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.