clammers

I love this 1961 photograph by A. Aubrey Bodine, which I found on the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum's Facebook page, both as a very nice black and white image and also as a little piece of history.  The photograph was taken in the shallows off the beach at Matapeake (marked with the arrow below) on Kent Island.  I wish I understood more about the rigs on the boats - booms hanging off the sides and also the wider boards (for culling??) towards the sterns.   Here is a comment from on the Facebook page about the clamming from S Michael Mielke....

The workboats here are small by today's standards. Most of these are 30 to 35 ft long and quite narrow. A couple of tucksterns. These short rigs worked shallow waters where there were plenty of manoes (White clams) in these early days of clamming.

I've sailed past the beach on the bay side, and also behind Kent Island through the Narrows.  The X marks Warehouse Creek, a beautiful anchorage visited a few years ago.  Need to get back there soon.