Day 11

July 18, 2017

Today I was feeling not feeling good. Head, stomach, my whole body just seemed to be hurting. Brenda woke up to shower and I just decided to just lay there a bit. Breakfast didn’t even sound good. I just wanted to stay in my tent.  I eventually had to get up and get ready to go to the Spokane Tribal Hatchery. There we were received by Tim Peone the Tribal Hatchery Manager, who graduated from Eastern Washington University. He explained how 80% of the people’s protein came from the River. The Hatchery was constructed in 1990. 20 years into the program they were mandated to pit tag their fish so that they could track how many hatchery fish are being fished. Their program is known as give & share, where 100% of the fish that is grown at the hatchery is meant to be harvested. Their current annual release goal for Lake Roosevelt is 3.7 million kokanee fry, 250,000 kokanee yearlings and 750,000 rainbow trout yearlings. They have just started to grow fish on top of fish. Where each bottom container holds 6,000 fish and each top container holds 4,000 fish. While we were there people were cutting the back fin of each fish so that once they were released they can be differentiated from wildlife fish.