Fish hatchery adjusts to drought

The United Anglers of Casa Grande, the celebrated fish hatchery program at the local high school, found itself closing the steelhead breeding ponds earlier this year due to the severe drought in California. But that didn’t stop the 32-year-old program from continuing to play a major part in the conservation of native fish species, and an important one at that.

“Our whole curriculum was based around the study of steelhead and how a hatchery operates,” said program director Dan Hubacker. “That component got thrown out midway through the year, because of what was happening in the creek. The environment was driving it in a different direction.”

Because of the California drought, low water flow created a crisis in Adobe Creek, the waterway that the first United Anglers helped save over 30 years ago. The problem was that fish were trapped in the drying creek’s pools, and in danger of dying off. The result was less time at the school hatchery, more time in the field.

“The main change was shifting more toward the monitoring of the creeks in this watershed – monitoring the water temperatures, monitoring the low flows and the impacts that were occurring,” Hubacker said.

As well as working hands-on with several salmonid species, the group is now putting all the pieces together for their annual fundraiser, set for Nov. 1 at the Lucchesi Community Center, as well as a fundraising site at GoFundMe.com/g4udko. It’s their way of keeping the program alive – essentially paying for their own classes, as Hubacker terms it. “They write a check every year to the school district,” he said. “So all the talk about teachers and the district and budget cuts – here, you’ve got high school kids raising money to have their classes.”

After the fundraiser is over, the United Anglers students will turn their attention to observing and cataloging the Petaluma River’s annual wild salmon run. Then they’ll prepare their hatchery’s race-ways for reopening with a new generation of steelhead fry, delivered from the Congressman Don Clausen Fish Hatchery at the other end of Sonoma County. State and federal fisheries officials have decided the Casa Grande hatchery is too important to let it go unused for another year.

At the Don Clausen Fish Hatchery, in the shadows of the Warm Springs Dam at the end of Dry Creek Valley, Hubacker is dressed in hip waders, ready for action in the hatchery’s tanks and runs. On this Wednesday he brought two of his new students up to the facility for their first day of on-site work. Working at the hatchery is a key part of the class curriculum.

The students climbed into the large circular tanks, where dozens of nearly-mature Coho circled restlessly. Their mission, on this their first day of work at the hatchery, was simple: take a tough brush broom and scrub down the floors and walls of the tank, to loosen up the layer of slime, food and fish waste particles that had collected there, so the tank’s filtration system can keep the water fresh.

When asked if this was what he signed up for when he selected the class, sophomore Peter Lantier answers without hesitation, “Yes sir!” Freshman Zack Holdenried nods in agreement, and they both get back to work.

The hatchery, a joint project of the Army Corps of Engineers and the California Department of Fish and Game, has overseen the spawning of steelhead as its primary purpose since it opened, to replace the natural Dry Creek spawning grounds flooded by Warm Spring Dam. The Casa Grande students are hip-deep in that effort as well, but the more important mission has become maintaining a genetically viable breed stock of Coho salmon - fish that have disappeared from their natural breeding grounds throughout the Russian River watershed. Once they were so prevalent old-timers said you could walk across the river on their backs during spawning season; now the only place they breed are in hatchery tanks.

Over three decades, the program has produced hard-working, scientifically astute students who learn more than just how to hook a worm. Hubacker stresses that the students learn to follow the processes of fisheries work, that everything is dependent on doing things right.

“It’s one thing to have a chore at home,” said Hubacker. “Their chore here is, this is what we have to do. It’s an understanding of processes, that there are steps they have to follow. They have that all the way down to the day-to-day operation of the hatchery. We don’t have a custodian that comes into this building – so everything from the fence inward is the responsibility of the student.”

“We work hard, we learn and we try,” said senior Kerrianne McCarthy, this year’s student president of UACG. “I don’t really know if I ever expected United Anglers to become such a huge part of my life, it just kind of did. From the moment I walked in the classroom, I was sold. The program was interesting, it was unheard of, it was unique, it was everything. I guess I just kind of fell in love with it.”

“I have kids coming into the program who are actually afraid of fish,” said Hubacker. “There are plenty of these kids who will never go into the field of fisheries. They may not even go into the field of science. But when it’s all said and done, they walk away with an understanding that they want to make a difference. And they do.”