Field Notes
Shellfish Guides
Clam digging, crabbing, shrimping, and oystering — coast by coast, species by species.
Pacific Coast
The Shellfish With Its Own Six-Month Closure
California shuts sport mussel harvest coast-wide for half of every year on the calendar, before anyone tests anything. Mussels concentrate biotoxins faster than other shellfish, which is why they are the sentinel species and why they get their own rules.
Gulf Coast
A Sack Is a Hundred and Ten Pounds
Texas allows two sacks of oysters per person per day and defines a sack as 110 pounds. Washington allows eighteen oysters. Same country, same animal, and the Gulf sits at the far end of the range.
Cook Inlet, Alaska
One Side of the Inlet Is Open. The Other Is Not.
Cook Inlet holds two razor clam fisheries. The east side, with the road and the famous beaches, is closed under the state's razor clam management plan. The west side has a ten gallon daily limit and no road at all.
ME
Five Traps, and the Lobster Has to Stay Whole
Maine licenses residents to set five lobster traps, forbids selling the catch, and forbids taking the meat out of the shell. That last rule is not squeamishness. It is what makes every other rule in the fishery checkable.
Chesapeake Bay
Less Than One Percent of What It Was
The Chesapeake produced twenty million bushels of oysters a year in the 1880s and holds under one percent of its historical population now. The recreational season is still open, and the sanctuaries you must stay off are the reason there is anything left.
Southeast Alaska
The Crab You Came For Is Residents Only
King crab in Southeast Alaska is open to residents only, under personal use rules, and no visitor license changes that. Dungeness and Tanner are the fisheries a visitor can actually do, though the nonresident sport limit is a modest three crab in combination per day.
Northern California
Closed Until at Least 2036
California's red abalone fishery has been shut since April 2018 and was extended to 2036 in December 2025. The abalone did not get fished out. A sea star die-off, a marine heat wave and an urchin boom removed the kelp, and they starved.
Bay Center, WA
Most of This Bay Belongs to Somebody
Willapa is a working oyster bay where most of the tideland is privately owned, and the public beaches are few and unmarked. Four sites carry public harvest, one of them for oysters only, and the ground below the nearest parking turnout is somebody's farm.
Steinhatchee, FL
Three Zones, Three Different Seasons, One Scallop
Florida's bay scallop season is three separate seasons, and only one of them runs on its own dates while the other two share a calendar. Pick the zone before you pick the weekend, because the drive between them is hours.
Georgia and Florida
The Whole Barrier Is Learning to Throw the Net
Georgia and Florida both allow recreational cast net shrimping under an ordinary saltwater license. No poles, no bait, no special permit. The autumn run out of the marsh creeks is free and public, and the only thing standing between you and it is a circular net that has to open.
Astoria, OR
The Best Bait on This Coast Is Not Sold in a Shop
Ghost shrimp are what sturgeon, surfperch and flounder are already eating, and a fresh one outfishes almost anything you can buy. Getting them takes a slurp gun, a low tide, and an hour up to your elbows in cold wet sand.
Tillamook, OR
Seventy-Two Clams a Day, and Nobody Digs Them
The most generous shellfish limit on the Oregon coast belongs to an introduced clam that lives high in the estuary, in soft mud, four inches down, close to the parking lot. If a shellfish trip has gone wrong for any other reason, these are the answer.
Pismo Beach, CA
Legal to Dig, and You Will Not Find a Legal One
The minimum size is five inches north of the county line and four and a half south, the limit is ten, and the population has been reduced to the point where a legal-size clam is a genuine find. This is the honest article about a fishery that collapsed.
Portland, ME
Nine Boats, Six Weeks, Seventy Shrimp
A 2025 pilot season in the Gulf of Maine put nine participants on the water for six weeks. They caught seventy individual shrimp, under one percent of the research quota. That is what a collapsed fishery looks like when somebody goes out and checks.
Gulf Coast
One Crab, Three States, Three Theories of Management
Louisiana caps you at twelve dozen crabs a day and sets no minimum size at all. Texas sets a five inch minimum and no bag limit whatsoever. Maryland raises its size limit mid-season and bans keeping egg-bearing females. Same species, three philosophies.
Seattle, WA
The Crab You May Keep When Dungeness Is Shut
Six a day, either sex, at five inches, frequently open when Dungeness is closed, and coming up in the same gear. Most recreational crabbers throw red rock back to make room for a Dungeness that never arrives, and the claws are the part they are discarding.
Newport, OR
Twelve Crab a Day, Year Round, From a Dock
Oregon lets you keep twelve Dungeness a day from a public dock with no season to track. Washington gives you five in an announced summer opening. Same species, a river between them, and the difference makes the Oregon bays the best place in the country to learn.
Olympia, WA
One Geoduck a Day, and It Has to Be the First One
Washington cut the recreational geoduck limit from three to one in April 2026, and it must be the first one you dig. A clam whose limit is a single animal per person is a clam that does not tolerate much harvest, and it is the hardest legal dig in the country.
Shelton, WA
The Clam Most People Dig Here Is Not From Here
The Manila clam arrived in the 1930s as an accidental passenger in oyster seed shipped from Japan, and turned out to suit Puget Sound beaches better than anything native. It is now the region's largest recreational clam fishery and the easiest place to start.
Seaside, OR
The Clatsop Closure Has Nothing to Do With Toxins
Razor clamming on the Clatsop beaches closes at one minute past midnight on July 15 every year and reopens October 1. It is an annual conservation closure on Oregon's best razor ground, and no amount of checking will make it open on July 20.
Tillamook, OR
Oregon Will Not Let You Pick an Oyster
Take of native oysters is prohibited outright, and every other oyster in an Oregon bay is a cultured oyster and therefore private property. Between those two rules there is no gap for a recreational harvester to stand in.
Hoodsport, WA
The Best Oyster Beaches Sit Above a Suffocating Fjord
Hood Canal is more than six hundred feet deep and its entrance is crossed by a sill only about a hundred and fifty feet down. Deep water sits for months, runs out of oxygen and kills things. The oysters are mostly above the problem.
South Bend, WA
One in Six American Oysters Comes Out of This Bay
Willapa Bay is twenty-five miles long, mostly under ten feet deep, and produces a sixth of the oysters in the United States. It is also in the middle of an argument about a native shrimp that has no clean answer.
Olympia, WA
The Only Oyster Native Here Is Down to Four Percent
Puget Sound may have held twenty thousand acres of native Olympia oyster beds. By 2010 the estimate for what survived of the historic core populations was under four percent. The Gold Rush did the first damage and pulp mills finished it.
Shelton, WA
You May Not Carry a Whole Oyster Off the Beach
Every oyster has to be shucked where you picked it and the shells go back at the same tide height. That is not tidiness. Oyster larvae settle on old shell, so taking the shell home removes the surface next year's oysters need to exist at all.
Providence, RI
One Clam, Three Names, and the Small Ones Cost More
Littleneck, cherrystone and chowder clam are one species at three sizes, and the price runs opposite to the size. Rhode Island is where to learn it, because quahogging there is public in a way it is not almost anywhere else.
New England
In Maine, the Town Decides Whether You May Dig
Soft-shell clam licensing in Maine is municipal. A town writes its own ordinance, caps the number of licenses, sets the season and can close its own flats. Call the town office of the flats you intend to dig, because nothing carries over from the next town along.
Charleston, SC
The Season Opens at Noon on a Specific Friday
South Carolina licensed a fishery nobody else did: poles set in shallow water, bait dropped at the base of each, and a cast net thrown over them after dark. Sixty days, its own license, and a five hundred dollar non-resident fee.
Seattle, WA
Every Big Spot Prawn in the Pot Is a Female
Spot shrimp start adult life as males and transition to female, so the largest animals in any population are all females carrying the stock. That is why the season is four days long instead of four months, three hundred feet down, announced days at a time.
Everglades City, FL
You Take the Claw and the Crab Goes Back
Florida stone crab is the one American fishery where you harvest a limb and return the animal alive. It regrows the claw in about a year. Whether that makes it harmless is a more interesting question than the marketing suggests.
Annapolis, MD
The Size Limit Changes in the Middle of the Season
Maryland raises the minimum blue crab size from five inches to five and a quarter in mid-July. Nothing about the crabs changes on that date. What changes is that the year class has had time to grow, and the state raises the bar to let it.
Seattle, WA
The Card in Your Pocket Sets Next Winter’s Season
Puget Sound crabbing runs on a catch record card, and the summer harvest reported on those cards is what the state uses to set the areas and length of the winter season. Returning it is the mechanism, not the paperwork.
Ocean Shores, WA
You Must Keep the First Fifteen Clams You Dig
Not the best fifteen. The first fifteen, whatever comes out of the sand. A dug razor clam usually dies, so the rule converts an invisible mortality into a visible limit, and once you understand it you understand razor clamming.