Metro

Shelter Island native goes for Olympic gold in London

Amanda Clark (Hampton Pix)

Amanda Clark puts in 16 hours a day, every day, getting ready for the London Olympics.

For her, it’s a piece of cake.

From the time the world-class sailor was a first-grader, she’d get up at 5 a.m. to go scalloping with her dad and granddad in the shallows off her native Shelter Island. They’d get on a 17-foot motorboat and harvest the bivalves by the bushel-load.

“I remember years when the scallops did good, and we’d get new appliances,” she recalled. “My family, they all worked extremely hard. I made that connection — you work hard and you get something from it.”

Fast-forward two decades, and Clark, 30, is applying that work ethic to winning Olympic gold. She and her crewmate, Sarah Lihan of Florida, are ranked third in women’s two-person dinghy.

And for Clark, who has been competing on the US Sailing team since she was 15 and finished 12th in the Beijing Olympics, there’s an added motivation: This will be her last hurrah as an Olympian.

“It’s exhausting,” she said. “I really love Olympic campaigning, but I also love my husband, and I want to spend more time with him.”

When she’s not training — whether out in her boat, running, or working out with Navy SEALs — Clark is raising money for equipment, thanking financial supporters and updating fans.

Her days start at around 6:30 in the morning and end at 10 p.m.

The roughest training came in March at an Olympic camp in Colorado. SEALs were her taskmasters, and the water temperature hovered around 40 degrees.

“We had to go into the lake . . . then run back to formation,” she said. “If you didn’t get your head fully under, then you had to do more push-ups.”

The extreme strain reminded Clark, one of six women who completed the course, of her childhood on Coecles Harbor.

“I can think of a lot of times clamming and scalloping when you’re feet got that numb,” she said.

Her grandfather, Albertus “Toots” Clark Jr., grew up in Shelter Island when the oyster industry was booming.

“The shells were higher than the houses,” the 97-year-old said.

He worked for Long Island’s upper crust, maintaining and piloting yachts for the Vanderbilts and Whitneys.

“I did all the varnish,” he said of the Vanderbilts’ J-class sailboat. “It was all mahogany.”

Amanda’s father, Dennis “The Clam” Clark, also plied the waters.

From 1972 to 1986, he clammed and scalloped, selling what he got to restaurants. When the stock dried up, he worked painting houses.

His income helped the family gain entry to the Shelter Island Yacht Club, where Amanda defied expectations at an early age.

Not long after she started sailing dinghies there, she was beating all the boys her age and many who were older.

The Olympic regatta in Weymouth, England, will be a little different. Each of the 10 races will take her out about 10 miles and last about an hour and 20 minutes.

After London, Clark wants to see if the scallops have returned and to relive fond memories.

“We’d just stand around that table, opening up the scallops, trying not to mangle them or eat half of them,” she said.