traffic conjestion in the Methow

I am working the early shift this morning, driving down the highway to the Twisp ponds, coffee in hand Willie Nelson on the radio. There is a car in the other lane stopped with its hazzards on and a car in front of me. I figure maybe there is a deer in the road. the car in front of me stops and talks to the car in the other lane, then the car in front of me pulls over and i quickly pull over too, since there is a big dust cloud and a heard of cattle coming down the middle of the highway. Some more of that small town stuff.
We cut open our 20 fish yesterday and they all seemed healthy, minus the fact that they were dead. I also have been helping out the hatchery by cleaning the raceways that no longer house our Coho. I geared up in raingear and hit up the left over slime and fish poo with a firehose. It felt a lot like cleaning up the factory on the fishing boat, except it was nice and sunny out and raceway i was cleaning was not moving back and forth in the waves.
I am also starting a garden. There is a plot already fenced off in the yard at the office, it was a garden a couple of years ago. I tossed among the dirt the 20 baby Coho carcases from yesterdays dissection. I also have two 40lb bags of leftover Steelhead feed, I did not know this either but industrial sized bags of fish food goes bad after 3 months, not so much bad as less healthy for a growing Steelhead. I am making my boss, Kraig buy all the seeds since i will be in Alaska and unable to reep the benifits of the garden, hopefully there will be some carrots or squash still around when i come back in Oct. I need a hobby when i am not in the 'clay dude' making mood. I really want another old VW, but i don't have the extra $$ right now. keep your eyes open driving around or out walking. I want the style of the WHITE cars NOT RED

It is funny living in a small town, where everyone smiles, waves, or says "hi" I just got a cup of coffee at the gas station for $.50, i filled up my travel mug, of course it tastes like $.50 coffee, but still. There seems to be three kinds of people here, those who have lived in the Methow Valley their whole lives, wearing work boots and Carharts, The Seattle-lites, who have the fancy vacation home and drive the Subaru and are always sporting the Patagonia wear, then there are the seasonal workers. Usually fisheries or Forrest service (Fire). I am probably the seasonal, but i look like the native, since i don't own any Patagonia and wear work boots and fake Carharts
We have the two groups of young Coho, 45,000 in the Twisp Ponds and 45,000 in the back channel behind the hatchery. These are the fish that we are directly in care of, feeding and shoeing off the preditors. We also have (had) 7 raceways at the hatchery with 50,000 Coho in each. Once a week we would take a random sample of 100 from each raceway, the ponds and the back channel and sample them, weights and lengths, we'd check to see if they retained the little coded wire tag that was shoved into their snouts earlier on, and at what life stage they were at. They got Coded Wire tagged at 'Parr' then they become 'Transitional' and lastly 'Smolt' where they loose all of their parr marks and turn the bright silver that Coho (aka Silvers) are known for.
On Wed evening we released all those fish that were in the raceways. We pulled out the wood planks that keep the fish in and then pushed a big screen that stretched across the width of the raceway sort of crowding them down to the outflow. We release them at night to lessen the chance of them getting gobbled right up by daytime predators.
Today we are doing OSI sampling. I have no idea what OSI stands for, but we will dissect 20 fish to see if all of their insides look good. Yep that one year of High School Biology is going to really pay off today.
On my off time i have been making the clay dudes. Yesterday on my day off i got to drive 8 hours down and back to Toppenish, the main Yakima office for nothing more than a signature. I have to have a special 'Tribal License' in order to drive the government trucks we have. For some dumb reason, i can't fax or send my signature down, i have to give it in person. They have everything on record from when i was there three months ago, including my signature and photo from the last three tribal licenses i had to get, but this is tipical of the way things are ran down there. On a good note because i had to take my own vehical down, they paid me $230 and it was a pretty drive, until just past Yakima. Toppenish looks like a cross between Keys, CA and Neah Bay, WA, but not as pretty.
I walked into the kitchen the other day and just outside the window was, not a bottle of Wild Turkey, but a real wild turkey.

throw net sampling

Had some really nice weather today while sampling the fish in the Back Channel and the Twisp Ponds. For todays sampling we used our brand new throw nets. In the video (if is shows up)i'm doing my best net toss that i have seen so many S.E. Asians do during my travels, don't be fooled by what looks like a crappy throw. We want to sample 100 fish and in my one throw i got 102. I knew i would be good at it. Over at the Twisp Ponds it was a bit harder, the pond is down a slippery slope, we parked the truck up top and sampled from up there. It is a pain to carry buckets of water up to fill the trash can we have to keep the fish in while sampling. We did not want not get enough on the first throw so we threw the net twice, and ended up getting way over 100. Next week we are going to bring a card table or something so that we can sample closer to the water. What we are sampling for is the fishes lifestage. Whether they are still 'Parr' prominent par marks, orange tint on their tales, white tipped fins are some of the things we look at. Then next stage is 'Transitional' This is what most of them are. Transitional means they have lost the orange tint and have a faint black outline around their codal fin (tail fin) they are losing thier par marks and transitioning into 'Smolt' the final stage before they are ready to be released. These are a bright silver with no par marks. We only found one in the two hundred fish we sampled today. Suryia is the gal i am working with and Rick is our boss, who is filming me. This is the first time Suryia and i have done this kind of work, i guess i did similiar stuff last year with the State. I think we did good, and i am sure it will go all smooth next week.

Not so laid back anymore

We have been sampling our little fish. Yesterday we did three raceways at the hatchery. I, in my waders hop down into the raceway with a big screen that stretches across and slowly move down the concrete canal coraling the all 50,000 fish to one end. Then i take a random scoop with the net. We are looking to sample 100 fish. If my random scoop is over 100, we do them all and if it is under 100 we scoop a few more up. I am pretty good at scooping. My first scoop was 128, but since then i scooped 107, 103, 111, 98, 104, 102. I am a great estimator. We sampled four more raceways today. Tomorrow we sample the two ponds. This we will do with a throw net. I think i am going to be good at this too, because of all the travel i have done through South East Asia, i have seen fishing done like this before. We will sample all the fish once a week until they fatten up to the preferred release size of '15 to the pound' I didn't know what 15 to the pound meant, but it means 15 fish= 1 pound. right now we are at 18 to the pound so they are close. To sample we use a concoction mixed with water to knock out the fish then weight them and take a measurement. We also scan them for a coded-wire tag. a CWT is a teency weency little metal tag that has a code on it that gets implanted into the snout of the fish. This code will tell us from which hatcher it comes from. Later on after the Coho have spawned and died i get to dissect the heads, retrieve the CWT and read the code under a microscope. Sampling isn't so bad, except the water is icy cold and with the wind blowing my hands were numb. I tried to wear a glove, but then i couldn't handle the little fish. The sacrifices i make for these little guys
I feel like i have made the best clay dude yet. I made a little group i call 'Safari-Party' I made it for my friend Aja, who is moving to LA. Once again i have made something that is going to be impossible to ship, I guess it will hang on my wall until i can get it to her Moms house in Modesto.

working the weekend

Yesterday we did some scientific work 6000 of our 50,000 Coho that are in the Back Channel at the Hatchery have 'pit-tags' in them, tiny little electronic code devices that are implanted into the fish's belly via a syringe. We have a couple of pit tag readers located in the river down from the acclimation pond. When we release the fish the recorded pit-tags will give us a 'Guesstimation' of how many Parr (Baby Fish) survived the acclimation. Yesterday we did an efficiency test by injecting a bag full of tangerines. What we found out was that water logged, chewed on by the dog, little oranges tend to sink and the pit-tag reader that is set directly under the overhead power lines doesn't read many of the tags.
I am the only one working today, so they have me on for ten hours. Work started to get a little too hectic at the Back Channel so i had to step it up a bit. Lying in my hammock i decided this 'Full Time' stuff isn't so bad, all i need now is a coconut or margarita

settling in

I've settled into my room, and i have my table set up to do some clay dude work on my time off. I have the noon to 8pm shift, which i like. I tend to get up early so i have a few hours to work on stuff before heading off to Parent the baby fish. I have internet access at the 'Twisp Ponds' There is only one small screen to clean there and feeding the fish takes all of about ten minutes, so i will be internetedly entertained there. At the back channel I have a book. Kraig gave me his old stereo amp so i am slowly installing that while watching for non-existent predators.

The next day after

I think my days are going to be rather easy. This week i am working from noon until 8pm. So today at noon i cleaned two of the three federal rigs (work trucks) Then i cleaned up the shop a little bit. Around 2pm Kraig drove me to the Hatchery. Behind the hatchery is a water way and pond where we have 50,000 of our coho. It is called an Acclimation Pond, they will stay in here while we feed them twice a day until they reach a certain size and then they will be released into the Methow River. They are acclimating to the water in hopes that they will one day return and spawn in these waters. Kraig (my boss) walked me through the steps of feeding and cleaning the metal grate that if not closed would allow the fish to escape into the Methow River early. Next up we drove 8 miles south to another set of Acclimation ponds known as 'The Twisp Ponds' these 50,000 coho are spread through out four ponds, that are all connected so that if the coho feel up to it the can freeley move about the four ponds, So far they seem happy milling around right where they are. We fed those fish, and also cleaned some leaves off of the escape gates. That is pretty much it for the work, the rest of the time i go back and fourth to each pond and watch for Minks, Ducks, Great Blue Herons, or any other preditor that tries to eat our fish. There is a big net covering the pond at the hatchery, but because it is a hatchery the animals know that there is an easy meal nearby, so most mornings the net needs to be mended. I spent a lot of the time sitting in the truck occasionally looking out the window, no preditors in sight. I read a magazine, wrote a letter to my Grandma, and walked around a bit. That is it work day is done. One of the other bosses is out looking for other usable acclimation ponds to expand my hectic work day.

First day of my return to Twisp

I have finally made it back to work, i was told i'd be hired back on March 1. Thirty Seven days late, i guess that is ok. I am still not officially on the pay-roll, but i will be getting paid, one day i hope.
Today i learned how to clean a raceway. Not like at the Indy 500. A raceway is where we are keeping our baby Coho Salmon at the nearby hatchery. I think we have some five raceways with about 50,000 Coho in each. Cleaning the raceway is like skimming the bottom of a pool with a big long brush. All i am really doing is brushing the bottom of the concrete raceway, stirring up silt off the bottom so that it may flow out as the top water flows out. Today we also emptied one of the raceways and transported the 50,000 Coho to their new homes in the 'Twisp Ponds' four ponds located not far up the Twisp River Rd. in Twisp, WA. Using a big pump we vacumed up all the fish and dumped them into a big tanker truck, the truck drove to the ponds and we hooked up a big hose and dumped them on into the pond. I think my days will consist of cleaning the raceways and feeding the fish, easy enough.
I was surprised to drive over the hill and into 70 degree weather with sunny skies, but i am not complaining.