Outdoors: Sailing/Boating

ON NARRAGANSETT BAY -- Early in the morning, the water is a mirror, reflecting the sky. A lone quahogger toils over his rake, silhouetted against the silvery blue surface.

Some quahoggers go out in fleets. Not Mike Giuliano. The most company he has is his two golden Labrador retrievers, Niki and Zoe.

In his other job, as a tugboat captain, Giuliano spends seven days at a stretch trapped on a boat with five other men. During his off weeks, home in Rhode Island, he wants to be by himself.

On the mornings he's home, in Riverside, he rises early and kisses his wife, Annie, goodbye. He drives to Lavin's Marina, on Bullock Cove in Barrington, and heads out into the Bay in the Roxie, a 23-foot clam boat he bought in 1979.

His quarry: Mercenaria mercenaria. This hardshell clam is found from Canada to Florida, but it's Rhode Island's official state shellfish, and the Ocean State produces roughly 4 million pounds of quahogs each year, a quarter of the national quahog harvest.

Giuliano, 52, spent more than a decade digging quahogs full time. In the industry's good old days, full time was a relative term. "In the '70s, it was good money," Giuliano says. "You were working three and four hours a day. We would be waterskiing by 12 o'clock in the afternoon."

In recent years, Giuliano has seen the number of shellfishermen drop. (The state Department of Environmental Management estimates there are 350 full-time shellfishermen working the state's waters today.) Giuliano estimates he's one of half a dozen people actively fishing out of Bullock Cove today. "Ten years ago, it was three or four times that many."

He blames the decline on falling prices, due to the easy availability of shellfish from other states and other countries, but also on the specifics of the job -- hard physical labor, with no health insurance or paid vacation.

Giuliano got his captain's license in the 1980s, thinking he'd get out of raking quahogs. Twenty years later, he's still on the Bay in his trusty boat.

GIULIANO DOESN'T COME from a fishing family. His father, the son of Italian immigrants, was a machinist and toolmaker who worked for Electric Boat. Giuliano did, however, grow up in Barrington, a block from the water.

He started quahogging with a friend during college. Now that it's not his main livelihood, it's what he does to unwind.

Working for Buchanan Marine, an aggregate-stone company based in New Haven, Conn., Giuliano oversees a tugboat that pushes and pulls barges full of stone from quarries in New York and Connecticut to buyers, typically in New York City.

It's a job of long hours and high pressure, says Giuliano, who rarely sleeps more than four or five hours at a time while on the tugboat. "We're five or six feet off of million-dollar yachts."

He bought his clam boat, the Roxie, in 1979 after seeing a for-sale sign in a clam shop. The previous owner was a quahogger who moved to the Caribbean to open a charter-boat business.

The boat was actually nameless until last year, when the Giulianos' golden Lab of the same name died. Roxie's patterned nylon collar adorns the steering wheel.

Over the years, Giuliano has rebuilt or replaced just about every part of the boat, front to back, inside and out. He has put in two new floors. He has replaced the stringers, the wooden reinforcements underneath the floor. He has replaced the boat's trim and rub rails, a process that involved bending wood by steaming it. (It also involved wood exploding in his father's shop.)

"It's a very, very solid boat," Giuliano says. "You couldn't buy a boat like this today. They just don't make them."

ON A HAZY late-July morning in the middle of a heat wave, the only place to be is on the water.

The Roxie motors out past the red and green buoys that mark the main channel heading into the Port of Providence. The boat's hull bounces off the waves. The metal poles of his quahog rake rattle.

Passing Crescent Park in East Providence, Giuliano points out where the Shore Dinner Hall used to be. That was where he worked during high school, cooking up family dinners of clam cakes and chowder.

In a calm spot sheltered from the wind by Prudence Island, with a view of the Newport bridge, Giuliano prepares to drop anchor. He positions his boat just so, lining up a rock in the water with a boulder onshore behind it, and a water tower in Portsmouth with a point of land that juts out in front of it.

Most fishermen use a Global Positioning System to find shellfish beds they've fished before. "I just have never bothered," Giuliano says. "I just kind of do it the old-fashioned way."

Giuliano is the kind of guy who doesn't even own a cell phone. He goes a week without talking to his wife. If they chatted while he was gone, he says, "when I came home, we wouldn't have half the things to talk about."

Giuliano changes his shoes, trading brown leather loafers for black sneakers speckled with white paint. He slips off his wedding band and stores it on a bolt underneath the boat's steering wheel. On a day this hot his shirt comes off too, revealing freckled shoulders already baked a pinkish brown.

His rake is a hefty metal contraption, a rounded, rusty steel cage at the end of an aluminum pole called a stale. The T-shaped wooden handle bar is worn from the friction of Giuliano's hands. Similar ridges are worn in the boat's oak trim, at the spots where Giuliano drags the rake back and forth to rinse seaweed from the shellfish he's caught.

He drags the rake back and forth for 10 minutes, gathering quahogs. He can't see them, but he knows they're there.

Sure enough, when he pulls up the rake, it's full of rocks, broken bottles, and quahogs -- more than three dozen.

After dumping the quahogs out, Giuliano picks up the rake and begins the process again, settling into a rhythm that's almost hypnotic: Cast down, turn over, and stab, stab, stab, stab. Pull up, drag to rinse, dump, throw out the rocks. Pull up the anchor line to return the boat to its starting position.

It's hard work but Giuliano isn't tempted to use a lobster-pot hauler, a modern invention that pulls the rake up automatically with a flip of a switch. If he had one, he says, "I'd have a beer belly."

When Giuliano has enough quahogs to fill three 50-pound bags, he heads for the "buy boat" -- the Gypsy II, anchored off neighboring Patience Island.

There, shellfishermen dump their catches into a machine that sorts by size. The quahogs trickle down a series of rolling metal tubes and plink into bags labeled "Mar Sea Food Inc.," destined to become clam cakes, stuffies and other culinary delights.

Giuliano keeps a few for himself and Annie. Once a week when he's home, they'll make clams casino or linguine with clam sauce. (Annie works as a medical secretary, but she loves boats, too. "I think that's why she married me," Giuliano says.)

When asked how many quahogs he catches in a day, Giuliano clams up. (Pun intended.) He says he's honoring the unspoken agreement among fishermen not to divulge how much the profession pays. He will say that he gets 16 cents per quahog, down from 20 cents four years ago.

Before heading back to the marina, Giuliano ends a day of honest work with a Budweiser from a cooler kept onboard. He allows himself that on the Roxie. On the tugboat, alcohol is forbidden. "For seven days, I don't even think about a beer," he says.

egudrais@projo.com / (401) 277-7045

Boat specs

Make: Cape Codder (Marion, Mass.)

Length: 23 feet

Width: 6 feet

Motor: 4-stroke 140-horsepower Suzuki

Hull: Fiberglass

Draws: 2 1/2 feet

Top speed: 40 mph (36 knots)

Purchased: 1979

Made: 1977

Cost: $4,500 (plus $10,000 three years ago for the new motor)