WARRENTON – They’re down there all right.

People all around me are sucking them from the sand with clam guns and kneeling to grab them bare-handed from watery holes.

Come out, come out, wherever you are.

But the 3- to 6-inch razor clams mocked me Saturday morning at low tide at Fort Stevens State Park, as I stomped the beach in circles like a child with a tantrum.

I stared at the ground and squinted, focusing and refocusing my eyes and scanning the sand for a telltale sign of a clam underfoot: A dime-sized dimple or hole created when the buried clam retracts its neck in fear.

The stomping is supposed to trigger that retraction and tell me where to aim my “gun” – a three-foot length of PVC pipe with a cap and a handle on one end. The cap has a hole that I cover with my thumb once the gun is submerged to suck up a tube of wet sand and, if I’m doing it right, a palm-sized clam.

Unfortunately, the dimples I’m seeking look an awful lot like the marks made by other diggers thumping the butts of their shovels on the beach (another clam-hunting strategy) or water dripping from clam guns slung over people’s shoulders.

I suffered countless fake-outs my first time digging razors last year. I can now admit that someone else actually spotted the measly four clams I managed to dig out on my first clamming trip to Fort Stevens. But in subsequent trips I’d had a blast digging my limit of 15 clams all on my own. What a thrill it is to plunge your arm into a freshly dug pool and grasp the clam’s neck as it tries to squirm away.

First time digger Max Kunetz of Vancouver, Wash., summed up his razor clamming experience nicely Saturday morning while digging with his mom:

“It’s pretty wet and sandy,” he said. “It’s kinda fun ‘cuz you see little holes and you try to grab them and then they escape too quickly. It’s really hard. My dad already missed two.”

Kunetz and his dad had gotten one clam apiece so far. More than I had.

“You have to stomp really hard with your heels and most of the time you don’t even see anything,” said Kunetz. “We’ve stomped like 200 stomps so far.”

My feet felt like they’d stomped even more than that without a single show. Good thing I wasn’t counting.

I’d I thought I knew how to do this. Where were the little buggers?

A fellow digger, Howard Lauridsen, of Clatskanie, explained:

“It’s different all the time,” he said. “Sometimes they show a little ‘V’ pointing inland. Sometimes they show a little neck sticking out … it varies based on conditions.”

Twenty years ago, when he first started digging, he was in my boots.

“I wasn’t very good at spotting them,” he said, “and I got really frustrated and quit.”

But he started up again seven years ago, and now he finds clam-digging to be a relaxing social experience.

“Some people get real hyped up and get real panicky about getting their clams,” he said. “Just find somebody you know out there to take you out and help you get started.”

Astoria resident Ron Norris backed Lauridsen up.

“Some days you gotta stomp ’em out, and some days you can’t dig ’em fast enough – you see ’em and there’s just holes there,” he said. “Today is one of the days you gotta stomp them.”

Norris prefers to use a shovel to avoid breaking the clams. With a shovel, diggers start their hole about six inches closer to the ocean than where the clam appears to be.

“Then you get in there with your hand and you feel ’em,” he said.

Dane Osis, a Fort Stevens park ranger who has guided groups of new diggers for the past six years, said he prefers to dig in the surf when he’s not working.

“It’s a little more challenging,” he said. “It takes a trained eye to know what you’re looking at. You’re using a shovel and looking for a small show that’s only there for a half a second. And you have to be real quick because they’re digging away from you.”

Most commercial clammers will dig in the surf – as opposed to the dry sand – because the clams are often shallower and easier to dig out there. Commercial diggers pay more for their no-limit license, while recreational diggers pay $7 for a license to dig 15 clams a day.

Clatsop County’s beaches are a hot spot for razor clams, which have adapted to dig vertically in the sand so they can survive our wild winter storms. The Columbia River spits out sand that washes onto beaches clear down to Seaside, and the jetties built to stabilize the river mouth have extended the Oregon shoreline and expanded potential clam beds.

“It’s basically the longest, uninterrupted sandy beach in Oregon, so it’s the best area in Oregon for razors,” Osis said.

Every other week in the spring, the county’s beaches will fill with diggers on minus tides, when the surf pulls back and exposes the clam beds. When minus tides combine with holiday weekends like this one, diggers flock from all over the region.

Former Astorian Gerardo Arnaez left an indelible mark on my psyche with his account of his first time clamming, posted on his blog under the title “Another myth:?the gentle clam dig.” He had a decidedly different take on the experience than I did. While I had been thrilled by the hunt, he had been a little shocked by the scene.

“It was a massacre, like a reverse beach invasion,” he wrote. “The ocean and beaches stormed onto from the high ground. Up and down the beachhead hundreds of people rushed seaward, all armed and dressed for wet-work combat.”

He kept seeing “what looked like small cow tongues in the sand,” and later realized they were the “pale and fleshy white” severed necks of clams, “guillotined” and left behind by diggers who misfired their guns and shovels.

As he and his companions dug, he marveled at the fight-or-flight response of his prey and at the brave few that expelled water at them “like Jack Bauer spitting in the face of his captors.”

“A clam will writhe and try to get away as fast and furiously as anything that knows it’s going to die,” he wrote. “So we dig just as fast and hard and plunge our arms elbow-deep to keep them from wriggling and digging deeper into the sand, and when we catch one they just plumb give up as if they know they are doomed to be fried up or chopped into stew.”

Mmm … yes. Breaded and fried, for me.

To redeem myself after spotting only one clam Saturday, I?went back for another dig at low tide Sunday and snagged a respectable 13 clams.

OK, so four of them were mangled and three of them were barely three inches long. When you go, don’t forget you have to keep everything you dig:?the tiny ones, the broken ones … and the guillotined.