I'm working as a Fish Culturist at Hidden Falls Salmon Hatchery in a remote spot near Sitka, Alaska! AM I CRAZY!? I'm starting to think so...

Thursday, March 8, 2007

my anniversary

WOW, I just realized that I've been here for a month today! That's CRAZY! :-D

MOOOOOORE ponding. We have 4 more days left on these chum. (I've figured out these 48 incubators we're ponding are the chum that are staying here... soon we will pond the chum that will go out to Takatz. They're in a different type of incubator.) Today I spent alot of the morning working with the raceways. After the fish are dumped in the ponding machine, they are piped out to two raceways, which have nets in them. We leave them in there overnight and the next morning, before starting the ponding process all over again, we send those babies out to saltwater. They are piped out there again.

Well these raceways are about 50 feet long and maybe like 8 feet wide but the fish are contain in this net which covers the whole area. To get the fish to GO down the pipe, we have to run this metal pole along a ledge on the sides of the raceway which goes on
the underside of the net, which just pushes the fish to one end as the net goes over the pole. MAKE SENSE?

So Adam and I did that this morning. The unfortunate thing, though, was realizing that there were ALOT of fish UNDER the net in one of the raceways, meaning there must have been a hole somewhere. As we started to push that net, we discovered a 6 inch hole in the net where one of the weights sat. MAJOR bummer because Adam estimated about 100,000 fish loose in the raceway that we'd have to try to gather up somehow. So after we pushed the majority of the fish out, he and Brandon tried to run the net down on the bottom of the raceway as they disturbed the fish to try to get them back on top of the net and it sorta worked but there were still quite a few underneath. It's not a good day for those babies.

We've had trouble with the birds lately too... seagulls and ravens. Those babies are under alot of stress by being dumped to going outside in the daylight and all... and then the birds tend to freak them out too! This is when the fish try to burrow down which causes that dog piling effect I talked about before. Scott put Deena and I on bird patrol for a little bit yesterday... possibly as a joke... he told us to throw snowballs at them. Well today he came in this morning and said one of those darn seagulls must have been pretty full and had an accident because there was a dead seagull on one of the pallets that sit on the side of the raceway. I'm not sure if he just died on his own or someone... "helped" in the process! HA Not a good day for that guy either.

ANYHOW, still no grocery flight... it was suppose to be on Wednesday. My food supply is dwindling! HURRY UP! :-\

SHOUT OUT OF THE DAY - To my dad again for leaving me the funniest comment on my last posting! I laughed for like 5 minutes!

DAD'S COMMENT...
OK! About yesterday. I hope I am around 20 years from now, to hear you say to your 15 year old son who doesn't want to shovel the porch:

"Why sonny! When I was working in Alaska, I had to shovel my way out of the bunkhouse just to get out. Then shovel my way to the office, just to find out I was going to shovel snow ALL DAY LONG! Then I had to shovel my way back to the bunkhouse! And it was UPHILL, BOTH WAYS, too! Kwitcher bitchen!and just shovel the damn stuff!"

Wise words of wisdom. DAD

2 comments:

h'na said...

admit it, you were the one that threw the snowball that took down that seagull. :p
rofl, vaguely reminds me of those buzzards circling over us hoe(r)s this summer...talk about grim!

and one month is pretty impressive! huzzah!

Anonymous said...

Geez! Your starting to sound like you are learning something again. I guess all that snow shoveling must have been homework. Too bad I didn't teach all you girls how to shoot, although seagulls and ravens are probably protected species anyway. Pray for NO MO SNO!

PS: Order twice as much food this time and maybe half of it will come.

DAD