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Working in Alaska was pretty cool, except for the last week I was there when I fell about 12 feet into an empty concrete
pond... not fun. They had to put me on a back board to get me out of the pond and call a plane to fly me to the hospital.
Amazingly, I'm ok. Nothing broken, just really sore. Scary. I could have been paralyzed, or worse!
Here's a pic of the hatchery. It used to be a cannery a long time ago. Now it produces almost 200 million
pink salmon each year!
| AFK hatchery |
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| Prince William Sound, Evans Island |
And here are some of those millions of pinks. These guys were just hanging out around the dock too, they weren't
in our pens!
| Pink salmon average about 3-4 pounds |
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To get to Cordova (PWSAC's headquarters) I took a ferry from Whittier
| glaciers! |
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Most of my time at AFK was spent here, in the incubation room. When I first got there, they were doing harvest
for cost recovery. Basically, they harvest some of the fish that come in and sell them to get money to run the hatchery.
Fishing boats come in and use big nets called purse seins to net a lot of fish at once. Since most people at the hatchery
were already doing sampling for harvest, they put me in the incubation room to help get it ready for egg take. As you
can see, it's huge! There were two more rows besides what you see. I had to level screens to make sure the water
flow on either side was even and put in zenger plugs (the white things you see on the incubators)
This is the egg take room where fish were slid in on the slide you see at the top of picture. People standing up
there would sort males and females. Females went to the three chutes on the left where they were cut open by spawners
such as Dave :) The eggs were dumped into the black bowls and checked for quality. If they were good (fertile)
they were sent down the good tube. Bad (unfertile) eggs went down the caviar tube to be sold as caviar. Male fish
were sent down the big chute to the right and a bucker squeezes the milt (sperm) out into a tray that runs into the tube that
the good eggs are flowing down. Eggs and sperm flow into a bucket which is brought into the incubation room. There
I would weigh the bucket and put it into the computer which estimates about how many eggs there are. Then I would activate
the sperm by stirring in a little water and letting it sit for 30 seconds. After that, I would rinse the eggs and then
load them into an incubator. Now, to get an idea of how fast we went, on a bad day we would go through about 20,000
fish in one day! We averaged about 12 million or so eggs a day.
| Break time Dave! |
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| Back to work! |
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| Dave takes eggs |
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