Burnett Inlet Hatchery

I have been trying to decide if I should keep some organization to what stories I tell and it probably would make more sense if I did but I am not going to. It makes me give a little more background each time but I would still rather just talk about something when I am thinking about it.

Today I am going to talk about when I was working at Burnett Inlet Hatchery. I was on our sailboat project in California and I called Tod Jones, the boss at the hatchery. I called him hoping to get a job for Andy. He told me that he didn’t have anything for him right then but would in the summer if Andy was still interested. But he did have something for me. They had two big aluminum projects coming up and wanted to hire me as an independent contractor to come out and build two big raceways and a 260 foot fish ladder. I had been Mister Mom for 3 years and was definitely ready to get back to work. Not that I hadn’t been working. That sailboat project and two little kids were lots more work than most men do, and I wanted to get back to something easier.

I see that I have gotten a bit more technical than some of you might like. If so skip down to the last few paragraphs for the fish story.

Tod sent me the blueprints of the two raceways they wanted me to build. I was to decide how to make them and order the materials. As I was looking at the prints I thought that there was not nearly enough support for the sides of these tanks. I mentioned it to Todd and he felt the same thing and wanted me to talk to the engineers that had drawn the plans. I did and he told me that he had another engineering firm go over his stuff and told me that according to their figures the sides of those tanks should not bow out more than 1/8 of an inch when filled with water.

OK, they are the engineers. These raceways were tanks, open at the top, 12’ wide, 5’ deep and 48’ long they were made out of ¼” aluminum plate. I built them as specified and I bowed the sides in that 1/8th inch so they would be strait when full of water. Then I went about putting together the fish ladder. That consisted of both using used aluminum sections that they had on site and new material. It was an 8’wide, 4’ deep trough, 260’ long with several bends. There were baffles about every 6’ so that when this ladder was in operation it was full of water running down the hill in a series of 6’ by 8’ pools of water so that the fish could swim up.

We had about 60 feet of elevation we need the fish to swim up. It started down at the low water mark and then came up the hill and across and over to the hatchery building. It went back under the building, among the pilings that held the building up, and then up along side the raceways. This all had to be completed before the water was put in the raceways. For some reason I was not at the hatchery when they first filled it with water. But I sure heard about it!

When they had a foot of water in the raceways the sides were bowed out about 3 inches. They kept filling and by the time they had two and a half feet of water they were propping sides with boards and they were out about a foot and a half. They finally stopped filling because it was obvious that if they kept filling and their boards slipped the sides would go all the way to the deck. Why they didn’t quit at the first foot is beyond me.

I had two tracks that had to be perfectly strait and put down the sides of each raceway. This was for a crowder to travel back and fourth. The crowder was what they used to get all the salmon crowded up against the harvesting area. Anyway, I ordered enough big heavy aluminum channel to run down both sides of the raceway. When I got them, about 2 weeks later, I laid these 12” by 8” by 25’ long channels end to end and welded them together. Then I welded a ¼’ plate of aluminum the full length to make a box out of the channel. Then I pulled the stretched sides of the raceways into the inside and jacked up the boxes I had build and forcing the sides to the channel, welded it all together. That gave significantly more support than what the engineers had specified. I wanted to go back to the engineers but the boss didn’t.

Anyway, when we filled it this time the sides still bowed out about 3 inches but at least we could fill it. Then, with it full of water, I could weld the tracks on the sides for the crowders and they would be straight. We had lost 2 weeks waiting for the heavy channel and by this time we had fish coming up the ladder. I was welding on the top edge of the raceways for a day and a half with hundreds of fish just inches away. I thought we would have a bunch of blind fish but as far as I could tell it didn’t affect them. However, several times a fish would jump and knock my welding hood in the water.

I thought my job was about done but the boss said, “Oh, by the way, we want you to weld up some incubators for us. This was the first I had heard about this. When they told me what it was it sounded fine. They wanted tanks made that were 2’ by 2’ by 3’ that were constructed out of 3/16th aluminum with some plumbing parts and a removable screen on one side and a baffle. They had two already made that I could copy and they had already ordered the aluminum plate sheared to size. Great! Lets get to work. And then they told me how many they wanted made.

They wanted 250 of them and the fish were already there! I asked how long it took them to make the two first ones and it took them 2 days each to make them and I was suppose to make 250 in the next few weeks. Well, I worked up a system and working 10 hours a day I got between 6 and 8 per day. I did get that job done but they had about half of them filled with millions of fish eggs while I was still making more.

One Saturday we had a really nice sunny day and everyone at the hatchery went out fishing. They all stopped by to tell me where they were going and when they planned to be back because I was working. At about 10 o-clock I decided that I wanted a fish too. I normally took a coffee break about then so this day I went down to the boat (Sue and the girls and I were living on the sailboat then) and got a fish pole. I jigged up a scrap fish from under the float and filleted it and put a fillet on a hook that was attached to a string that was long enough to reach the bottom out in the middle of the channel in front of the hatchery. I had a short piece of chain for a sinker and a one gallon milk jug on the other end of the string. I took my skiff and put this out right in front of the hatchery. Then I went back to work.

Every few minutes I would just look up from my welding to see if my milk jug was still there. Pretty soon it disappeared. I put down my welding and got in my skiff. I chased down the milk jug and pulled in the string. Attached to the other end was a 200 pound halibut! I cleaned it and put it on the dock with the white side up and left it until the other fisherman came back. As it turned out I was the only one that caught a halibut that day and I worked a 10 hour day!

One of the girls that worked there laid down beside that fish so that she could have her picture taken with it. It was more than a foot longer than she was. I filleted the fish and we all shared it. I usually don’t like to keep fish that big because I don’t think they are as good as the smaller ones and only the females get that big. But we hadn’t had much fish and we all like it and I was really pretty busy. So that was fun.