Journey of the Issaquah Creek Salmon.

This blog is about the salmon returning home to their spawning grounds. Salmon, by and large, always return to the river or creek where they were spawned, usually after three to four years at sea. There are 5 to 15 percent of the returning salmon that take a wrong turn to spawn, into an unfamiliar drainage system, but this is beneficial to the species by mixing up the gene pool.

Once in a while, their hormones will short circuit and the fish might stay out to sea five, six or seven years before it returns...that is what produces your big 70 pound or more fish.

After a few years cruising the Pacific Ocean, a hormone tells the 12 to 22 pound fish that it is time for him/her to go home. From where I am standing and 200 yards past the railway bridge is all saltwater coming from Shilshole Bay (not a misspelling) and the Puget Sound. Some of the salmon, who are lazy or smart depending on your outlook, use the locks to my right rather than the fish ladder off to the left to travel into Lake Union...the first fresh water they will encounter.

I am standing on a walkway that crosses the shipping locks and am looking under one of the arches of a diversion dam. This small dam (no more than 30 feet tall) provides a barrier between the ocean's salt water and the fresh water flowing down from mountain lakes and glaciers. Union, Washington and Sammamish are all natural lakes whose levels are controlled by the dam and afford floating traffic access to ports they might not normally be able to dock. 

This is the fresh water side of the locks. I'd assume the boats might be going out to Puget Sound on a little fishing trip. I also see kayaks and canoeists using the lock...for free.

This map is intentionally larger.

The salmon travel through Puget Sound, into Lake Union and Lake Washington. They then connect with the Sammamish River, into Lake Sammamish on their way to Isaaquah Creek and get trapped at the hatchery. A total distance of 42 miles and without a strenuous stretch of river to navigate, it makes for much healthier fish that arrive in Issaquah.

The city of Issaquah has the only hatchery within a metropolitan area in the state of Washington, and because of this, it is also the most visited hatchery in the state. The hatchery was built by the WPA in the 1930's to foster employment and opened for production in 1937 with plans of trying to repopulate the salmon fishery that was largely destroyed by logging, farming and coal mining. Most of the original salmon were extinct by this time, so fish from Green River were used as a starter stock.

I knew there was a public tour on Sundays at 1:00 pm so that was what I tried to schedule...and made it.. Larry our docent, was an excellent tour guide and historian.

I learned a lot from Larry such as "can I get any salmon after the hatchery spawns it"? His reply didn't encourage me.

"As soon as the fish enter fresh water their bodies start to change. The hens eggs are small to start with but the fresh water triggers the body to start turning oil and fat into egg development and sperm for the bucks". Larry said you wouldn't want to eat one of the fish at this stage because instead of the rich pink/salmon color meat that we all love, all you'd get is white wasted meat. That is one of the reasons why you see eagles, bear and raccoon just ripping out the eggs to eat and tossing the rest.

This small buffer dam blocks the progress of the salmon and force the fish through gates into a large hold pen.

At the bottom of the hatchery dam were hundreds of salmon dying...no really, they are dying...to get upstream. Most of these fish are running 15 lbs to 22 lbs and 25 inches long. Fall has the largest run of Chinook and Coho and I am lucky to be here in October.

I watched the fish, trying and trying again to jump the dam without any success. I have seen plenty of movies with salmon jumping six or eight feet...right into a bears mouth, why can't these fish jump "three" tiny little feet...are they weaklings I asked? Larry says they used a little trickery in keeping the water below the dam to a maximum depth of four feet. Those fish in the movies have a ten or twenty foot deep hole to gain some speed...these fish are just as good, but limited.

Larry did say if I watch long enough, I'll see a success story, but only if the fish approaches the dam from the side and not straight on...most do not.

The fish are crowded by a moving fence at the end of the holding pen where volunteers hand them off to other volunteers who measure and check to make sure the fish are reading to spawn. Some that might not be ready yet are put back into the pen (small opening in the back) for another week to ripen.

Speaking of volunteers....

In the 1990's the state of Washington, because of budget cuts, was considering closing the Issaquah hatchery. The city couldn't see that happening and the Friends of Issaquah Salmon Hatchery (FISH) was born. The hatchery was saved and the state now only has two (2) paid workers at the hatchery with all else being done by volunteers. (I'm surprised the state doesn't threaten other hatcheries with the same?)

The fish are measured, called out as to whether they are a buck or a hen, ready to spawn or not and whether they are wild or hatchery fish...90 percent of the returning are hatchery fish. They then conk the fish with a club (I mean really...they were going to die anyhow) so nobody gets hurt handling a flopping, twenty pound fish. All wild salmon and about 1000 otherwise exceptional fish are set aside to be released above the hatchery dam so they can spawn naturally.

The eggs (about 4000) are stripped out of the hen and into a bucket.

The bucks are milked into little white cups.

As I said earlier, the fish are not for human consumption...but as pet food, they're gourmet!

The buckets of eggs and little white cups of sperm are mixed in the incubation room. The eggs are mixed with at least 4 different bucks to ensure a diversity of the gene pool. Next year when the millions of fingerlings are released into Issaquah Creek the life cycle will start again...three years down the road.

Three weeks later

After two inches of rain in the last two days, interest must of been sparked out in the middle of the bay because there are many more salmon and much are more active. As I watch the frenzied action I really did feel sorry that most won't spawn naturally.

Here the volunteers are loading 100's of salmon into a water tanker truck and will release the wild fish into a number of neighboring creeks, trying to establish new salmon stocks.