Fishing at Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe (Little Boston)

If you ever drive through Port Gamble S’Kallam Tribe, you’ll be bewitched by the cacophony of fishing equipment such as crab pots, nets, boats, fenders, and outboard motors. It harkens back to a time when people worked with their backs and their hands, and it’s good to know that that way of life survives somewhere.

In these modern times, the most lucrative fishery is often the geoduck, a blush-inducing bivalve that is enormous in size and commands a good price (before tariffs of course).

The first time I saw a geoduck (gooey-duck), I figured something went terribly wrong in its development.

“Nope. That’s the way God made ‘em,” I was told. “And thank God for that.”

The geoduck is central to my book Ghost Puppet, which is quite good I’m told if you can find a copy somewhere.

Geoduck isn’t fished in the traditional sense. The critter is on the sea floor, and you must dive for it. It’s dangerous business. And perfect for a mystery novel.

Here is a description of the geoduck from Ghost Puppet.

For the uninitiated, the geoduck—pronounced gooey-duck—is a striking, if not offensive underwater creature, bearing a not-so-subtle resemblance to an outsized male sex organ. The neck of the clam can extend three feet, far too large to tuck itself inside its curiously diminutive end shell that grows only six or so inches. Fundamentally uncovered its entire life, one wonders how such a meaty animal survives in the brutal underwater ecosystem of Puget Sound, with everything from sea lions to giant octopi surveying the seafloor for something to eat. But survive it does. Found in the tide flats and just under the seafloor up to sixty feet below the surface, the geoduck is relatively abundant in Puget Sound and coastal Canada. A typical lifespan is 140 years.

And there’s prawns, crabs and salmon, each worthy of their own season, regulatory limits and (potentially) big payoffs.