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...

Monday, November 1, 2010

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...

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

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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.

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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.

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These are their saltwater pens.

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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.


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More sea lions.

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Basking

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

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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).

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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!

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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!

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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!


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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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This was a picture down the hall.

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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.

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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...

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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.

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