davenport, Iowa. There, Mathis was a production controller and eventually a shipping and receiving supervisor. He was doing well for himself, with a shiny set of wheels to prove it.
But the bay, as it does, called him back.
“I took my brand-new Ford Mustang and drove home and said to hell with it all,” Mathis says. The mustang was traded for an outboard motor. When Fruehauf tried to lure him back, Mathis was firm in his decision. “John Hayes. I’ll never forget the conversation. He says, ‘Listen, we’ll give you a better salary, work out your relocation.’
“I said, ‘The only person I’ve got over my shoulder these days is a sea gull, and I’m going to keep it that way.’” Again, that laugh.
A Bay Paved in Clams
In some ways, clamming now is just like it has always been. It follows seasonal rhythms. Knowledge gets passed down and clamming continues, though young farmers are mostly in oysters these days. (According to the New Jersey Shellfish Aquaculture Situation and Outlook Report for 2016, there was a 51.5% increase in full-time work in oyster farming between 2015 and 2016, with the number of jobs nearing 40. Too few clam growers completed the survey for stats to be included. Mathis estimates that there are roughly 25 full-time clam farmers.)
In other ways, however, the work of farming the bay would be unrecognizable to those born a century back.
As recently as the 1960s, intrepid wild clammers in the LBI region could earn enough over a summer to pay for college. Jay Mann, managing editor of Long Beach Island’s weekly, The Sandpaper, was one of them. “The only way kids here made real money was through clamming,” Mann recalls. “But we made real money. I had $100 days. What would that be today? $300? $400?”
Dragging a basket attached to a tire’s inner tube, Mann and his peers thought the supply was endless, pulling up 2,000 clams a day. It was a rite of passage, Mathis says. Then things started to change.
Mann missed part of the transition, leveraging academic scholarships and his shellfish money to attend college (read: surf ) in Maui. “When we got back into the business in the late ’70s—that’s only about a six-to-eight-year span there—something had gone wrong.” Wild hard clam stocks in Atlantic and Ocean counties began to diminish, and quickly.
Overharvesting was a factor. But there was more to it: changes in the ecosystem that most people attribute to coastal development. “If you go back 400 years here, there were no roads, there were no impervious services, there were no houses. You had a natural environment,” he says. As man paved over what Mother Nature had created, runoff into the bay increased markedly, complete with nutrients from new residents’ lawns. Systems that had previously taken care of themselves went into collapse.
Amid that decline, the hard clam aquaculture trade was born in Atlantic County in the mid-1970s. Seeing the proverbial writing on the wall, clammers Rit Crema and Rich Beckley partnered with researchers from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science to launch a fledgling industry out of a small Atlantic City hatchery. (See page 44)
Mathis was an early convert. After initial failures raising seed in the late ’70s, he and his family opened their own hatchery aboard a 40-foot houseboat in 1984. Located off Tuckerton’s Seven Bridges Road, it also served as Mathis’ home. “We were the Tupperware hatchery,” Mathis laughs. Mom, Elizabeth (Betty), raised algae in her Northfield basement. Mathis and his dad, George Senior, farmed and harvested.
Eventually Mathis switched to buying seed, which had come down in price. Yet, the transformation had been made.
Aquaculture, Mathis realized, was the future.
Bearing Witness to Change
Early on, Mathis spent hours poring through biology books, even learning some Latin to unlock journal articles. “Those are things the average clammer didn’t have to know,” he says. Over time, the family figured out how to keep seed losses to a minimum and started to harvest a farmed product. These days, Mathis continues that tradition as a member of Heritage Shellfish Cooperative. (See page 51)
It isn’t the same as hunting, and lots of folks got out of the business altogether. “There were some people that were detractors,” he says. “That’s fine. You’ve got to understand that there were several of us, and there are still several of us, who want to stay on that bay at any cost at all. We needed to be on that water. It was part of us.”
This is key to understanding the inner world of a bayman. Personal relationships ebb and flow, but life on the water is meant to endure. “I’ve often explained it this way,” Mathis says. “Our bodies are comprised of two-thirds salt water. Some of us have a little more than that.” He lets out a laugh.
“We are the same salinity as the ocean, you do know that? Some of us may find ourselves attached to it.” Besides, it’s an honest living, he says. “It’s you and God and nature.” Even after all these years, Mathis keeps a camera on board to capture a striking sunrise.
As for wild clamming? It still happens—and it never really waned in northern Monmouth County, where stocks remain strong and a depuration program allows harvests to continue in conditionally approved waters. Mathis still does some himself. Yet, the days when a community’s chatter would skip over the water like a stone, folks hunting the wilds as far as the eye could see, are long gone. The bays down in South Jersey are mostly quiet now.
A Clam’s a Clam?
A saying in the shellfish community reveals the psychology of a bayman: A clam’s a clam’s a clam. Tonally, it reflects pragmatism, a dry, gallows humor. Below the surface, however, there’s more to it.
A clam from New Jersey reflects a particular and deep history.
A clam’s a clam—sure. And it’s a heritage worth preserving. “People don’t realize that entire towns, like Tuckerton, probably two-thirds of the population harvested clams at some point in the year. They don’t realize that down in Atlantic County, most of the farmers were also clammers. They clammed in the winter months, and they farmed in the summer.”
Mathis intends to see that tradition continue. This year, that’s a challenge: Growth rates in Dry Bay are slow, which means Mathis is spending even more time on the wilds. Still, he’s hopeful. “We are farmers, and we are optimistic that things will improve. We wouldn’t be farmers if we were pessimists.”
Out on Dry Bay, he picks up a littleneck from his basket and turns it in his palm, admiring the smooth concentric arcs that showcase the creature’s age as the sun pushes through the clouds. At the edge of the clam, the shell goes pale, this season’s growth ring opaque and milk-white.
A clam’s a clam, but these are beauties.
“I can still remember being very much fascinated with the idea of raising these things,” Mathis says, his eyes again scanning the horizon. He recounts the story of a friend from Iowa coming out to visit. “He goes, ‘Wow, I see why you gave everything up. It does get under your skin.’”
A soft smile paints his lips and he runs a hand through his wavy salt-and-pepper hair. Then he revs the motor, puts on his tinted shades and guides the boat back through the channel.
“It’s an honest living,”
say Mathis.
“It’s you and God and nature.”
Heritage Shellfish Cooperative
Along with Pete McCarthy and Jeff Pritchard, George Mathis established Heritage Shellfish Cooperative in 2013.Working with retired marine extension agent Gef Flimlin and the Keystone Development Center; which specializes in helping independent businesses leverage a cooperative model, the trio combined expertise with the aim of improving economies of scale. Together they combine nearly a century and a half's worth of experience in hatcheries, farming and distribution.
“The door was open to all clam farmers to come and talk about being in the cooperative,” Flimlin says. “Those who stayed realized that doing the same old thing would produce the same old results. We needed a new way to get a really good product into the hands of convinced consumers— people who understand what good product is.” Flimlin believes a branded clam can help preserve New Jersey's industry by making our local product more visible in the face of stiff competition and pricing pressure from commodity producers like Virginia.
“Three independent baymen working together What a miracle that is,” Mathis jokes. “It was like climbing Mount Everest with yarn.” Together; they produce farm-raised Eventide Littleneck Clams, which are sold in a unique clamshell package. In 2017, the brand was invited to have a backstage tasting table for VIPs and performers at Farm Aid.
- Founded 2013
- Product: Eventide Littleneck Clams
- Available in: Kings Food Markets
- Online: heritageshellfish.com
