It"s open season on Atlantic salmon as the public is urged to help mop up a salmon spill from an imploded net pen holding 305,000 fish at a Cooke Aquaculture fish farm near Cypress Island.
Lummi fishers out for chinook on Sunday near Samish, south of Bellingham Bay, were shocked to pull up the spotted, silvery sided Atlantic salmon — escapees that turned up in their nets again on Monday.
The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife is urging the public to catch as many of the fish as possible, with no limit on size or number. The fish are about 10 pounds each. No one knows yet how many escaped from the floating pen, but the net had some 3 million pounds of fish in it when it imploded about 4 p.m. Saturday, said Ron Warren, fish program assistant director for the WDFW.
Cooke, in an estimate to WDFW, put the number of escaped fish at 4,000 to 5,000, according to Ron Warren, fish program assistant director for the WDFW.
The department has been monitoring the situation and crafting a spill-response plan with Cooke, Warren said.
In a statement Tuesday morning, Cooke said "exceptionally high tides and currents coinciding with this week"s solar eclipse" caused the damage. Cooke estimates several thousand salmon escaped following "structural failure" of a net pen.
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