Odd Fellows Help Maintain Kokanee Hatchery

— from Michael Riordan —

Al Nickerson (right) watches as biologist Mike O’Connell (left) delivers thousands of Kokanee salmon eggs from Lake Whatcom Hatchery on January 9. (photograph by Michael Riordan)

Led by lifelong fisherman John Sumrall, a small group of Odd Fellows is working with park rangers to maintain the Kokanee salmon hatchery at Moran State Park. The hatchery is housed in the small brown building just past Moran Creek to the left of Olga Road after you pass through the archway; the building had once served as the park registration office. Visitors can peer in the window and watch juvenile salmon, last year’s hatchlings, drifting about in a glass tank.

Last November the Odd Fellows helped ranger Al Nickerson and retired ranger Dave Castor transfer about sixty thousand hatchlings from the hatchery troughs across Olga Road into the lower reaches of Moran Creek. From there the hatchlings swam the rest of the way into Cascade Lake. (Actually, some of them immediately tried to swim upstream.) This arduous transfer — which previously took Castor and Nickerson many hours in the dead of night — was accomplished in little over an hour by the Odds forming a long bucket brigade from hatchery to creek.

During Thanksgiving week, one can often watch the mature, dull-crimson Kokanee trying to migrate back up the creek, attempting to spawn. Creek waters were, however, not high enough for them to do so in 2017.

Thus the Cascade Lake Kokanee population is replenished every year by importing Kokanee salmon eggs from Lake Whatcom Hatchery in Bellingham. The salmon in that lake are able to spawn and reproduce in a creek running into it on the east shore, providing a reliable annual source of eggs for the Moran hatchery.

This year the egg delivery occurred just after noon on January 9, thanks to marine biologist Mike O’Connell, manager of the Long Live the Kings hatchery on the Youngren property between Eastsound and the park. He picked up over 200,000 eggs at Lake Whatcom early that morning and brought them back on ice on the 11:20 a.m. ferry. I was fortunate to return to Orcas Island on the same ferry and was present at the delivery, having been alerted by Nickerson.

It was a thrill to view thousands upon thousands of bright pink eggs laid out placidly in two black plastic trays, teeming with the potential of much more vigorous activity later this year. If you looked closely, you could even see two tiny brown spots on many of these eggs, what will soon grow into salmon eyes.

These eggs are now being slowly hatched in three plastic tanks, watched over every morning by an Odd Fellow who comes by the building to check the water temperatures and flow rates — and to make sure a pernicious, light-brown fungus is not growing on them. If all goes well, we’ll be forming another bucket brigade late this year to transport many thousands of Kokanee hatchlings into Moran Creek and Cascade Lake.

And maybe one day soon Orcas Island will have its own sustainable Kokanee population in Cascade Lake, returning every year to spawn in the upper reaches of Moran Creek.