YARMOUTH — The nameless young clammer stood silent and motionless on the sandy flat, a four-tined rake in one hand and a still-empty clam sled in the other, as a crowd of smiling festivalgoers waited in line for their turn to take a selfie with her.

The pony-tailed clammer was made out of sand. Amanda Bolduc, a Maine native who now lives in Florida, had carved her out of 16,000 pounds of quarry-produced sand over three days as a contestant in the sand sculpting contest at the 56th annual Yarmouth Clam Festival.

“This year’s festival theme is special people in the neighborhood,” Bolduc said. “You can’t get much more special, or more local, than a young kid learning how to clam. Sand sculpting is an interactive art. The crowd asks questions. So I plan my designs, the little details, with that in mind.”

The sand sculpting contest was one of several crowd-pleasing competitions planned for the three-day festival, which organizers expected to draw 120,000 people to this sleepy town of about 9,000. Others included clam shucking and pie eating and road races for both runners and cyclists.

The festival always begins on the third Friday in July and runs through Sunday. Its primary purpose is to raise money for local nonprofit organizations, such as school booster groups, civic groups and churches. In a typical year, these groups raise about $200,000 through the festival.

Last year, nonprofit volunteers sold one ton of french fries, squeezed 2,300 lemons, sugared 2,175 fried doughs, dished out 2,331 servings of steak tips, poured 5,800 Lime Rickeys, and cleaned, breaded and cooked a record-breaking 217 gallons of clams, according to festival organizers.

The high school ski club is the festival’s only fried clam vendor, a lucrative privilege the group was lucky enough to lock down during a long-ago vendor vote, according to Sean Lynch, the new coach of the alpine team. It has helped the team grow and offer both alpine and Nordic options.

Last year, the booth ran out of fried clams, unprepared for the big crowds eager to resume their festival traditions after a two-year hiatus due to the pandemic, Lynch said. This year, the team was determined to avoid that same mistake, so they ordered more clams than usual.

All the clams are dug from area flats, he said, in Brunswick, Cumberland, Freeport and Scarborough.

They sold 90 gallons of clams on Friday and, as of lunchtime, they were “well on their way” to selling all 120 gallons of clams they had ordered for Saturday, Lynch said. Foot traffic at the clam booth, at least, was on par with last year’s record-breaking numbers.

“We looked at last year as pent-up demand that had built during the pandemic,” Lynch said. “This year? I mean, our clams are delicious, but this year I think it’s about pent-up demand caused by all the rain. People are desperate for summer fun, summer food.”

Team members and their parents staff the booth throughout the weekend. Annie Polstein, 16, is a rising junior on the alpine team who said working the clam festival is a good way to give back to her team outside of the sport and a good way to welcome in new underclassmen.

“But it’s hard work,” Polstein said. “You get pretty dirty and it can get really hot. I work a catering job up north during the summers, so I’m used to food service, but on a hot day like this, you are really tired when your shift ends. But it’s a happy tired.”

Gary and Janice Stockson of Cape Elizabeth have been coming to the festival for the last 50 years. First they came to the festival on dates, then as newlyweds. Then they brought their children, and now, they are bringing their grandchildren.

“I love the hustle and bustle of it all,” Janice Stockson said. “There’s really something for everybody. In some ways, it hasn’t changed at all. There’s still the parade. There’s still the fried clams. There’s still the music and the rides. But it’s much, much bigger now.”

They were sitting at a table underneath a shade tent listening to an old-timey bluegrass band enjoying crab cakes and watching the crowd. Janice had already been to the junk table run by a local church, one of her favorite festival spots.

“When I go into Portland now, I don’t run into people I know,” Gary Stockson said. “But here, here I know people. I don’t even live here, but I can’t walk 5 feet without running into someone I know. It’s gotten bigger, but it’s still kept that small-town feel about it.”

That quaintness felt otherworldly to Kelly Hill and his wife, Sharrell. The couple and their three kids were driving up from New Jersey to spend a week in Maine and stopped at the festival on their way to their rental house on Mount Desert Island.

“Oh my God, look, they had a clam-shucking contest,” Sharrell said. “How does that even work?”

Their 11-year-old pulled out their phone, Googled it and pulled up a YouTube video of a past contest to show his mother. The 8-year-old was pulling Kelly toward the rides. Their goldendoodle, Ferb, was slurping the remains of the 6-year-old’s lemonade slushie from its cup.

“It’s like stepping back in time,” Kelly said.

Back at the sand sculpting competition, Bolduc stopped to answer a young boy’s question about the “big claw” her squinting young clammer was holding in her right hand. Using a sandy forearm to wipe sweat from her brow, she explained how a clam rake worked.

“What’s it do?” the boy asked, pointing at a sitting dog she had sculpted by the clammer’s feet.

“It does what every good dog does – it watches out for her and makes sure she’s OK,” Bolduc said. She pointed at the boy’s younger sister, who had been crying a few minutes earlier but now toddled over toward the dog smiling. “And it wins over young children.”

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