Clamming has been good in Wiscasset this year, very good.

A few years ago, one or one and a half bushels would have been a digger’s likely take from a tide, Wiscasset Shellfish Committee member Dick Forrest said.

In 2014, a few bushels; this year, it’s running as high as four, Forrest said.

That’s called fantasy digging, a term Wiscasset diggers typically cannot use to describe the local supply, he said. But according to Forrest, who’s served on the town committee for two decades, the fantasy could become a memory.

The work that led to the fruitful flats needs to continue, and the town needs to be better able to thwart increasingly clever poachers, Forrest said. He made his comments Oct. 28 to an engaged audience of about 20 inside Wiscasset Public Library.

Joining him, lifelong worm digger David Cronk spoke about that line of work, including some of the conditions diggers work under; the two men touched on factors that can cut a flat’s clam and worm numbers. And each got listeners laughing over stories of times that took surprising turns on the water or on the flats.

Their joint talk was part of a speaker series the group Friends of the Library was running through Nov. 4.

Placing tons of crushed clam shells on six Wiscasset flats in recent years has probably greatly helped raise the clam counts, according to Forrest. The shells, from a Damariscotta dealer who first removes the clams’ meat, contain acid-fighting calcium; acid has gotten into the mud via rain and hurt clams’ growth, Forrest said.

The crushed shells are dumped by boat at high tide. Other conservation efforts include planting seed clams and using a machine to help clams grow.

Forrest voiced concern about a recent change in town rules, lowering the conservation time that diggers have to put in. Diggers requested the cut when the clams started doing better, he said. But less work could mean losing those gains in the population, he said.

“If they’re not putting in the shells, it’s going to diminish. So the three and four-bushel digging that they’re seeing this year, they’re not going to see next year, unless they put the shells in because that’s effective.”

Enforcement will also be key, he said. The town’s part-time shellfish warden Jon Hentz does a great job, but has other towns to watch; and poachers are now taking new tacts such as traveling by canoe instead of a motor vehicle, and having a lookout who can tip them off by cell phone when the warden has arrived, Forrest said.

The committee is still considering asking for a drone in the next budget to help with patrols, he said. 

Green crabs have hit Maine’s worm counts up and down the coast, Cronk said. He also cited an impact from boats taking mud up while dragging for mussels. About 25 years ago, he, his brother and another digger went Down East to Frenchman Bay. Each dug over 5,000 worms. “Now that’s a lot of worms ... Just to count them out, it takes you almost an hour and half, two hours...I went to that same flat last year. I got 1,000 worms.”

In lighter moments during the evening talk, Forrest recalled heading from Westport Landing toward Maine Yankee with another man, on a boat loaded with netting, chain, toggles and cement blocks. The plan was to try out a University of Maine at Machias professor’s conservation idea. The end of the boat Forrest was on tipped; the two men swam to shore; then the other man took out a comb. Forrest said the man told him, “’Oh, you’ve got to look your best all the time.’”

Walking a road, they met a driver who offered them a ride. “He never asked why we were soaking wet, and we never told him,” Forrest said to the continued laughter of attendees.

He added that he asked the man who’d joined him on the failed boat trip, “’What are you going to tell your wife?’ He says, ‘As little as possible.’”

Some audience members expressed surprise to hear that, even in sub-zero temperatures, Cronk preferred not to use gloves when digging for worms. If there’s a wind, he will wear them, he said.

Cronk no longer digs in the winter. When he went out once last March, the wind was howling. “It was brutal. And I said, ‘I’m never going to do this again in my life,’” he recalled about the harsh conditions.

Cronk also recalled a blood worm biting him between the fingers when he was about 11, digging off Westport Island with Norman Sherman and his father Ken Sherman. The bite from the four-toothed worm hurt so much, he has never forgotten it, he said.

Sand worms have two teeth and are not as vicious as blood worms, Cronk said in an interview after the talk.

 Wiscasset’s clam diggers can’t make a living off the work alone; they have other jobs, Forrest said. 

“A lot of worm diggers, that’s all they do,” Cronk said. “Are they filthy rich? No. But they have earned every cent that they make. They’re hard-working,” he said.