JAVA accessing BLOBS and CLOBS

I have been able to stream documents into and out of the BLOB's incl. MS .doc Also I have been able to get the content from BLOB and write it to a target directory.
However I am having odd problems with CLOB, a simple text file. My servlet attempts to read the CLOB and does create the output file in the target directory, but does not copy the content over. It also returns 0 for clobLength - here is where the troubles start !?! Here is the stub-code :
...
ResultSet clobRS = thisStmt.executeQuery (
"SELECT ATextMsg " +
"FROM ... " +
"WHERE ... " );
clobRS.next();
//
CLOB thisCLOB = ((OracleResultSet) clobRS).getCLOB("ATextMsg");
int chunkSize = thisClob.getChunkSize();
System.out.println("chunkSize is " + chunkSize); // default us 8132...
char [] textBuffer = new char[chunkSize];
String targetFile = targetDir + "retrieved_" + fileName;
File thisFile = new File(targetFile); // it does create an empty target file...
// read content as ASCII (text) content...
FileOutputStream thisFileOutputStream = new FileOutputStream(thisFile);
OutputStreamWriter thisWriter = new OutputStreamWriter(thisFileOutputStream);
BufferedWriter thisBufferedWriter = new BufferedWriter(thisWriter);
//
long clobLength = thisClob.length(); // things go very wrong here, returns length of 0, why ?!?
System.out.println("clobLength is " + clobLength);
//
// flush to targetFile, but nothing gets copied over due to clobLength=0 ...
for (position=1; position<=clobLength; position+=chunkSize)
{
int charsRead = thisClob.getChars(position, chunkSize, textBuffer);
thisBufferedWriter.write(testBuffer);
}
...
Since the clobLength is 0, obviously it will not copy from the database CLOB to the file.
Manually change the clobLength = 8132, recompile and run, then it copies some junk to the targetFile, certainly not the textual data in the CLOB itself.