Like many Pacific Northwesterners, I'd long been amused and amazed by the geoduck's rise from obscurity to delicacy. The lowly bivalve, it seems, has come out of its shell.

A single geoduck can fetch $60 in a Hong Kong fish market. Most of the harvest goes to China, where cooks in Shanghai and Beijing simmer the clams in hot pots. Japanese chefs slice it for sushi and sashimi. Swanky New York bistros serve geoduck with rice wine vinegar. Today Puget Sound fishermen sell four million pounds of it each year, or about two million clams' worth. The neck resembles an aardvark's snout, an elephant's trunk or a monstrous prehistoric earthworm emerging from a fist-size shell, among other things.įorty years ago this mollusk was virtually unknown outside the Northwest. Its long, leathery neck can stretch to the length of a baseball bat or recoil to a wrinkled nub.

Wearing a neoprene dry suit, he stood in the boat surrounded by the morning's haul: a glistening payload of an absurdly proportioned shellfish defined by a mass of pudgy, lolling flesh.īuried in the muck beneath Puget Sound lives the Pacific Northwest's most profitable marine creature, a mollusk so valuable that gangsters have traded it for narcotics: the geoduck (pronounced 'gooey duck'), the world's largest burrowing clam.

Parker's eyes, though, were well trained. Sixty feet below, where Parker had spent his morning, the seafloor was flat and sandy-barren, to unschooled eyes, except for the odd flounder or orange sea pen. We were anchored 50 yards offshore from a fir-lined peninsula that juts into Puget Sound. Craig Parker popped his head above the surf, peeled off his dive mask and clambered aboard the Ichiban.

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