EDMONDS — Opening the net was like a dam breaking. Thirty thousand coho salmon rushed out into Puget Sound all at once, and just minutes later, they were gone.
Volunteers clad in yellow rubber waders hoisted the now-empty net, coated in grime and heavy with seawater, up on to the Edmonds fishing pier. Another group hitches the pontoon frame that supported the net to their boat and speeds away to the nearby beach, where they’ll dismantle the frame and store it for next year.
The baby salmon called the net pen home from the time they were fingerlings, back in February, said Dan Stauffer, vice president of the Puget Sound Anglers Sno-King Chapter. The group has been doing this for six years running, Stauffer said, with the goal of keeping the waters off the pier stocked with coho for local anglers.
“The seals and birds seem to appreciate the effort, too,” Stauffer said.
Each fall, the fish arrive in Edmonds as eggs, brought up from the state salmon hatchery in Issaquah, Stauffer said. By February, they’ve hatched and are ready to spend their adolescence in the huge floating pen just off the coast. They have room to move and grow and feed, and their diet is supplemented by feed from the volunteers who come to check on their progress and monitor the net for tears.
Upon their release into the wider world, the salmon are 6 to 8 inches long, each with a clipped adipose fin to show their origins when they’re caught later. They’ve imprinted on the Edmonds pier as their first home, Stauffer said, so they likely won’t migrate as far as the open ocean. They’ll return to the pier as they mature, where anglers are bound to pull them up as 6 to 8 pounds’ worth of dinner.
“Fish we released two years ago are now getting caught right off this same pier,” Stauffer said. “It’s pretty neat to see them circle back.”
Stauffer said he thinks coho are the “bread and butter” of Puget Sound fishing. Everyone gets the chance to reel in their own coho on the Edmonds pier — no boat needed — that is free to the public year-round. Stauffer sees old folks who come out every Saturday morning with buckets of bait and dads teaching young kids how to cast their first line.
“That’s why we do it,” Stauffer said. “It’s been going on forever — I caught clipped fish raised in net pens when I was a little kid. I just hope now we can pass it on so some other little kid gets the same chance.”
Riley Haun: 425-339-3192; riley.haun@heraldnet.com; Twitter: @RHaunID.
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