Editors note: This article has been corrected to state the legal daily limits for clams that incorrectly included the larger geoduck and horse clams which have a separate daily limit. We regret the error.
Record numbers of shellfish harvesters flooded Penrose Point State Park in 2025. This winter, fisheries managers are going back to the drawing board to ensure that the park’s oyster and clam populations remain viable. The harvest opening also placed great strain on park staff and infrastructure and raised concerns about the cumulative impact on the beach.
“You come out here on a Monday after a hard harvest period, and it looks like a mine field,” said Washington State Parks Ranger Farley Martelle. “There are huge holes that never get filled in. It’s affecting the whole ecosystem here.”
Jeff Barney, who coordinates a county-led program to outplant Pacific oysters, said, “At the end of this season, the place was wiped clean.”
The spike in shellfish harvest pressure was dramatic. The opening last year was a two-month window in March and April, with impacts concentrated on eight weekends. The park’s two parking lots overflowed, and cars lined the entrance road as far as its intersection with Delano Road. Martelle said it was not just one or two people per car, but whole families, and they came from as far away as Bellevue and Vancouver, Washington.
Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife regulates the harvest and uses beach-side samplers and overflights to estimate harvest pressure on each beach, according to Chris Eardley, WDFW shellfish policy coordinator. The data suggest that Penrose saw large increases over 2024, with up to 88,000 oysters harvested in 2025, and up to 23,000 pounds of clams. If these unofficial numbers at the high ends of the estimated ranges are accurate, more clams were harvested at Penrose in 2025 than at any other beach in the state, including those open for year-round harvest.
Why Penrose? Martelle and Eardley both said they thought that social media is a primary driver. Martelle patrols five other local state parks, and none of them had anywhere near as many harvesters as Penrose.
“I ask folks, hey, how’d you hear about us?” he said. “They say, oh, there’s a couple of Facebook groups, they said to come down here.”
In 2025, WDFW made emergency closures at two beaches on Hood Canal — Shine Tidelands and the Wolfe Property — after social media posts where clammers showed off their buckets and how they maxed out in minutes, triggered hordes of harvesters and dangerous conditions on Highway 104.
“It would be great if folks kept this a secret,” Martelle said. He noted the contrast to fishing and mushroom foraging communities, in which productive spots are kept as closely guarded secrets. “For whatever reason, the shellfishing community is not like that.”
“I’ve talked to folks who tell me, I’ve been harvesting shellfish down here for 20 years, I grew up on the KP, and I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
WDFW seeds Manila clams each year at Penrose. Historically, it seeded oysters as well, but oyster populations have been given a significant boost by the program Barney coordinates. It began with the fly fishing community around 2018, when Coastal Conservation Association Washington funded two years of oyster seeding, motivated by success on the East Coast using oysters to improve water quality and create fish habitat. Cutthroat trout, in particular, are drawn to Puget Sound oyster reefs.
Since 2020, the program has been a part of the Pierce County budget at just shy of $10,000 per year. WDFW plants oysters at Penrose Point and Kopachuk State Parks, though in 2025 it concentrated all of its effort at Penrose because of the park’s increasing popularity. About 300 bags of oysters per year are trucked in during autumn, strapped to pallets in the intertidal to harden over winter, then scattered.
Beach closures due to COVID and park septic repairs gave the oysters a chance to establish a strong population. Since harvest resumed, word has spread, and the pressure has been exponential.
“This is something we have created,” Barney said. “The justification that has lasted so long with the county is that filter feeders are good for water quality and good for habitat and substrate, and we’re providing an opportunity for people to come gather a food source.”
“It benefits across the board,” he said. “How many people have I met out there who say, I’ve been coming here for 30 years with my family. My grandparents brought me here.”
At Penrose, oysters and clams are seeded in the small bay between the two points, directly offshore from the main day-use area. The Mayo Cove side of the park, adjacent to Lakebay Marina, is closed to all harvest by the Department of Health. There are shellfish on the far side of the point, according to Martelle, but few harvesters are interested in making a mile-long walk with their gear.
Barney said he feels the shellfish beds at Penrose could take two or three times the oysters they are currently planting, but that overharvest concerns him. “I don’t want to make a poor investment on that location, if it just gets trampled.”
The legal per-person limit is 40 clams or 10 pounds, whichever comes first. That includes Manilas, varnish clams, butter clams, and cockles. There are size limits to protect young clams. The oyster limit is 18 oysters per person, and they must be shucked where they are harvested.
Martelle has been on the frontline of enforcement. “Maybe one in 20 or 30 people have a violation,” he said. “Maybe half of those have a violation so egregious they’re going home with some paperwork. Most folks are following the rules.”
The most common violations, he said, are people going over the legal limit or ignoring harvest rules by not filling in their holes or shucking their oysters in place. The shucking rule is intended to ensure the continuation of the oyster beds, as young oysters cannot settle and grow on sand or mud and need a base layer of old shells to thrive. Many harvestable oysters have young oysters fused to their shells. Martelle said he commonly sees people haul their oysters to the picnic tables, shuck them there, and dump the shells at the top of the beach, where any young oysters attached to the shucked shells are likely to die of exposure. Others barbecue the oysters.
State Parks and WDFW enforcement rangers use education rather than citation if the infraction is not too egregious, as when a family has put their whole harvest in a single bucket rather than separating it by person. Signs and rules pamphlets have been published in several languages.
Still, with only a handful of rangers covering numerous beaches and also responsible for other, possibly more emergent, situations, this year’s high harvest pressure stretched the rangers to the limit. Several suggested that volunteer beach stewards might be a strategic addition to the management effort.
“I can only do so much as one guy with a thousand people out here,” Martelle said. “You try to contact as many people as possible. You feel like a chicken with your head cut off.”
Penrose has 125 parking spots and two restroom buildings. It was unprepared for the crowds. State Parks staff closed the park gate when the lots reached capacity, only allowing one car in for each car out, but most of the harvesters elected to park outside the gate and walk in. A septic pump burned out during the harvest.
A similar scene played out on the Purdy Spit, where geoducks are also harvested.
Dr. Michael Behrens, a professor at Pacific Lutheran University who studies shellfish and beach ecology on the Key Peninsula, said that he sees the county’s effort to plant oysters as akin to stocking lakes with trout and bass.
“I support the program, but I’m also well aware that we’re outplanting a nonnative species; we should never lose sight of that,” he said. “But it’s an important put-and-take fishery. It’s a potential education opportunity around the importanceof filter feeders.”
He believes economics plays a role in the uptick in harvest pressure. “We’re talking about a cheap protein. The cheapest seafood you can get.”
“I’m actually sort of a fan of trying to concentrate the impact. In Penrose, they’re restricted to one area.”
Rare native Olympia oysters are present at both Penrose and Purdy, at slightly deeper tidal levels, and often settle on Pacific oyster shells. They grow more slowly and are much smaller, seldom reaching the lower size limit for oyster harvest. If any Oly happens to have settled on a Pacific oyster, Behrens said, that is then harvested and improperly shucked, the Oly will die.
Geoducks are not seeded for recreational harvest, and while it takes a Pacific oyster a few years to get to legal size, a harvestable geoduck is a much older animal. A native species, geoducks are commercially raised around South Puget Sound. According to Behrens, there are many unknowns about the natural replenishment of geoduck beds and the positive or negative impact of nearby commercial operations on wild populations.
While this winter’s 300-plus bags of oysters harden in the Penrose intertidal, fisheries managers are in discussion about shellfish harvest in 2026. WDFW can adjust seasons beach-by-beach to be shorter or longer or fall during different times of the year. They work with state park staff and use models of different harvest pressure scenarios.
Martelle said that in addition to the infrastructure concerns, State Parks, as a conservation organization, is looking at the harvest situation’s general impact on the beach environment.
“Due to the intensity of harvest here,” Eardley said, “we do expect changes to the Penrose season for 2026, but we are too early in the season-setting process to say with 100% certainty what they will be. Closing to give the beach a chance to recover is a tool we use regularly for beaches in need, and is a possibility for Penrose in 2026.”
For more information or to review and comment on proposed rule changes, go to https://wdfw.wa.gov/newsroom/news-release.
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