Serving food at this weekend’s Yarmouth Clam Festival is a numbers game.

The first number to keep in mind is the more than 100,000 people expected to attend the 46th annual festival, which features a carnival, a parade, a craft show, an art show, a series of competitions and a big line-up of live music.

Here are some other numbers to chew on: more than 6,000 pounds of clams, 6,000 lobster rolls, 6,000 strawberry shortcakes, 1,500 shore dinners, 400 homemade pies and 13,500 lime rickeys expected to be served during this year’s three-day festival.

Accounting for a decent chunk of those clams is the Yarmouth Ski Club booth, which will offer breaded fried whole clams and clam strips (the ones without the bellies) along with onion rings, fried calamari, jumbo breaded fried shrimp and fried mozzarella sticks.

“We bread and fry the whole-belly clams ourselves,” said Sam Eddy, a Yarmouth parent who coordinates the ski club’s booth. “The clams are harvested in Maine waters and processed by Dennison’s Seafood in Freeport. We’ve experimented with a pre-breaded and frozen product, but it’s just not as good.”

Eddy expects the booth to sell more than 3,000 servings of clams, which requires 200 to 250 gallons of raw clams.

Making this happen is a team of more than 200 volunteers who put in four-hour shifts at the ski club booth. All the food booths rely on volunteers, but the ski club requires more than most to handle the assembly-line clam breading operation that goes on throughout the festival.

“We put out a pretty good product,” Eddy said. “I hold our clams up against any of the clams from the clam shacks around the state.”

Like all the food booths at the festival, the ski club’s is a major fundraiser for the group.

Other places serving clams include the Yarmouth Colts Soccer booth (clam chowder), the Royal River Chorus booth (batter fried clams), the Yarmouth Little League booth (steamed clams) and the Yarmouth Football Club and First Universalist Church booths (clam cakes).

While each year the festival organizers get numerous calls from professional food vendors, Clam Festival director Mark Primeau said, “We’re pretty adamant about not opening it to outside (food) vendors. It’s such an amazing event to bring the community together.”

Those who want to show off their clam extricating skills can enter the annual shucking contest, which takes place at 11 a.m. Saturday, with both professional and amateur heats. This is followed by the Celebrity Clam Shucking Contest, featuring returning champions Shannon Moss and Norm Karkos of WMTW-8, who will compete against Kathleen Shannon and Brian Yocono of WCSH-6, Doug Rafferty and Diana Ichton of WGME-13, Mike Violette and Ken Altshuler of WGAN, Jeff Parsons and Teddy McKay of WJBQ, and Heidi Knight and Stan Manning of WFNK.

The traditional way to start Saturday and Sunday at the festival is with a hearty pancake breakfast. The First Parish Church’s Flapjack Breakfast is served from 7 to 10 a.m. for $7 at the church. Yarmouth High School juniors offer the Blueberry Pancake Breakfast for $8 and a sausage, egg and cheese sandwich for $3 from 7 to 10:30 a.m. on the Memorial Green.

How many pancake breakfasts do the two organizations plan to serve? A mere 2,200.

Staff Writer Avery Yale Kamila can be contacted at 791-6297 or at:

akamila@pressherald.com

Follow me on Twitter at:

Twitter.com/AveryYaleKamila