Random Pages & Comments by Diana from my 11x17 inch Tabloid layout

Photos by: me
 
A couple of dummy pages from my work-in-progress Digest.
This is the back story:

One hot Sunday morning in July of 2000 I received a call from Nena Calvert, asking if I wanted to go out with her husband Doug and their daughter Heather, and son Josh to photograph them pulling  ‘a couple of bags’ of clams. Nena and I had been the founding officers of the local PTO some fifteen years earlier, and I knew that her father, years before my time in town, had pushed for and unsuccessfully tried to establish oyster farming in the area. Since then Nena and Doug had tirelessly worked to establish clam farming in the area, and they had been the first ones to engineer a successful clam hatchery on Florida’s West Coast. Their efforts were instrumental in assuring the community’s survival after the Florida net-ban passed, by making it possible for the out of work commercial fisherman to transition to clam farming.
I grabbed my camera bag and joined them on the town’s outside boat ramp, where they had launched. Their clam lease was south-east of the key, unlike most other leases which were to the north-west of town, towards the mouth of the Suwannee River. Although it had been five years since the net-ban, and the beginning of clam farming in the area, a lot of the clam farmers had not been financially able to transition to boats and equipment specifically designed to make the harvesting of clams less physically demanding and more streamlined.
This meant that each bag, with its clams, mud, and water in it, weighing right around 100 lbs, usually required two people to lift fully out of the water and heave over the gunwale into the boat, and once in the boat be redistributed to assure a balanced load.
When they finished pulling the ‘couple of bags’, which by my estimate were actually twenty bags, weighing around 2000 lbs, Heather pulled up anchor, and Doug backed the boat trailer down the ramp, pulling boat and clams onto the trailer, and up the ramp. I was watching the operation from the side of the ramp and noticed that the fiberglass hull of the boat was doing some serious flexing and groaning under the load of clams. I had only been standing in the water, photographing, while they did the backbreaking work, yet the heat and humidity of the summer morning had gotten to me, and I was tired.  I jumped into the bed of the little pick-up with Heather, and road back to their house. Once there, they still had to off-load the clams and process them, more strenuous work, probably taking the rest of the afternoon, while I headed back to the air-conditioned comfort of our house and a cool shower.

Foul mood this May Day....

Perhaps I am in a particularly foul mood this May Day. As I work my way through photos and text for my Digest I keep encountering memories of friends who struggled mightily, who were intelligent, who provided valuable and necessary work, and who were beaten down by the system for one reason or another. We must dissuade ourselves, our politicians, and our culture of the notion that if one works hard, has a good education and is of great benefit to our society, one will succeed, and be well rewarded, and if one doesn’t succeed it because one is lazy, and not willing to work hard, or get an education.

“All these adventures – and there were many – ended
with the ban on gill nets.
I stood at the fish house as the last basket of
mullet was hauled up and tried, like the men around me, not to cry.”.

Drascombe Dabber

This time of the year we have fantastic sailing weather in this part of Florida. Way back in the mid-‘80’s I did a story about that for SAILING Magazine, featuring my Drascombe Dabber and Cathy, who had volunteered to be part of the story. The Dabber is a fantastic small, open, British sailboat. I imported it while living in Hawaii. We brought it back to the mainland with us, and I towed it across the country and sailed it in New England, North Carolina, and Florida.

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Okay, so far it's taken me three zine dummies to work out all the kinks. That's a bit much. I am paying for not being organized and more methodical going into this project. But it's really fun too!