Kids learn about LI's maritime culture

In a room of the Long Island Children's Museum that smelled intensely of fish, 11 baymen explained their trade Sunday to young museum patrons who wanted to know: How do you tell a boy crab from a girl crab? What do fish eat? Can I hear the ocean in this shell?

The baymen were there at the behest of Nancy Solomon, a folklorist with Long Island Traditions, a Port Washington nonprofit group working to preserve the region's maritime culture, for the first leg of a three-weekend program at the museum, in East Garden City, called Saltwater Stories.

"Nobody topped Long Island for export of clams and oysters for well over 100 years," Solomon said. "Through the 1950s, 75 percent of shellfish consumed in the U.S. came from Long Island - now, it's not even 1 percent."

Behind her, at a table covered with clams and mussels, were Flo Sharkey and her son Paul, clammers from Patchogue. Paul Sharkey shucked one of the clams and it quivered, exposed to the air.

"Nice pink meat," he said. "That's a healthy clam. That's a cherrystone, probably from the South Bay. What he does is, he sticks his tongue out to draw in water because he likes to eat plankton, and it filters through him. He's not only good to eat, he cleans the bay."

Next to the Sharkeys was John Buczak, a fisherman from Bay Shore, whose table had dead fish and live crabs big and small. The males had claws tinged blue, females red, "like nail polish," he said. Josh Roth, 51/2, took that in. There were huge horseshoe crabs and lurking hermits in front of him, but they didn't have the allure of the dead fish.

"Do you really want to hold that one?" said his dad, Steve, and Josh nodded, fingering its reeking gills.

A clammer and carver of decoys from Center Moriches named George Rigby held court in the center of the room, where he'd set out some duck decoys he'd made, along with blocks of wood and cork for the children to use. Melissa Daniels, 7, and visiting from Pennsylvania with her family, briefly stopped work to consider the purpose of the decoy.

"Maybe it scares the fish away from where the boats are?" asked Melissa, who is knowledgeable about conchs, oysters, crabs, seaweed and sponges, but not duck hunting.

Rigby was having a good day, explaining some of the carving basics, and he likes teaching children. "When you see a smile on a kid's face it kind of sticks with you," he said.