INDIAN ISLAND — The return of young salmon to the eelgrass beds of the tidelands below Indian Island’s sandstone-stacked bluffs has been swift following the removal of an earthen causeway that opened fish passage.
Even Bill Kalina, the island’s longtime environmental program manager for the Navy, was taken aback by the jump in the number of juvenile salmon since the causeway was replaced with the bridge at the south end of Kilisut Harbor, according to his comments in the Kitsap Sun.
“We weren’t expecting these results so quickly,” Kalina said. “It happened almost overnight.”
For the past 75 years, the causeway’s two small culverts were the only way saltwater — and the life traveling in it — traversed Oak Bay north to Kilisut.
But in 2020, a $12.6 million state project replaced the causeway with a concrete girder bridge.
Only six juvenile salmon were found during seining in the five years before the bridge opened.
During this year’s seining, over two days in May, volunteers netted close to 1,000 juvenile salmon.
“The increase was really dramatic,” Kalina said.
Since at least 1958, the channel had been blocked by a buildup of sediment, not to mention state Highway 116 that connects the two islands.
Now, that land bridge is history. In its place sits a 440-foot concrete girder bridge.
The reconnection of the two long-separated bodies of water represents the culmination of a multi-year effort by the North Olympic Salmon Coalition to restore not only a historic migration route for endangered salmon but also the marine ecosystem of Kilisut Harbor, which had suffered from elevated temperatures and stagnant, sediment-filled water.
The coalition came up with the lion’s share — nearly $10 million — while the state pitched in $2 million and the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe added another $1 million by way of a NOAA Restoration Center grant.
