Whew! As I sit and write this post, my sixth, I am already halfway over with my internship, the first of August on the horizon. Hard to believe that the summer is already that far gone. Alas, I still have the second half ahead of me, and I'm very excited for what remains.
I've heard some rumors that there is the possibility of some snorkeling and some electrofishing surveying being done this month, along with another round of estuary seining coming mid August or so. Although the summer Steelhead and spring Chinook numbers at the Siletz trap are slowly starting to wind down from the peak of the run, there will still be fish returning through to September as well. So I should stay plenty busy on the work side of things!
On the after work / recreational side, I have heard that the tuna fishing outside of Newport has been incredible over the weekend. I was very surprised to see the Newport Marina parking lot full, and trailers parked clear out on the road right outside Hatfield where I live (Hatfield and the marina share the same entry road). I'm going to try my best to get out on a trip sometime soon to see what this tuna madness is all about. In addition to that, I plan on going up to Corvallis this weekend to get my bike, and my guitar (the latter of which I have missed dearly) so that hopefully I can bike up in the Gorge during the week to fish as well as play some guitar on my free time.
Today I finally received my very first paycheck, which was very nice. After having spent the last month or so living very lightly (and having to borrow from some... you know who you are, and I love you for it), I finally can pay some bills and get some things in order that have needed to get done. Getting that first paycheck with any job can be a bit of a hassle when you need money and you have to wait a while for it to get to you... especially when its over a month since you started working. I'm glad to say that now I'll be able to get a lot of things done. Including hopefully getting a waterproof camera so I can share more of my exploits with you all. Don't worry though... there's plenty of pictures to be had this week!
Anyways... you guys want to hear what I've been doing since my last post, of course!
To be honest, it's been mostly a lot of the same. Since the 16th of July (my last post) I have spent a grand total of one day NOT at the Siletz Falls fish trap. Working the end of the peak of the run, we had plenty of fish to take care of - both recycling and taking them to food share. We are still getting between 50 and 100 fish every few days at the trap - so the bulk of our work is not necessarily over!
On the 19th, I had the opportunity to tag along with Derek, Evan, and John Spangler (who works out of the Newport office but is stationed in Florence) to do estuary seining for juvenile Chinook salmon out of the Siuslaw River estuary. I unfortunately do not have any photos to share of this event, as it was done mostly in and out of the water all day and I feared for the life of my cellphone. As stated previously I will be doing another round of seining later in August, and I hope to have a waterproof camera by then to utilize. Alas, I can briefly summarize the process.
In the estuary, juvenile Chinook spend a significant amount of time maturing before heading out to the great big blue to grow into adults. Thus, in the late summer and into early fall, biologists perform estuary seining, or netting, to take data from a few select sites to gauge how the population of juvenile salmon are doing. Essentially 3-5 sites are chosen, and we head out of port early in the morning just before low slack tide. We use low slack tide because it is at this point in the tide that the river is narrowest, and gives us plenty of bank to work on.
Using a very large seining net that has a big "bag" in the middle, we will go ashore and place two men on the bank - one as an anchor for one end of the net and the other to set up the rest of the equipment / help pull the net in at one point. The net has two ends top and bottom - one with a leaded-line to help one side of the net sink to the bottom - and the other has buoys that stay at the surface. Effectively, the man running the boat backs the boat straight away from the bank 20 yards or so, letting the net out slowly. Then, the boat turns in the downstream direction, making a semi-circle. As he does this, he will then - usually with the help of another man - get out of the boat, walk the other end of the net to shore, and we will slowly start pulling each end of the net towards each other. Once we do that, we slowly lift the net up and work any fish that are on the edges of the net towards the center, where the bag is. Once we've reached the bag, we use small dipnets to sort and separate the fish, marking what species they are and how many. For the juvenile Chinook, we will also take fork lengths - which is a length from the fork in the fish's tail to the nose. This gives biologists an idea of not only how many fish are in the estuary but how large they are. In addition to juvenile Chinook, we also caught hundreds of topsmelt (a silvery baitfish) and english sole (a flat bottom feeder). Crabs got caught as well, and some juvenile rockfish. All fish were later released. I thought that I'd be helping out with seining in the Alsea, Yaquina, and Siletz estuaries as well, but I ended up working the trap those days instead. I will hopefully get the opportunity for more seining in August.
It was a real cool experience not only to get to net but also to get to see a part of the coast I've never been to before (Florence). Previously I had never been further south than Yachats, and it is a very pretty drive through the Seal Rock / Cape Perpetua / Yachats area.
Moving along - as stated before, I have so far spent every single other day up at the trap. A few days we were doing more then just working the trap - two days last week we did some major weed eating and brush clearing. I knew all of that yard work experience growing up would come in handy!
Between the yard work, we also made a trip to the Cedar Creek fish hatchery in Hebo, on Three Rivers, to deliver 11 pair of broodstock hatchery Summer Steelhead. The broodstock program is where hatcheries will get adult fish to use to make eggs for their juvenile smolt production. Since the Siletz doesn't have a fish hatchery on the river itself, they use nearby hatcheries to make their hatchery smolt for them. Cedar Creek raises the Summer Steelhead, and the North Fork Alsea Hatchery on the North Fork Alsea River is used to rear the Winter-run Steelhead. Evan will take 11 to 20 pair of steelhead over a few times a month, from the beginning of the run all the way to near the run's end. This gives the hatchery workers a very variable amount of individuals to work with, which is important for maintaining genetic diversity.
Here is the lib truck, about to launch 11 pair of Summer Steelhead into this holding bay.
The fish will hang out in this holding bay for months, and won't be ready to spawn (i.e. won't be sexually mature) until nearly January of 2013! They get a nice long rest period, and once they are used for spawning, they will actually be released back into the Siletz to go and spawn again if they so desire. Steelhead are unique that way in that they can return to the ocean multiple times and can spawn multiple times. Salmon unfortunately aren't so lucky, and get one chance to spawn.
Here is a somewhat encompassing picture of the Cedar Creek fish hatchery. You can see the holding bays on the right, where 116,000 Spring Chinook smolt are being held. These fish will be released very soon for the Nestucca Spring Chinook fishery in the following years.
Nets are put over the holding bays to prevent unwanted predation.
Although they seem small, these smolts were actually fairly good size for their age. Very pretty fish even at the juvenile stage,with lots of spots.
Feeding time! And the crowd goes wild!
I spent a few more evenings out on the jetty, and had to snap a few photos.
This large vessel, operated by the US Army Corps of Engineers, spent many evenings out roaming around on the jetty, going back and forth multiple times. I'm not exactly sure what they were doing, but it was quite entertaining watching them go in and out multiple times in a single evening.
The evening fog from the breakers about to set in.
And a beautiful sunset shot to end the evening.
One day I got lucky enough to head out and try the north jetty for the first time. It's a bit more hiking then the easily accessible south jetty, so I was hoping that there would be more fish around. Unfortunately to my dismay, I failed to hook anything but those stinkin' crab. Which I would have loved to take home, but they had the habit of letting go of my bait every time they got close to the surface.
Walking out, I started to get the hang of my phone's "Panorama" photo option. It makes for some pretty cool sweep shots! Here's a few I took.
Pretty cool, that even in the rough hard rocks of the jetty - plant life can still be found.
A couple of trawlers make their way back in, as some sea stars hide away between the crevices of the jetty.
I spent one night inside the bay to try my hand at some fishing, and was surprised by this nice greenling kelp (also called a sea trout). I guess my luck fares better when I'm not walking the jetty!
Here's a little guy I caught, one of about 20 I caught that night. This is a Pacific Staghorn Sculpin. Most don't get more then the length of your index finger, but some can get as long as your hand. They are named because of the stag-like spines they have protruding from the corners of their heads. When you go to grab them, they perk up and stick their spines out to try and get you. Quite a gnarly looking little fish!
And... for the moment I'm sure you have all been waiting for... I got brave one day when I was asked to go up to the trap and do some fish work myself, and put my phone in a zip lock bag to try and take some pictures. Sad to say most of them didn't turn out, but a few turned out well enough to give you somewhat of a better glimpse of what I do up there. So without further ado... here they are!
First -a couple of more detailed high-res photos of where I get to work nearly every day. You simply can't beat this scenery. I admit, it'd be even more beautiful with a few more trees around ... but that's what happens when the land you work on is owned by a private timber company. They have to pay bills too.
Simply a gorgeous and stunning view of the Siletz gorge and basin.
You can see on the opposite side where little creeks meander their way down the valley. In the winter, I was told that there were several parts of the logging road on the far side that washed away during the periods of high rain.
This is torture... right?
Here is a cruddy picture of the hydraulic winch that is used to lower and raise the bucket down to the fish trap.
My office... once again!
Here you can see the staircase leading down to where I'm standing (the trap) from the cable car.
A view upstream from the top of the trap.
For the fish trap, we have a T-handled valve that we use to lower and raise the headgate. There are two headgates at this trap - one that allows/disallows water to flow through the trap entirely, and a second headgate that controls exactly how much flow the trap will receive. While we are working in the trap, we use the second headgate to slow the flow down so that 1) it's easier for us to move around in the trap, and 2) so that fish cannot escape. There will be times where ODFW will stop flow through the trap entirely, to prevent fish passage. This isn't very often, however.
You wind this sucker about 24 times, counter clockwise... and that flow is slowed down enough for you to get to work.
Here's a view of the opposite side looking up at where the cables for the bucket go into the wall. It's hard to believe someone poured a huge slab of concrete into the gorge wall just so they could get some cables attached to it... This was quite the engineering feat, for sure.
A view of the trap from the walkway.
Looking down into the trap from the top... Oh, my! Look at all those fish!
With that, it's time to hop in and get a gear check.
Hard to see thanks to my ingenious phone-in-a-bag for a camera... but here I have cloth gloves, pencil, forceps for taking scales, the fish count board, hole punch, and scale cards.
A view from inside the cargo hold. You can see the ladder leading up to where I was previously standing a few photos ago, and the fike. The fike is put into place so that fish can easily swim up over it when the flow is higher, but prevents them from falling back downstream once the flow is lowered.
Looking up into the upper portion of the trap, where we will be putting wild fish later.
These are holding bins. There are three in the trap, and with water flowing through them we can actually store fish in these bins for later use. We don't leave them in there for longer than a few days typically, as they tend to get a bit stressed out. Not a single fish has died in my use of them, however. It can be really handy to use these for sorting particular fish (i.e. processed fish vs not) as well.
Can't forget the most important part of the checklist... the net!
A look-see down the fike into the next portion of the fish trap. If you look closely, you can see some of my friends down there waiting for me to raise the water enough for them to easily jump up into the trap. Surprisingly, a few actually made the jump without the raised water while I was busy working with other fish. The Summer-run Steelhead are well known for their leaping ability.
FISH!!!
Here is where the bucket gets lowered into, at the upper portion of the trap. We can fill the bucket with almost 100 gallons of water to hold fish in. When we do a recycle run, we can typically send 20 fish over at a time to the truck. We will send one bucket of water over first to get some water in the holding tank, and then send each load of fish over with a full bucket of water. After three buckets, we can turn the aerator on to keep the oxygen circulating and keep those fish alive. We also utilize dissolved oxygen from an oxygen tank to keep the fish happy and healthy while we transport them.
The opened and unlocked top portion of the trap.
First fish of the day is... a male hatchery summer steelhead! You can easily identify this fish by the missing adipose fin (fin between the dorsal and the tail) and the flat ended tail. You know it's a "Buck" because it has a kype-forming on its elongated mouth. The kype is what gives the mouth its hook-like shape.
Second fish is... a wild female summer steelhead! You can clearly see that visible adipose fin, and the short, blunt nose which makes it a female. The flat ended tail makes it a steelhead. Simply a gorgeous, fresh, chromer.
Here's a chrome hatchery summer steelhead, just a prime example of how fresh these fish are, 65 miles upstream from the ocean - after a long, hard fought climb up the Siletz Gorge.
Hard to see, but this is a filled out scale card for a CHS ( or Chinook Salmon, Spring). We fill out the fish species, date, sex, and location.
Here I am with a wild Spring Chinook salmon. See the forked tail? That is a tell-tale sign that you are holding a Chinook.
Again, here is the forked tail. It's hard to see in this photo, but Chinook will also have spots on both lobes of the caudal fin (tail), and will have black lined gums inside their already black mouths.
Here is a native summer steelhead with some kind of abrasion marks - we also make notes of these just for our own records.
Another look.
Here's a blurry photo of a little chrome jack Spring Chinook. This Chinook is considered a "jack" because it does not exceed 24 inches. We estimate that this year about 1/3 of the run has been jack Chinook.
Here is another marked fish. We have a feeling that river otters have been getting into them fairly heavily, as we have seen multiple fish return with holes and scratches on their heads. This one, however, likely got these abrasions from a net of some kind.
One last chroooooooomer of a wild hen. Get your sunglasses on, folks!
As you can see in this photo, I hole punched the upper lobe of the caudal fin of this native Summer Steelhead, so that if this fish makes it in the trap again somehow (i.e. makes it down the falls and comes up the trap) we will know that it's been through once before and we will not mark it down. In science, it is important to take correct data. If you want to make any kind of a conclusion about something, you have to have as flawless of data as humanly possible. If we took data off every wild fish that came through the trap without some idea that the fish had been through once before, we might be taking data on the same fish - and that wouldn't help us much, now would it?
Taking the bag off after getting the fish done, I take some photos without the protection of the zip lock.
The upper bin, with all the wild Summers and Springers. Thanks for the memories guys! Good luck in your journey upstream.
With some time to spare I decided to do the little walk down the trap to get some better photos of the ladder. Time for a bit of adventurin'.
Looking at the Siletz Falls from the top of the trap boulder, downriver. It doesn't look like much of a falls at this flow, but there are actually stages in this big rock pile that are ten foot drops. If you fell in and got caught in the flow through this... you'd be lucky to stay alive.
A baldie flies around above me in the beautiful afternoon sky.
Here is the trap, looking upstream. You can see that ODFW has put many precautions into making sure that no other human beings are allowed access into the trap, unless they are ODFW employees or volunteers.
A view of the fish ladder looking downstream from the same position as the previous picture.
Down here is a big hole, one of the bigger "rungs" of the ladder.
Looking upstream.
I don't know how many steelhead YOU can see in this photo... but there are lots! Tons! Several hundred.
I decided to take a quick video of this hole, and if you are lucky and pay attention, you can see some fish in there... sorry that it's a bit dark. Enjoy!
An incredible feat of human engineering, all for allowing safe and easy fish passage.
It is know that this immense boulder patch, making the "falls", fell into the river many years ago from the mountainside after a big land fall. Historically, only native Summer Steelhead were able to traverse these falls to get upriver to spawn - as in the winter time the flows are so treacherous and the velocity is so high that Winter Steelhead, Fall Chinook and Coho salmon simply cannot make the trek. It is for this reason that we only pass native Summer Steelhead and Spring Chinook salmon upstream. While the "wild" Spring Chinook Salmon aren't exactly natives (in that they weren't originally upstream of the falls before), it is also known that Spring Chinook salmon and Summer Steelhead are unique in that despite returning to the river and spawning around the same time, they do not compete for resources with each other. They both utilize different spawning habitat as adults, and as juveniles they have different life histories. While the steelhead smolts will rear in the river for up to a year before heading to the ocean to spawn, Chinook smolts will head downstream to the estuary as soon as they are able to. This allows for them to live with each other in harmony for the most part, despite returning to the river at around the same time and going to the same general location.
A hard day's work... done! Heading back across.
A super silly video of my ride to the trap is like... enjoy!
Here we see some evidence of a fisherman who has trespassed on ODFW property. We have notified the forest patrol deputy from Lincoln County, so he will be performing a few extra patrols for us to make sure that the trap stays trespassing-free.
All in all, a great day up at the Siletz Falls fish trap. Thanks for tagging along with me!
As I head down the gorge road, the fog starts to roll in.
Now I'm sure you all are ready for a magic trick?!
Big dirty F350? Watch this...
And a one...
A two...
A three...
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Ta-da! It's like new again! Almost... Some of those mud stains simply don't come out. We like to keep our vehicles clean and proper. We do have a reputation to uphold, working for a state department... ;) And, our vehicles work hard for us, so we like to take care of them as much as we can.
So that is more or less what I do everyday I go up to the trap. Been going up there a lot recently... and I got the good luck last week of getting a flat tire in the lib truck, on the way down, 3 miles away from the end of the gorge road, with fish we intended to recycle still in the tank! After forty five minutes and a few rusted lug nuts later... we got the tire changed and got all of the fish to Moonshine boat ramp, without any harm. They all swam away just fine. It was great! Changing that tire on the gravel road wasn't though. We've continued to have trouble with keeping all our tires pumped up, and we had to purchase a new tire after the flat one was pretty much shot. So we've been in Les Schwabs quite a bit this week as well... Psst, the popcorn and the coffee is free ;)
Over the last weekend I had the pleasure of camping with Evan and spending two full days and an evening up on the very same river that I work at every week, trying my hand at catching my very first Siletz Summer Steelhead. Me and Evan went up on Friday afternoon after work, got a spot at Moonshine, and fished the evening. No fish for either of us, so we decided to head up and fish on Saturday, at 0-dark thirty.
Around 9:00AM, I hooked up with one of the little jack Chinook that have been so numerous in the trap this year! You wouldn't believe the fight this guy put up on a steelhead rod, it was incredible. Quickly released, and I'll most likely see him in the trap later this week.
To my utter surprise, not very long after hooking the Chinook, I was downstream a ways and happened to hook into something extraordinary: a very, very lost and confused Sockeye Salmon. The fish was fire-engine red on the body, with a green-ish colored head, and likely weighed about 5 pounds. I only had the fish on for about 15 seconds before it spit the hook of the spoon I was using, but not before I could get a very good glimpse of it's beautiful color. After unhooking itself, it swam around me in a victory dance before taking off upstream. I'm really hoping that we see that fish in the trap so I can get some photos. Bob Buckman, the district fish biologist and my boss, told me that they get a very tiny number of those usually each year, usually less than a handful. They aren't supposed to be there, but a few stray upriver every year. I'm also told that Chum Salmon will do the very same thing, but mostly in the lower portion of the river. Crazy that the river gets every single run of pacific Salmon except for Pinks!
On Sunday I started out my morning very strong by hooking a 16'' Coastal Cutthroat trout, as you can see on the tape measure here. It would only be my warm up party for what was to come later however...
Here he is, my very first Siletz River Summer Steelhead! Taken on a jig/sandshrimp combination fished under a bobber. This fish marks the 5th fish I've tagged in 5 months, tagging a fish every single month since March. Definitely not a bad year so far!
Here is Evan holding up my second hooked Steelhead. I handed this fish off to him, because he hadn't landed any Steelhead up to that point in the weekend, and that way I was able to continue fishing after he tagged this fish on his tag. Plus, it's always nice when everyone can go home with a fish, right? He was super happy to go home with this fish, as I was to go home with mine.
As the story goes, this would not be the last Steelhead I would hook, but it would be the last I would land. I went on to lose 4 Steelhead, another on jig/bobber that spat the hook after a good 5 minute battle, two more that quickly popped off on a spoon (one that did so after I took a bit of a nasty slip on the rock, and only suffered a flesh wound), and one last fish of the day that was hooked on a spinner, in the run pictured below. It was a chrome rocket, probably about 12 pounds - teeming with energy and spunk unlike any fish I had ever hooked before.
After being hooked, this monster promptly performed 3 cartwheels downstream until it found itself above the rapid to the far left of the picture, and as soon as it decided it wanted to return to the ocean, the hook came undone. A very bittersweet end to the weekend, but it was an incredible day looking back. It simply doesn't get much better fishing then that.
With that ends my sixth post, folks. Stay tuned for more exciting posts coming in August, as I turn the corner and start winding down the hill to the end of my internship.
As always, thanks for reading, and stay classy. We'll see you soon!
