Well, life has been getting better as Kona is finally house broken, I found my mailbox, and we're starting to go out on projects at work. I found out there's funky stuff in the water at my house so I'm either going to get a filter or start buying water. Sheesh!

Now I have bad news: my grandmother passed away on the 26th of February. She died peacefully in her sleep and the official cause was congestive heart failure. I'm going to Hemet this weekend to attend her funeral.

On a lighter note, here are some pictures from the fish hatchery.

















Here's a great view of the lake, mostly frozen but the fish still survive. They instinctively go up stream to spawn, so we don't even have to catch them. They swim up these ladders and right inside the hatchery.



















Once they're in side, we sedate them with MS and carry them over to get squeezed. That green tube being used has a needle on the end of it and we put 5-7 psi of pressure inside the fish to get the eggs started. Then we squeeze the rest of the eggs and all the air out by hand. It's most important to get all the air out or the fish will float, and die. 50% of the fish die naturally when they spawn and the rate of death at a hatchery is actually a little less than that. Plus our fertilization rate is higher and it gives us the ability to "grow" fish for other lakes.

















When we're done we send them back out to the lake through this tube that has running water in it.


















Here's a bucket with fish eggs from 7 females in it. After we get it we literally just pull out a bag of sperm, dump it in and stir it up. After about a minute we rinse off the sperm though because we don't really want "slow swimmers" to pass on their jeans. Then we pressurize them to sterilize and put them in trays to incubate. They're very sensitive the first 23 days. They can't dry out, be moved, or exposed to light.

Well, I guess that's a wrap! I'd better get back to work. I have my first evaluation today...I'm a little nervous.