Fish flying through sorting facility

$100 million project at Lake Billy Chinook to get fish past dams
By Kate Ramsayer / The Bulletin
Published: April 17. 2010 4:00AM PST

LAKE BILLY CHINOOK — Brad Wymore had it down to a science.

At a fish sorting facility Thursday morning at Lake Billy Chinook, he scooped up a net's worth of young salmon and slipped them into a tub of water and anesthesia.

When the fish stopped flopping as much, he picked them out, one by one, and waved them through an electronic tag detector. He snipped off a small facial bone, clicked a counter to add the fish the tally and shuttled them down a water-filled chute to a holding tank.

A truck waited nearby to drive the salmon around the three dams of the Pelton Round Butte complex, where they would start their migration down the Lower Deschutes and toward the Pacific Ocean.