Anyone who has known me for any length of time knows how I love to read anything nautical; this book was no exception. Commercial fishing is twenty-eight times as dangerous as the average for all other industries. The opportunities for death are legion: being washed overboard, frozen to death, or "assaulted by their machinery." Pressure on the captains to take their boats out in nasty weather contributes to the hazards, but the clamming industry until 1999 had had six years without a fatality, in part due to changes in the regulatory environment that limited the total amount a boat could dredge in a year and did not suggest when the clams had to be collected.

Still, companies who owned the tags that limited production always wanted to make sure they met their quotas — not to mention the public, whose bizarre taste for clams unfathomably knew no limits. The more clams that could be brought back in a load meant more profits all around, since each crewman was paid a share. A captain could earn as much as a high school superintendent, and an otherwise uneducated crewman as much as a teacher with a master’s degree. Overloading was common. " 'Someone asks you to carry a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound man across the parking lot on your back, you can do that. That's a clam boat with a full load of clams. If they ask you to carry a second two-hundred-and-fifty-pound man on top of the first, you can't do it. That's a clam boat with a full load, taking on water,' " recorded one captain.
During a thirteen-day period in January 1999, four clam boats sank. Ten fishermen drowned, and Campbell's book is an expansion of a series of articles that was published in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The intrigue of books like this is not just the recurring "man against the sea" theme. I love the detail of how things work, how the jobs are accomplished. Two different types of clams are dredged off the Atlantic Coast: quahogs and surf clams. Neither is typically served in restaurants. They are used for chowders, clam strips and other inedible clam dishes (or is that redundant.) The boats, usually less than 200 feet long to avoid the requirement for a licensed master at the helm, carry enormous dredges that scrape along the bottom. Every 25-30 minutes they are brought up, and clams and detritus are dumped on a conveyor belt where the clams are sorted and dumped into large cages for transport back to canning plants in Virginia, New Jersey and Maryland. The cages weigh about 500 pounds empty. When full, they are very heavy and how they are loaded becomes critical important to the stability of the boat. The boats also have several fuel and hydraulic oil tanks that must be watched carefully so the boats, which usually have a very low freeboard, don't develop a list that would cause them to capsize. This is especially likely because, the captains’ tendency to overload their boats with cages raising the center of gravity and reducing stability. In addition, numerous valves that pump out bilges and holds must be well maintained and operated properly, or instead of pumping water out, they will let water in, again reducing a boat's stability and increasing the likelihood of capsizing. So there are lots of things to watch out for and to monitor.

Drug use among fishermen is a huge problem, and fishermen accounted for 30-40 percent of the arrests for heroin usage in the nineties. Since clamming could be very profitable when things were going well -- a hand could easily earn up to $60,000 a year, much more money than could be earned at most other jobs requiring no education -- they often had money to burn. Campbell became close to several of the bereaved families. This and his research into the clamming industry provide a moving and balanced picture. He discusses safety standards, describing negligence both by the companies and the fishermen themselves. Other related books that I have previously reviewed are: [b:The Perfect Storm|108229|The Perfect Storm A True Story of Men Against the Sea|Sebastian Junger|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171580454s/108229.jpg|1887699] and; [b:The Hungry Ocean|173165|The Hungry Ocean A Swordboat Captain's Journey|Linda Greenlaw|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172413473s/173165.jpg|1842743] a book on King crab in Alaska. One can never have too many good nautical books. ( )

In the book "The Sea's Bitter Harvest," , author Douglas A. Campbell expands upon his Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper series, chronicling a deadly thirteen-day period in commercial clam fishing operations off the North Atlantic coast of the U.S..

This is a carefully-crafted book which does more than chronicle the sinking of four boats and the resulting loss of life. Campbell introduces us, not only to the ill-fated fishing boats and their crews, but also to an industry subject to complex forces poorly understood by most outsiders. He examines the various factors (economic, regulatory, techinical, and environmental) which drive commercial fishing practices and in some cases contribute to commercial fishing's status as the deadliest occupation in America.

Campbell's descriptions of technical matters are thorough, but not overwhelming; His portraits of the boats and their crew members are strking and engaging. We get to know and care about the people involved in this string of tragedies.

Campbell draws connections with sea tragedies of the past and how they relate to the losses of January, 1999; we also see how many "near misses" some of the fishermen on these very boats have had in the past.

All in all, I found it a fascinating and compelling book that was hard to put down until the very end -- and a book which left me with much to ponder after I was done reading.. ( )