FISH Annual Training – August 24, 2024

2024 Annual Training Day 
Interested in volunteering at the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery? Join us this Saturday to find out volunteer opportunities. Opportunities include: habitat restoration, spawning fish, under water salmon cam, hatchery maintenance, events, photography and more!

See the schedule below:

9 to 10 am – New Volunteer Orientation. Meet at the Watershed Science Center. Orientation includes a brief presentation and hatchery tour.

9:30 to 10 am – Morning Meet and Greet. As new volunteers leave for their hatchery tour, doors open in the Watershed Science Center for current volunteers to complete registration and connect with each other. Coffee, tea, and snacks provided.

10 to 12 pm – All Volunteer Training. Introductions followed by a fall programming overview, refresh on volunteer processes, salmon and hatchery knowledge game, and education best practices presentation.

12 to 1 pm – Lunch Social. Take a break, eat, and connect with other FISH volunteers. Pizza, salads, fruit, veggies, treats and beverages will be provided.

1 to 4 pm – Training Breakout Sessions

For the afternoon, volunteers will be split into three groups and participate in breakout sessions. Session topics are based on the greatest need for fall operations. We ask that volunteers attend all breakout sessions because even if a volunteer is not interested in a topic, it is important to be familiar with it in case a visitor asks questions.

• Fall Fish Operations (includes water safety training for adults)
• Educational Hatchery Tours
• Outreach and the FISHop

1 pm to 1:45 pm – Breakout Session 1

1:45 to 2 pm – Break/Transition

2 to 2:45 pm – Breakout Session 2

2:45 to 3 pm – Break/Transition

3 to 3:45 pm – Breakout Session 3

3:45 to 4 pm – Break/Transition

4 to 4:30 pm – Closing and Questions. There will also be a second opportunity to complete volunteer registration.

FISH GUIDES PROFILE

August 2024

FISH Guides keep coming back every year, just like the salmon

By Grace Reamer

As the Friends of the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery celebrates its 30^th anniversary, we are taking a look back at the people and the activities that brought about the formation and development of this unique organization and partnership.

As a non-profit organization, the Friends of the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery has managed to continue its educational work for 30 years with just one to three staff members. But the vast majority of the work is done by volunteers, and over the years, many hundreds of dedicated community members have lent a hand to FISH. In fact, volunteering is a proud tradition of the City of Issaquah, and volunteers kept the hatchery operating long before FISH was formed.

But what keeps volunteers coming back year after year to lead school tours, answer questions from visitors, staff the hectic and crowded Salmon Days Festival and help hatchery staff collect eggs and milt?

“Educating the public – not only the school kids, but the whole community – about the salmon is so important,” said Norb Zeigler. “Salmon are such an important part of our Pacific Northwest environment, and this is where you can see it and learn about it.”

Norb started volunteering with FISH in 2008, shortly after retiring from his career at the Starbucks headquarters in Seattle. He remembered visiting a community volunteer fair in 2008 and talking to a FISH member at their table.

“I knew nothing – NOTHING – about salmon,” he said. He and his wife, Mary had moved to Issaquah from Chicago in 1995. But the salmon story was so compelling that he signed up for training. Soon he was leading tours for the hundreds of elementary school students that visit the hatchery on field trips every day during the fall spawning season.

“I tell my friends it keeps me young because the kids have so much energy,” said Zeigler, now age 85 and still leading tours. “They are so excited about what they are seeing.”

It was a little different story for another long-time volunteer. David Waggoner moved to Issaquah as a young child and grew up with salmon. He remembers visiting the hatchery on a Cub Scouts field trip in the 1950s. Back then, his grandparents had a farm south of town on Cedar Grove Road, and he remembered that when the creek flooded once, he saw salmon swimming through the pasture. He left Issaquah to join the military, but after his career, he returned to town in 1996 and found the hatchery still operating. He heard about the threat to close the hatchery and the effort to save it, and he joined FISH, then started volunteering in 2002.

“I was doing four tours a day when I started, and close to five days a week,” Waggoner said. More than 20 years later, he has had adults recognize him from when he led their school tour, and they have come back to the hatchery with their own kids.

“You touch their lives for those few minutes,” and that feels like he’s making a difference, Waggoner said. “It puts a face on this thing we call salmon in the Northwest.”

He and Zeigler remembered the day following the 2012 spawning season when they got together with FISH Volunteer Coordinator Bev Lee to review what worked and what needed improvement. They agreed that the aquarium in the lobby of the historic building was the biggest upgrade that would improve the tour and visitor experience. The aquarium was old and needed maintenance and cleaning, and they suggested removing the goldfish.

The two volunteers agreed to take on the project, and with staff help, they found funding and got donated time and materials from contractors, who had to open up the wall, reframe the aquarium stand and build out the space. They tracked down mural artist Larry Kangas, known for his Darigold mural and the hatchery water tower wildlife painting, who had moved to Portland. He was commissioned to create a natural mural backdrop for the new, larger aquarium.

“We wanted the aquarium to represent the Issaquah Creek habitat, with the predators and the vegetation,” Zeigler said. “It must have been one of the last things he did.” Three months after Kangas installed the mural with a pulley system he designed to roll up for aquarium maintenance, they learned he had died.

When the new aquarium full of salmon fry debuted in 2013, Waggoner said, “It was the first place to show the whole lifecycle with live fish in the state.” He remembered a young girl on his first tour walked into the room and exclaimed, “Wow!”

“Now I’m in the sunset of my years, and the fish are still coming up the creek,” said Waggoner, who is still giving school tours at age 80. “I hope after I’m gone, the fish and the kids are still coming.”

For Kim Stanley, the draw of the hatchery is keeping up with the changes over time – at the facility and in the ongoing research about salmon. He has been sharing updates with visitors at the hatchery since 1995.

“Many people don’t realize why the hatchery is where it is and how the whole process works,” Stanley said. “Some people think the hatchery is where farm-raised salmon come from.” He gets to explain to them how hatchery salmon spend most of their lives swimming free in the ocean, and also about how volunteers get in the holding pond with the adult fish and select the salmon by hand for spawning.

In fact, Stanley was volunteering with spawning work well before the facility remodeling project that replaced the old round asphalt ponds with the new fish ladder, underwater viewing windows, and automatic crowders. Back in the early days, he explained, volunteers in waders wielded a big net in the ponds to corral the fish for spawning. Those ponds were shallow and easier for wildlife to access. Stanley remembered hatchery manager Rod Henderson explaining to him that the state used to issue shotguns to hatcheries to scare off birds of prey.

As a facilities maintenance technician for the City of Issaquah, Stanley could be found at the hatchery mostly on weekends. Now retired, he still enjoys greeting visitors and answering the many questions they bring to the Salmon Days Festival.

“After a couple of hours, you are saying the same things over and over. You have to kind of read your audience and see if they want more depth,” he said. “It’s fun seeing people from different cultures,” especially those who haven’t witnessed the live salmon runs before.

He’s especially happy to see students who have learned about salmon in school bringing their parents to the hatchery on weekends. “Sometimes, a 6- or 8-year-old kid may know more than their parents.”

Originally from Illinois, he moved to Issaquah with his wife in 1994. He had got into long-distance biking and did a cross-country fund-raising trip starting in Seattle.

“I thought the hatchery was so cool nestled in between the Issaquah Alps,” he said. “Hearing about the dwindling salmon runs and the threat of closing the hatchery, I decided to volunteer.”

Now living in Sammamish, he also volunteers with the Master Native Plant Steward program. But come September, when the chinook start returning from the ocean, he will be back at his post on Sunset Way.

“I like to see how the run is doing, and it’s fun seeing the other docents and helping out the ones who are new,” he said. “I’m always learning new things, too.”

The FISH docents and guides who return to volunteer year after year get to know each other well, and friendships develop over discussions of spawning techniques and tour tips. Some couples even volunteer at the hatchery together. One fishy acquaintance even evolved into marriage.

Kathy O’Neill remembers briefly meeting veteran FISH docent Darrell Wells when she picked up her son, who was volunteering at the hatchery to earn community service hours for a class at Issaquah Middle School. O’Neill and Wells both were married to other people at the time. But over the years, things changed. Their mutual friends also volunteered with FISH, so they occasionally ran into each other.

“Eventually, there came a time that we were both single people, and then we started dating,” O’Neill remembered. That was in 2007. “We used to meet at the Brewhouse,” Wells added, referring to the FISH Guide favorite lunch spot at the former Issaquah Brewhouse next door to the hatchery.

As some other couples also do, O’Neill joined Wells at the hatchery, attending training sessions and volunteering to greet visitors and answer questions. She had already learned a lot about salmon from her son’s school project, but she credits Wells with getting her hooked. Eventually, they worked up to a wedding in 2019.

Wells came to the hatchery through his love of fly fishing. He grew up in Southern California and treasured trout fishing trips to the eastern Sierras. After moving with his family to the Sammamish Plateau in 1993, it didn’t take long for him to discover salmon.

“When I realized we had a salmon hatchery in my backyard, it just blew me away,” he said. He showed up at the first volunteer training session in 1995, which involved about a dozen people on the deck next to the creek. They listened to presentations from FISH ‘s first executive director Steve Bell, hatchery staff and Muckleshoot Tribe biologist Mike Mahovlich, and they took home a three-ring binder with background materials about salmon biology and lifecycle to study.

Wells was eager to jump in the pond and help with handling fish on spawning days. But those salmon are a lot bigger than a rainbow trout. He was thrilled with “just being in the middle of all those fish and how strong they were,” he said. He recalled the first time hatchery staff told him,” Don’t hold on too hard with your thumb.” The pressure can result in a condition referred to as “spawning thumb,” when temporary numbness makes it difficult to pick up a cup of coffee.

Wells soon joined the FISH Board and came up with the idea to track visitors to the hatchery.

“We found out that people locally always wanted to bring their friends from out of town when they were visiting,” he said. “The hatchery was a big draw.”

Wells bought a large paper world map and mounted it on a cork board. Visitors were asked to press a colored pin into the map to indicate their hometown. Within a couple of years, the map was full of pins from dozens of countries all over the world.

Over the years, Wells, now 74, has done some of everything at the hatchery, from rescuing big chinook that accidentally jumped out of the holding ponds, to pushing the FISH Board to establish a gift shop. (The FISHop first opened in 2012, thanks in large part to the couple’s efforts.) He enjoys early mornings on fall weekends, before the crowds arrive, when he can sweep some leaves off the deck, pick up any litter and savor the tranquility of the salmon park in the middle of town.

While other Issaquah residents plan to leave town the first weekend in October, O’Neill and Wells embrace the chaos and jump right into the middle of it. They often can be found at the underwater viewing windows, interpreting the salmon story for the enthralled crowds.

“It’s exhausting, but it’s really fun,” Wells said. “You would answer the same five questions a thousand times. You would go to work on Monday, and you hardly had a voice left.”

 “It’s very exciting to be there, especially at Salmon Days weekend, because there are so many people, and they are excited to be there,” explained O’Neill, who arrived in Issaquah in 1995 and settled on Squak Mountain, just up the hill from the hatchery. “The entire town parades by you. It’s a great reminder of what a lovely community we live in.”

“It’s really a unique group of people,” Wells said of the FISH volunteers. “What I enjoy most is just hanging out on weekends and answering questions. About 90 percent of the people who come there don’t know anything about salmon. I just love talking to people about FISH and trout and salmon.”

The experience of sharing salmon with visitors creates a family atmosphere among volunteers. Wells met and bonded with fellow FISH guide Kevin Boze while sharing tips between visitors on the bridge over Issaquah Creek. They’ve remained friends and fountains of fish wisdom since 1999.

“There are so many fascinating things to learn about salmon, and a lot of them verge on the incredible,” Boze observed. “Sometimes, I’ll tell a tour, ‘If you think I’m making something up, raise your hand.’ I never actually make anything up, but visitors still raise their hands. Salmon are fantastic creatures.”

A Boeing engineer and community theater actor, Boze lived just a few blocks away from the hatchery and volunteered to help out there after his wife started working for FISH. Just one season of harvesting eggs and leading tours got him hooked. He served for several years on the FISH Board and was named volunteer of the year in 2004. He even takes vacation days from work in the fall to get in the adult holding ponds and wrangle salmon on spawning days.

“Salmon Days is my favorite time of the year,” Boze said. “We see tens of thousands of people, and they all have questions about the fish. I’m happy to share the remarkable salmon migration story, over and over again, to help people understand how important these fish are to our community, and especially to the tribal cultures here.”

Volunteers often mention a sense of responsibility that comes with the work – responsibility for keeping the hatchery operating 30 years after it was threatened with closure, and responsibility for interpreting salmon behaviors and educating young and old about this keystone species.

“The hatchery is Washington State property, so, in a sense, it belongs to everybody,” Boze noted. “When you volunteer at the hatchery, you really and truly feel like you own it. You care about it, and you have a stake in its future and in the continuation of our salmon runs.”

            What all volunteers have in common is their reverence for the Northwest salmon and their remarkable migration and life cycle, and how they symbolize the resiliency and sustainability of the Northwest ecosystem.

“I fully believe in my heart of hearts this is a gift we have been given to take care of until we have no more breath,” Waggoner concluded, “and then we turn it over to someone else who we are teaching daily to become the salmon stewards of the future.”

Thanks to these volunteers, and to these other long-serving FISH Guides:

• Richard “Doc” Andersen – served as docent and spawning volunteer. He was the physician for the Issaquah High School football team and had a practice in Issaquah before moving to North Bend. He also was an avid fisherman. “He could tell you the name of the disease that causes the fungus on spawning salmon,” Waggoner said. Zeigler added, “I was so impressed that he was giving tours and answering questions when he was legally blind, with his wife, Janet, guiding him. He seemed to love that.”
• Eileen Barber – served as board member, docent, business owner and Issaquah city councilmember. As a member of the Chamber of Commerce and the Kiwanis, she was instrumental in collecting donations from the business community to remodel the Aquarium Room, Zeigler said, and she gave many tours as well.
• Bruce Davis – served as docent and spawning volunteer. RIP 1927-2003.
• Doug Emery – served as board president, docent and Issaquah School District teacher
• Ava Frisinger – served as board president, docent and Issaquah mayor and councilmember. “I remember Ava coming over on her lunch hour from City Hall to do a tour,” Waggoner said. “When I found out she was the mayor giving a tour, that blew me away,” Zeigler added. “That just showed her love and dedication for this place.”
• Don McWhirter – served as docent and spawning volunteer. He established a tradition of bringing donuts for volunteers at the weekly spawning sessions, and he became known as the “whack king” for his well-practiced method of dispatching salmon for manual spawning, Waggoner said. RIP 1931-2020
• Don Monchil – served as docent, spawning volunteer and FISH photographer. RIP 1928-2020
• Norman “Crash” Nash – served as board member and docent. He was a retired military pilot who moved to Issaquah with his wife from Whidbey Island. He was a member of the VFW, where he met and recruited Waggoner to volunteer with FISH. Waggoner related the story about how Nash got his nickname, after he survived two plane crashes. RIP 1935-2017
• Charles “Stan” Staniforth – served as docent and DFW volunteer, named State of Washington Volunteer of the Year. “He always seemed to be on the grounds and talking to people,” Zeigler said. “He was very social and asked the kids lots of questions.” Waggoner added, “He just wanted to get out of the house, and the hatchery gave him something to do. There’s nothing Stan wouldn’t do.” RIP 1929-2014