Planting to Harvest

This is our beach on Carr Inlet on Puget Sound in Washington State. A neighbor had leased these beautiful tidelands out to a geoduck company. The pictures below are what was planned for the beach.

Generally they plant PVC tubes one foot on center with 4 geoducks each. For a 5 acre site, this would be a quarter of a million tubes.

Before planting the beach, they literally clear the beach of any obstructions to the tubes. This would include rocks, or these sand dollars (first picture) that can cover large portions of Puget Sound tidelands. This could also mean what they consider predators, crabs, sunstars or starfish. When speaking to the Department of Natural Resources, they confirmed they would probably have to be removed to plant. Removed to where?

After driving all the tubes into the beach, one method to control predators is to cover each tube with a net and a rubber band. Notice the loose netcap between the tubes. (These are often the first of the debris to end up littering the beach and waters.) After a year or so, all but 20% of tubes are removed and remain as spacers for a large net expanding the beach.

Another method used as an alternative to using the net caps is to plant the pvc pipes then cover the whole area with this small mesh net. This eliminates the net cap debris, but leaves the entire beach covered for the two years.

The tubes are left for one to two years. Quite often they get loose and litter the beach or get lost on the bottom of Puget Sound. Geoduck companies say they maintain their tubes, but these are from two different companies, in two different regions of Puget Sound.

After 3 years nets and tubes are removed. Notice the geoduck siphons.

Every 4-7 years geoducks are harvested using a water jet that liquifies the beach 3 feet down. These jets can pump up to 50 gallons a minute churning up stratified sand and soils of mud, rock, silt and anything else living there.

Geoducks are then shipped off live, often to Asian countries where they fetch high prices. This is a fairly recent market, which has spawned an increse of geoduck farms. Pictures above are from the wild harvest, where they use dive boats with water jets to liquify the deep water bottom.