BRUNSWICK

For the first time in years, local teens are spending their summer ankle-deep in the mud off Thomas Point Beach digging clams.

Thanks to diligent detective work by the local shellfish community, which rooted out failing septic systems and other causes of degraded water, nearly all of Brunswick’s clam flats are open this year, prompting the town’s Marine Resources Committee to increase by 14 the number of shellfish licenses.

Four of those licenses were awarded to Brunswick High School students, who are raking in “pretty good” money by working their own hours and answering to no one but themselves.

On a recent Wednesday morning, Matt St. Pierre and Josh Thibeault crouched low and dug their rakes in the ankle-deep mud about 100 yards off Thomas Point Beach.

St. Pierre, 16, pulled back more than a dozen clams before standing to wipe his forehead with a muddy forearm.

“I wouldn’t do anything else,” he said of this year’s summer job. “There’s no boss. And I love being outside.”

Thibeault, 16, dug clams as a child with his grandfather on these same Brunswick flats.

Last summer he worked doing landscaping on Bailey Island, but this year is making more money digging clams.

“There’s no boss, and the pay’s pretty good,” he said, especially considering he works fewer hours and “you dig whenever you want.”

‘Wide open’ flats

In 2005, heavy rains and other factors caused Brunswick to reduce the number of harvesting licenses after runoff from farms, malfunctioning septic systems, pet waste and other sources led to poorer water quality in various areas, according to Brunswick Marine Resources Officer Dan Devereaux.

But efforts in recent years by municipal staff, volunteers, clammers and coastal resi- dents to clean up — and maintain — the water have paid off both for harvesters and the sustainability of the clamming resource.

In September 2011, the Maine Department of Marine Resources reopened flats in Woodward Cove after a four-year closure. A rigorous sanitation survey by the town identified failing septic systems and, after they were replaced, the water tested cleaner.

Over the past three years, in fact, approximately 200 acres of flats in Brunswick have reopened.

“We got Maquoit Bay back, Woodward Cove — the ‘Bull Pen’ — and Coombs Island and Harpswell Cove,” Devereaux said. “Those are wide open.”

As clam flats open and close, communities are charged with determining how that affects the number of licenses they award.

Brunswick’s committee weighed the need to increase jobs against the need to allow current license-holders more flats to harvest, according to Devereaux.

By awarding 14 new licenses — to a total of 75 — Brunswick opted for what he called the “middle ground.”

“In my opinion, with the economy the way it is, we need to maximize our resource and create as many jobs as possible without putting too much strain on the resource,” Devereaux said.

The decision to add student licenses was based in part on an effort to keep the clamming industry alive even as the clammers themselves age.

Maine and Massachusetts alone allow municipalities to manage their own shellfish flats, Devereaux said, where some states — like Washington — award contracts to companies, who hire the diggers. That’s a situation Devereaux would like to avoid.

“I told them, ‘If you look around at the fleet (of harvesters), you’re getting old,’” Devereaux said. “What do you do 20 years from now when all the clammers are 65. A corporation is going to come in and say the state is not managing its resource.”

But the money — Devereaux said one student earned “upward of $2,600” in just the first month this summer — may not be enough to entice this year’s crop of student clammers.

“I don’t know if I want to do this for the rest of my life,” St. Pierre said Wednesday.

Other plans

Thibeault said that while he hopes to dig clams with a recreational license after he graduates — he hopes to “do something in the medical field” after high school — he’s pretty sure he doesn’t want to become a full-time harvester.

“I respect the guys that do it because it’s so hard, but I would never want to do it,” he said.

Scottie Hawkes, 54, has dug for nearly 40 years — so long that “all my disks are gone,” he said recently, loading bags of clams into the back of his car as the tide rolled in at Thomas Point Beach. “My doc told me not to do it (any longer), but what am I going to do? But I can’t dig like I used to.”

Hawkes’ said he approved of adding licenses this year, especially since his 24-year-old son, Brian Hawkes, received one of them.

Brian works as a sternman on a lobster boat, and now supplements his pay by clamming, his dad said.

“I told him not to give his job up, because you never know about clamming — you could get a closure.”

Still, Devereaux hopes that offering student licenses will keep the industry viable.

“Once they find out what they can make in the summer time, with a little hard work, I think that will attract people to do it full-time,” he said.