I was slogging along the beach in Mukilteo not far from the ferry dock recently when I spotted Jon Houghton and his colleagues crouched over a long black net.
Houghton, the chief fisheries biologist for Seattle’s Pentec Environmental, started waving and pumping his arm, urging me to pick up the pace. Shuffling along in chest waders, a yellow hard hat and an orange vest while juggling a camera and a notebook, I was moving in really slow gear.
I up-shifted to just plain slow and eventually made it to the net, where Houghton was rapidly scooping handfuls of sand lance, generally called candlefish, back into the water. They’d netted literally thousands of the candlefish, Houghton said, and quite a few juvenile salmon.
The salmon were the real quarry – and Houghton was happy with what they’d nabbed.
“I would say the fish are using it,” he said.
The “it” Houghton was referring to is an artificial beach created for the Port of Everett under some duress. The Tulalip Tribes insisted on the beach work because the port wanted to put a new barge pier smack dab in the middle of one of their usual and accustomed fishing areas.
The port needed the Tribes’ OK to receive federal permits for the pier, designed mostly to handle giant containers of Boeing jet parts which can be sent on a rail spur to the Everett assembly plant. So it signed on to the beach idea.
What the port agreed to do was to take an area that didn’t really have a beach and to fix it for salmon. The area, which runs about 1,100 feet, abuts some giant rip-rap rock that keep the Burlington Northern-Santa Fe Railway tracks from falling into Puget Sound. The tide had been running right up against the rock. The sloping beach in the area had long been washed away.
All told, the port spent $684,000 to bring sand, gravel and plants and to anchor the manmade beach with some fairly large rock.
The jury’s still out about whether things will last, but early surveys taken by Houghton show that for now, the beach appears to be a complete success.
Houghton noted that it had long been an area for spawning candlefish.
“The question was whether they would continue to use it,” he said, adding, “Juvenile sand lance are here to a fault.”
So are the salmon.
As I watched, Pentec’s Jim Starks and Derek Ormerod plucked young salmon from the bucket – Chinook, coho, chum and pinks. The laid them onto a measuring device so they could record their size, then slipped them back into buckets to be returned to the water.
On the day I had visited, Houghton had planned to run a net on the other side of the barge pier – an area where no work was done – for comparison. But the motor on his boat went dead. So it’s unclear whether the nearby natural beach is better or worse.
In any event, the new beach is working, which should be good news to all of us because although the area is closed now, it will eventually be opened to the public. There’s parking for a dozen or so cars and a nice stretch of beach for walking, picnicking or just hanging out.
And people aren’t the only creatures who are invited.
The port has anchored a dead tree into the beach that will be a great perch for osprey and eagles.
Port director John Mohr said the agency’s staff was excited when an eagle was photographed on the beach eating a fish.
“It looks like a real beach and we’re excited about it,” he said.
He’s hoping the project will become a model for creating or restoring beaches in other areas of the Sound.
It’s something that can be replicated from Golden Gardens (in Seattle) to Everett,” he said. “There’s a lot of opportunity.”
The barge project was promised to Boeing by the state if the jetmaker would agree to build the new 787 Dreamliner in Washington. But it looks like Boeing won’t be the only entity to benefit.
Mike Benbow: 425-339-3459; benbow@heraldnet.com
Researchers examine fish found on an artificial beach that was recently created in Mukilteo near a new pier.
Mike Benbow / The Herald
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