Spokane Hatchery Fin Clipping

Those in attendance from our Club were Stephen Aspinwall, Dan Lobb, Floyd Holmes, Leon Buckles, Chet Allison, Phil Beck, Jon Bowne, Ward Buckingham, Bob Harley, Tom Hoag, and Bob Johnson. We were joined by a group from the Spokane Fly Fishers and several Fish Hatchery employees plus Chris Donley, Regional Fisheries Manager, WDFW.

We started at 8 AM and most worked until 3 PM with the Hatchery guys furnishing us pulled pork sandwiches, chips and potato salad for lunch.  There were about 60,000 triploid rainbows to clip for the Avista financed planting into Lake Spokane.  It was a great activity for a near Fall day. The setup that we used was built with minimal cost by the Hatchery guys. Fish were dipped from the rearing pond into a central holding tank that ran about 20 feet in length. On each side of this central shallow tank was another aluminum trough that held a fish anesthesia to make the fish stop moving. The small dipping nets with fish were placed in the anesthesia water and we pulled each fish from the net so we could then clip their adipose fins and placed them in a plastic rain gutter on each side that took the fish to another rearing pond to recover. It was a very well designed working area.