Magic Moments - Adventures of Glen and Liz: Aug 7 – Day 97 Hatchery and Cannery Cove exploration

Aug 7 – Day 97 Hatchery and Cannery Cove exploration

Went back to watch the Fish Hatchery in action ….. processing the returning salmon, and harvesting the eggs, etc.. They were very welcoming and it was fun to watch the process in real time. There were tons of salmon going through the process. They had a three person team working the line. One gal sorting fish by gender and two others doing the processing. The sorter pushes 3 females and then 1 male to each of the others as quickly as she can.

They slit the bellies of the female and scoop the eggs out into a trough.

Then they take that 4^th fish the male and simply squeeze his belly to extract the sperm into that trough.

The eggs flow down the trough into a bucket. When the bucket is full a 4^th person switches out the bucket and move the egg bucket on to the next step. They keep track by counters exactly how many fish they process per day. Only about 33% of the fish that are coming back right now are females which was an interesting fact. The intact males not being used for their sperm are pushed into another shoot which takes them down to a waiting boat, to take them to the processing plant in Ketchikan. The fish that were used in the processing are sent down a separate shoot which ends up in the same place headed for Ketchikan. These were Chum Salmon and are used primarily for: pet food, fertilizer, and possible some for human consumption.

The eggs which are tightly bundled come out of the females and go into a separate bucket. Those are not ready for spawning so they go separately to town to be used for caviar.

We also watched John cutting out the otolith's (ear bone) of a number of salmon, which will be sent to the lab for review. The salmon eggs are 'heat coded' during their infancy which actually puts a code (think bar code) on the otolith bone. With that code that they can determine: how old the fish is, where it was hatched, even down to the date the eggs were harvested and which batch that day. The process puts a series of dark bars on the bone which can be viewed with a microscope. The otolith bones are very small.

Otolith bone from Salmon --- pretty small

The bears were not out at the facility when we got there. They had been there early in the morning eaten their fill and went back into the woods.

Ever wonder what to do with old salmon heads? John is creative.

He dries them for several years, and then mounts them in various ways, adding colorful eyes, etc… to make them look fierce or whatever comes to mind. He sells them primarily to cruise ship tourists. He did not have any finished produces to show us, however. Apparently there is big money in dried out fish heads, who knew!

After leaving the hatchery we went up the inlet to the end to explore. Very pretty. LOTS of Eagles. At one point I counted 16 in the air traveling together up the inlet. Missed that photo, it would have been a good one to have 16 eagles in one shot all in the air. We had been told that sometimes people see up to 13 or so brown bear as they travel up the inlet. Mostly in the evening however, so our mid-day chances are not good. We did not see any; just Eagle, Seagull, and one Deer.

When we got back to the motherships we gathered Dave and Jane and went ashore to explore the old cannery area. The cannery burned in 1940 and was never rebuilt. There were all kinds of pieces of machinery and evidence of houses (stove chucks, bed frames, broken pottery, etc…) on the beach and in the woods. It is always fun to see what you can find and wonder about the people who worked and lived in places like this.