Washington Hatchery Tour

I forgot I was going to write a blog about my trip to Washington. I've been back for a few weeks now. The trip to tour Washington hatcheries was only 4 days but because of flight schedules, I had to spend 5 days in town (9 days away total for a 4 day trip!) A few days before I went to town, a big storm blew through and knocked the power out in Sitka. They had some power but not enough for the whole town so they had a few days of rolling blackouts (that means 1 hour of power on this side of town, then 1 hour of power for that side of town... back and forth all day)... and I got to town just in time to experience that! BOO. Even though I was still really bored in town, there was some events going on. Alaska Day was October 18th so the weekend before they had a few events. I went to the Russian Dancer show one night and the Military band concert another night. Alaska Day is one of the biggest events to happen in Sitka so lots of military people were in town and they have a parade and other stuff on that day. Unfortunately I left two hours before the parade... bad timing for the tour!

Anyhow, the trip went well! I was a big nervous, just because I wouldn't know anyone, but everyone was really nice. The manager from the hatchery in town came with but I don't really even know him, but he turned out to be really fun and cool so I'm glad he went. Even though I wasn't a manager or assistant manager of a hatchery, it was kinda fun to talk about hatchery stuff with other people. Even though I didn't know as much... Bill and I had to give a presentation (made to by the big boss), which went good. Besides the presentation put on by the fish food guy who put on the tour, we were the only ones with presentations.

Anyhow, it'd be hard to explain everything about the tour but I'll say it was interesting to see how different places run. I learned how great we have it here when it comes to water. Every place we went to has to filter and treat their water, some use UV and one uses ozone. Here at Hidden Falls, we don't do anything with our water so that's pretty big. Lots of other things were different too... rearing containers, incubation rooms, etc. So I have a bunch of pictures I can show and talk about a little...


We took a ferry to the first place... otherwise we'd have to drive quite a while around Puget Sound.


Nice indoor round ponds. This place was more of a research site than a hatchery. They raised a bunch of different kinds of fish like rockfish, sablefish, lingcod, and some others. They also did a captive broodstock program where they are trying to revive a certain stock of sockeye salmon that is almost all dead. They had 6 adult sockeye in one of these round ponds.


As we were walking to the saltwater site of the Manchester Research Station, they had a little dock that had some sea lions on. These are California sea lions instead of the Stellar sea lions. These ones are the barking kind. They were so cool! Of course, as we walked by them (we were on a dock about 20 feet above them) they dove.


These are their saltwater pens.


In one of their saltwater pens, they had some ~20lb halibut. I'm not exactly sure what they have these for because I think the guy said they didn't raise them, they got them from somewhere. But they were pretty cool to watch. As soon as they lifted the gate that covered the pen, they fish came right up to the top.



More sea lions.


Basking


This was a different hatchery now. They used these egg troughs, which is very different than what we use.


This is at the Cowlitz Trout hatchery. This is their incubation room. In our incubation room, we use R-48s (the big blue vats) and No-Pads. They use this style of trough as their incubators. They put the eggs in baskets (which you can see).


All of their outdoor fish rearing containers were huge concrete raceways. Their older fish were fed by these automatic feeders. There is food in that fiberglass container and there is a thin metal pole hanging into the water and the trout bump it, causing the food to fall out. They went crazy for it!


Their oldest fish are reared in these massive ponds. Obviously, this one isn't filled with water but they had two other ones that were. It was a really foggy day, so you can't really see much of the pond. What you see is only 1/3 of it. They are about a quarter of a mile long and hold about 225,000 fish. At first, I thought just this area you see was it, which is still really big! Then I realized we were seeing only 1/3 of the pond and I was amazed!


This is the Cowlitz salmon hatchery. This hatchery was pretty amazing and just underwent $26 million worth of renovations! All of their rearing containers are these 200 foot long concrete raceways. Obviously you can't see them all, but there are about 20 of them I think. All with these fancy railings and the whole complex is covered in bird netting and really nice. Oh, and they had two of these complexes! They were beautiful!



This is their "fish sorting building." On the left is one of those raceway complexes. The river is on the right along with their fish ladder, which leads up to the sorting building. Notice the road under the building... I'll explain that in a minute. Also right under the building, you can see what looks like a white pipe. Hang on to that thought too.


This is half of their sorting area. It's all fairly complicated but easy to understand at the same time. The fish come up the ladder and get shocked in a box similar to ours. They come onto the table to get sorted. On this half of the table, the guys sort the fish down certain pipes that lead to big holding tanks.


The tanks are full of water. They only shock the fish a little to stun them, then they come back to life in the water. Today they were sorting fish that were tagged and fish that were surplus that were going to a food bank. So each group goes into a certain holding tank... Then when they want to, say, take the fish to the food bank, they drive a truck under the building, under the certain tank, and empty the tank into the truck and then drive off.


This is the other half of the sorting table. Similar concept... except the pipes connected to this side run a quarter mile down the hill to 8 raceways. This side of the table is for sorting the broodstock they need for spawning. The fish slide down to their certain raceway and hang out their until they spawn them.


These are the broodstock raceways that are down the hill from the sorting building. Those metal things on the other side of the raceways are crowders. While we use a crank and manpower to bring our raceway crowders forward, they have fancy hydraulic ones! Everyone was jealous!


We stayed at some nice places along the way... The Westin in Seattle, another decent hotel in Olympia, and then here. This was my room in the Olympic Club. It was a very different style hotel. It's a really old building that used to be a gentleman's club that has been turned into a hotel, with a pool hall, a movie theater (for free if you stay there) and a restaurant/bar. My room was just as you see... very small and quaint. It had a sink in the corner of the room but the bathrooms were shared in the hall.


This was a picture down the hall.


I was in room 3. These two rooms were next to mine, along with a bathroom (that's the open door). Each room was themed sorta... Each room is after a person that meant something to the Olympic Club. On the walls of the room was a little story of the person. In my room picture, you can see some writing.


This was the sink in the girl's bathroom downstairs. You could turn all the different knobs and alot of them produced water from some faucet. It was pretty interesting.

So that's all I have for the tour pictures. Of course I took tons of pictures but most wouldn't mean much to you guys. Alot of the pictures were of the formalin systems at each hatchery, because we want to set something up at ours. If you want to see more pictures, ask me when I come home. Now some random Tucker pictures...


Lab party! This is Tucker with his new chocolate and black lab friends. They were off a boat that was helping us with our fish. It was fun to see all three colors of labs in my yard.


Tucker likes to carry around fish. But he loses interest in them once they stop moving.

Juneau pictures

Here are some more pictures from Juneau...


The Mendenhall glacier from "up close" I guess it's not exactly up close but if you got up close it would be massive!


ICE BERG, RIGHT AHEAD!! Chunks of ice are constantly breaking off of the glacier. We didn't see any break off when we were there but these were floating around in the water.


A waterfall off the the side of the glacier. We could have walked to this waterfall and stood practically under it, but we have the stroller.

And now for some funny pictures...


Funniest of them all! It looks like I'm hanging over a cliff!


When we were in a store in Juneau, I came across this! A bear nativity scene! See that's "Beary and Joseph" in the middle with a little baby and off to the right is one of the 3 wise men and a "camel" bear, some bear angels and more wise men on the other side and what looks like a bear in a sheep costume? I thought this was hilarious! I kinda wanted it!


I feel like you'd see this only in Alaska! What is that... you might say?


Oh, just a dog sitting in a chair on the back of a flatbed truck! I believe he is tied up there... or maybe the chair is. I'm not sure if the dog rides like this but it wouldn't surprise me! Here in Sitka, there are ALWAYS dogs in the back of trucks... even if the truck is parked and the owner isn't there.

The Hunt for Warm October

Well it's October and the hunt is on! No, not the hunt for our long underwear! Though that's not too far off... The hunt for a winter vacation! Though most of you guys on Facebook know that because I’ve been posting my comments on the vacation search. It’s hard to figure out but I won’t bore you all with that. I just want to go somewhere warm. And as I sit here on our cold, dreary Saturday watching Michigan State beat on Michigan on a bright warm sunny October day, I feel jealous of you Michigan people! While you guys have potential for warm colorful fall days, we just have rain and cold! Oh well… we have a lot of green… and lots of bears… who like to poop all over our hatchery. I guess that isn’t helping Alaska’s beauty…

Besides rain and more rain (we had 3 inches of rain in one day last week), there isn’t all that much new, but I haven’t posted in a while so there is some stuff. I went to Juneau about three weeks ago with Jacquie and her two kids. I spent my birthday in town and had dinner with some ladies in town. Then on Wednesday, we took the ferry to Juneau. We took the “fast ferry” and it only took about 4 hours. It was my first time on the ferry and it was a pretty cool experience. It’s a huge boat and it just goes so fast for a boat that size! I mean, we aren’t talking 80 mph but it goes about 30 mph. If you stick your head out the side, the wind hits you pretty hard. The prop wash out the back of the boat is pretty cool to watch and just makes the boat seem so much more powerful. Like, if you fell off the back of the boat into that prop wash, you wouldn’t come back up.


This is the ferry... I think it was like 125 feet long.


Prop wash = power!

Anyhow, we didn’t really do that much in Juneau. We shopped a bunch. We went to Costco and spent a lot of money! I got to go to a movie which was nice. They do have a mall but it’s pretty lame… but they had a Joann Fabrics! We went downtown and shopped some more. The cruise season was winding down to a close when we were there, though there were two huge ships in, and there were a lot of good deals on clothes and other stuff. On our last full day there, we went to the Mendenhall Glacier which is pretty cool. The glacier goes right down to the water so there are icebergs broken off in the water. I’ve never seen a real iceberg so that was neat. We left on the ferry the next day around 8am, got into Sitka around 12:30 and caught a flight back out to the hatchery after that. We had GREAT weather the whole time we were gone and we didn’t bring any shorts with us because we thought it wouldn’t be as nice. Although we didn’t really do that much in Juneau, it was nice to get away for a little while.


This is the Mendenhall Glacier from a distance. I'll have to upload some up close pictures.

When I got back to the hatchery, it was about time to start working with the coho. We sort the coho and inject some of the fish with an antibiotic to prevent the eggs from getting Bacterial Kidney Disease. We seemed to do this sorting pretty fast, but maybe that was just in my opinion. Normally this is such a cold wet job, where your hands are in really cold water most of the day. Last year, I figured out that if I wore diving gloves, my hands didn’t get cold, even though they got wet, so I was ready to do that again. But this year, I was playing doctor and injecting the fish so I didn’t have to get wet and cold. That was really nice!

Now we have all of our coho hanging out in the raceways, just ripening up. Eventually the bears will start running out of fish and realizing that there is another stash in the raceways and they will start breaking in. But for now, they are staying out of there. That doesn’t mean they aren’t everywhere else! We see them on-site a lot now, making a mess with fish and poop… like I said before. It seems like the Sows and cubs are the ones walking around the most.

We also split ponds of coho in a quick amount of time. This is also another crappy job usually. Sometimes it’s even snowing when we have to do this, but this year it was just wet. It went really fast though so can’t complain about that. Other than that, we haven’t really been doing that much. Feeding fish… treating eggs to keep the fungus away…

Next week, I’ll be heading out AGAIN! I am going to Washington for a tour of some hatcheries down there for a few days. Adam did this tour last year and it seemed like he had a good time. It will be cool to see what other hatcheries do. I was a bit nervous at first though, because when Adam went, it was all guys. Everyone else that goes, too, are usually managers or assistant managers, and I’m just a lowly fish culturist without her own group of fish to raise! I asked the guy in charge if there was going to be any other girls and he said I was in luck! There is going to be another lady there who is a manager at some hatchery. Everyone else that is going is, again, managers and assistant managers. Hopefully it will be fun and not awkward, but I’m looking forward to it more now. I have to give a little presentation, which I am a little nervous about. I feel like if I was giving a presentation to people that know nothing about my hatchery or hatcheries period, it would be easier! But since I’m giving a little presentation to people that have been doing this longer than me, it’s a little scary. I just don’t want them to ask me questions that I can’t answer and make me look dumb. But I’m just going to try to talk about things specific to Hidden Falls. That’s what Lon, the BIG boss wanted me to do. Talk about our whale issues or our new alarm and monitoring system upgrades. It will probably go alright. I’ll probably have a lot of pictures to show when I get back.

Well that’s about all I have for now. Here are some other cool pictures…


Sea Lions


This is Takatz Lake from the air. I love the color!


Our pilot took us on a bit of a sightseeing tour on the way to town. This is a glacier I hadn't seen yet.


This is flying right over that glacier. They are so cool... very blue and craggy!


I just think this picture looks really cool. This is the back of Deep Inlet in town. Medvejie hatchery has a remote project here in Deep Inlet (similar to how we have a remote sight in Takatz.)

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

UPDATE since last blog!

ADAM GOT HIS FIRST MOUNTAIN GOAT!

I was pretty excited to see him show up the morning he returned. I was pretty anxious to see if he'd get his goat or not. They couldn't have had any BETTER weather for a hunting trip, though I think they could have had a better bug situation. I'm pretty sure they got swarmed!

Anyhow, pictures!

Adam and his mountain goat! It was a 5-5 1/2 year old nanny (female). He had to shoot it like 4 times. Apparently they are tough! Finally on the 4th shot, he took out her legs and she tumbled down the mountain. Unfortunately, during the tumble, her horns got a little busted up. You can see that one is broken and bent down and the other one is a little broken too. But it's still pretty cool. I'll have to take a close up when he gets them back from town. He had to send them to Fish & Game in town.


Can you believe that background!? I guess his goat was a little on the smaller size, just so you know. But I don't have any other pictures of goats to compare...


I think they camped somewhere on that ridge... about half way out.


Another ridge... they were literally walking on the top of the mountain!


These views!! That is Kaznyku Bay that you see... which is the bay we are in. That is Hidden Falls lake also. If you make the picture bigger, you can see some netpens in there, on the right of the picture.


More views. That long skinny water on the left is Cosmos Cove, which we boat to alot. On the right is our bay again... that same view that you saw before.

All spawned out...

Chum spawning - CHECK

Spawning party – CHECK

Can you believe it’s the middle of August already!? I mean, where did the year go? For the past three and a half weeks, we’ve been spawning chum. Since I missed all of chum spawning last year, I was looking forward to it this year! It’s such a tiring time but it’s so fun! It’s one of those times that I wish I was still paid by the hour, instead of salary. We are always working past 5pm… and since I am in charge of the numbers, I’m usually the last one working. But still… I’ve had fun. This year, instead of grinding up our carcasses, we’ve sold them. It seemed like it was going to be such a pain but really it ended up working out pretty well. As we spawn the fish, we send them down a metal shoot and into the grinder. But this year, they installed a conveyor belt coming off the end of the metal shoot and the fish are diverted onto the belt, instead of into the grinder. Then they are moved on the belt and dropped into a fish tote. You always have to have someone manning the fish totes and moving them, but since it takes 10 minutes or so to fill up a tote, it’s not a really fast thing. Coming into this, we thought we would have to take a few permanent employees off the spawning table everyday to deal with the totes, since we are the only ones who can run the equipment, but they ended up training a few of the seasonal on the forklift.

I dreaded the times I might have to be the tote mover, but I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable with it. Now I feel like I can just jump into a few of our pieces of equipment and do something, instead of feeling nervous about it. I can drive the forklift pretty well now (which was a bit difficult at first, getting used to dealing with a clutch and stuff) and even our telehandler. The telehandler is a smaller loader that has an extendable arm that you can reach out and pick stuff up with. It’s pretty easy to use but has a bunch of blindspots, which is the hardest part. I’ve been pretty proud of myself about that though. I can use the Skid Steer too (I dunno what else it’s called…) but I haven’t driven it very much. We also have a Case loader, which I’m not real comfortable with because it’s so big! I drove it back and forth a few times the other day though, and on the last trip, I started to understand it a bit more and get better. That loader is a bit different because it’s split in the middle, I guess, where as a car is all one piece. You turn the steering wheel and the front half of the loader moves so if you are going really slow (like I was!) it turns sort of jerky. I’m not sure if that makes sense to you or not. Guess I won’t be working for Mike and driving a combine anytime soon, but I might be able to do a little tractor work! HA I guess it does give me a bit of a confidence boost to know that I can drive something like that, if I need to!


This is a telehandler... all of these aren't really ours but basically the same thing.


The Big Case loader... it looks small here but it's pretty big.


The Skid Steer


Similar to our Forklift... minus that tank on the back.

We still have most of our Chinook spawning to do but that shouldn’t take that long. We did some of the Chinook on Thursday. Last night we had our spawning party, which was a lot of fun. We were set to get a pig (and maybe even a lamb) to roast on our spit, but it fell through. So we have chunks of pork. Scott smoked two of the chunks in this smoker and then the other 4 we put on the spit. The smoker meat was done at like 6pm maybe, but the spit meat took a lot longer and they didn’t take that off the spit until like 11:30pm! So that was a bit of a “midnight snack pork.” There was so much left over, so we have a chunk of meat in our fridge and a few other people do too. Our weather was AMAZING so we all just sat out and talked, drank, ate, hung out. It was very casual, like normal. I think everyone gathered around 12:30 or so…. And dispersed about 12 hours later! We played our games of course! The egg guess, bucking contest and chum toss. Those are always amusing! Adam and I cleaned up when it came to prizes. We got first and second place in the bucking contest!! Adam was first, I was second. Then we both got first prize in the boys and girls chum toss. I felt a little bad for winning most of the prizes, but hey, what can you do!? I was giving tons of tips out to everyone… trying to get them to do their best job! It’s more fun when you have close calls! It seemed like the bucking contest was a bit of a struggle this year… not real long distances! Though Adam’s winning distance was 24 feet, 7 inches. I think I only made it to around 21 feet maybe. But I’m not even sure. I threw my chum first and thought I blew it. It felt like it slipped out of my hand, but I guess no one could beat me so I won. Hey, what can I say!? I’m just good. HA


Hanging out


Emma and I matched! Hair and all.


Just a cool picture of the fire pit


A fancy picture we took with a sparkler.

Now it’s the weekend… some people are recovering, some people are just hanging out (like me… no recovery needed!), and some people are on a mission! Those “mission” people would be Adam and Ben. They are currently hiking up to the alpine (That’s ALL the way up to the top of the mountain.) on a mission to hunt a monster mountain goat! They both were pretty excited to go… Ben compared it to the excitement at Christmas. Personally, it doesn’t sound fun to me! Heh Last year I hiked up with Adam and we didn’t even get close to the alpine, and I thought it would be the death of me! So that’s what Ben is for! Ben’s practically a professional hunter… he takes a month off from here, in November, to work as a hunting guide for… rich dudes essentially! But this is Adam’s trip this time… he’s going to be the one shooting. Ben is just going to help him pack the goat out. They should have great weather up there so they should get one. They went up a few weeks ago with Scott to check it out, to leave some supplies up there, and to see if they could spot any, which they did (like 13 I think!) So they’ve had their eye on this one goat, and they think he’s a big one. So I’m crossing my fingers for them! Glad that I’m not up there with them, but ready to admire the goat hide and horns, and eat the meat when they get back.

Scott couldn’t go with them this time, even though I’m sure he would have loved to. He’s heading to town today in his boat, because he has to head to Colorado in a few days to get married! Last Thursday his friend from Sitka showed up and they (Scott, Kyle, Ben and Adam) were supposed to go up goat hunting, but the weather wasn’t good. It was supposed to be a sorta surprise Bachelor weekend for Scott. So instead, Scott, Kyle and Ben drove over to Admiralty Island (which is across Chatham Strait) to look around and ended up getting two deer on the beach. Well when they got back, they hung the deer in the big walk-in cooler, like they always do. Unfortunately, they forgot to put the pin in the door handle (to kinda lock the door) and a bear broke in and stole the deer. It sucks, but at the same time, it’s a little funny. There are a few bear paw smudges on the door, but it probably didn’t take much for it to hook the handle and pull. It (or multiple bears) walked off with the deer, ate it and then buried the rest right near the cooler, by the spawning shed, for later. That’s a bad thing because that bear could get territorial of that area, even if the guys dug the deer up and took it away. So they hung around back there to see if the bear was going to get mean about it…. They scared a few bears away back there but who knows which bear it was. The guys did end up digging the bear up and taking it away and we haven’t really seen much bear activity back there so that’s good. It seemed like it would be a lot more dramatic than it ended up.

We haven’t really had any issues (except for the deer thing) with the bears, but there have been a lot around. We have a sow and 1 cub, and possibly 3 sows with 2 cubs. There is definitely a sow with 2 really small cubs and a sow with a bit of an older set, maybe 2 year olds. Melissa and I think there is that third set around but we aren’t sure… just seems like there’s another small set with one darker cub and one lighter. But who knows. There are a bunch of single bears… atleast 3. My favorite is the sow with the single cub. Ok and the sow with the 2 small cubs! They are so cute! The single cub is sort of rascally and mischievous, it seems. I always see it on the other side of the weir from its mom… always just standing up on its back paws looking at its mom. I watched it climb through the little space over the weir pickets the other day and almost got it’s leg stuck in the metal poles. It hung there for a minute but came free. It was pretty cute and funny.


The Rascally cub climbing through the pickets


It's hard to tell what the heck he's doing... but he's almost all the way through. His head is on the other side and he's sorta hanging. This was when he was stuck.

Well anyhow, for now, Tucker and I are hanging out and going to enjoy the nice weather today! It’s supposed to get up to about 75 today and tomorrow, but is perfect. It was probably almost 70 yesterday. Tomorrow, we are planning to head to the beach with Jacquie and the kids and Melissa, assuming we can wrestle the boat away from someone! I guess that’s it for now.


Hangin at the beach


Tucker loves digging in the sand.