Gathering dinner at Hood Canal
Along Washington’s Hood Canal, you have to work for your dinner, but “therein lies the fun,” said Bonnie Tsui in The New York Times. The “glitteringly beautiful” 60-mile fjord, about an hour and a half outside Seattle, forms one of the western branches of the Puget Sound. Here the “icy runoff” from the “snow-clad” Olympic Mountains flows into the “brackish waters” of the canal, and its shores are “bristling with oysters, clams, mussels, and crabs.” Every summer, locals throw crab pots off the dock to haul in red rock or Dungeness crabs, and go shrimping for the “sweet and sizable” local variety. Visitors can join in: Hood Canal is the “kind of old-fashioned place where shellfish permits can be easily procured at a gas station or general store,” so have a go at picking and shucking. First try your hand at digging up clams along the “muddy and shell-strewn” shore and then taste “the luxuriantly round, salty flavor of the sea.”
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