The Pismo Beach Clam Festival
Coming to a sleepy little California beach town Oct. 19th & 20th.
Clamming in Pismo Beach is so popular that the town makes a party of it. The 78th Annual Pismo Beach Clam Festival is coming up October 19th and 20th.
The Pismo Beach Clam Festival is held each year in October and is one of the top events in Central California. The festival features live music, marching bands, a parade, a carnival and kids’ zone, lots of food trucks, a wine night, a clam chowder cook-off, and of course, plenty of clam digging.
Clamming is still popular, even when it’s not clam festival time. But today, to protect and preserve the clams and to allow clams to grow to full size, commercial clamming has been outlawed, and restrictions have been placed on private clamming.
When early settlers arrived to the Pismo Beach area, they found clams that were much larger and more abundant than those found in other areas. This was in part because there were not many sea lions in the area at the time, or human beings for that matter, other than the native Chumash tribe. So, the clams were not overly harvested and were able to grow to larger than usual size.
But word spread about the large Pismo clams, and they became famous. They were once so abundant that one early settler took his team of horses and his farm equipment onto the beach to harvest the clams. Clamming was also a fun vacation activity—during the pandemic, I moved down to Pismo Beach for two years and lived in a 100-year-old beach bungalow a half block from the beach. 100 years ago, it was a vacation bungalow for visitors who came to enjoy clamming.
Because commercial clamming for the Pismo Clam is now prohibited, local seafood restaurants in this popular beach town often have to import clams from other areas, including the East Coast. The Splash Cafe, for example, famous for its clam chowder in a sourdough bread bowl, and the winner for many years in a row of the Pismo Beach Clam Festival’s clam chowder cook-off, makes about 10,000 gallons of its gourmet clam chowder each and every year. The restaurant is also famous for its steamed clams and its “Bucket O’ Clams.” But, despite the fact that the restaurant is located in one of the seafood capitals of the world, this popular restaurant has to ship its clams in from New York. (New York City?!!!)
If you want to go clamming in Pismo Beach, here are some things to keep in mind. First, anyone who goes clamming is required to have a valid, California salt-water fishing license. Clams must be at least 4-1/2 inches in diameter, otherwise they must be returned to the hole in which they were found. Each clammer may bag a limit of only 10 clams per day. Clamming is restricted to the beach south of the Pismo Beach Pier and is limited to the time period from 30 minutes before sunrise to 30 minutes after sunset.
The best thing to use for clamming is a tool called a “clamming fork,” which is similar to a small rake and often comes with a caliper attached to it, used to measure the diameter of the clams to make sure they are legal. If you do not have a clamming fork, a small, hand-held rake or similar utensil will work just fine. Make sure that, whatever you use, the prongs are about 12 inches long. Bring a bucket along and fill it part way with sea water so that you can keep the claims in the bucket after you harvest them. Once in the bucket of sea water, the clam shells should begin to open, at which point you can try to remove the clams from their shells. Whatever you do, do not try to remove the clams while the shells are closed, as this will cause the clam to clamp closed even more tightly, hence the term to “clam up.”
For more information on the Pismo Beach Clam Festival, visit the Pismo Beach Clam Festival website.