PORT ANGELES — A seafood company has slightly altered its proposal to move its Atlantic salmon farm operation out of Port Angeles Harbor and into the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
In addition, all of the 11 permits required for the proposed new pens, located 1.7 miles north-northeast of Green Point, have been completed.
The company is awaiting responses from the local, state and federal agencies, Alan Cook, vice president of aquaculture for Icicle Seafoods Inc. of Seattle, told about 25 people at the Port Angeles Business Association meeting Tuesday.
“I used to talk about the Byzantine nature of the permitting process. I really had no idea,” Cook said of the process to install the first new salmon farm in more than 20 years.
Icicle Seafoods has operated fish pens in Port Angeles Harbor for nearly 30 years.
They raise genetically natural Atlantic salmon, Salmo salar, which are only distantly related to the six Pacific salmon species of the genus oncorhynchus.
A new proposed 4.1-acre pen is just east of a location selected in November, moved due to concerns expressed by the Puget Sound Pilots regarding ship transfer areas in the Strait.
Cook said the new location offers better water flow of up to 3 knots, which would keep the pens clear of fish waste and allow the expansion to 1.1 million salmon, using plastic pens in place of the current nets.
The plastic pens are used in the Atlantic, where the seas are considerably higher than the 18- to 19-foot waves that are a 100-year high for that portion of the Strait, in an area sheltered by Ediz Hook, he said.
It would be located far enough out in the Strait so that it would only be a line on the horizon from the bluffs, he said, but outside of shipping lanes.
In addition to the farmed salmon, which comprise about 15 percent of the company’s fish sales, Icicle Seafoods also sells wild-caught salmon, halibut and cod.
Proposed Navy pier
The company is concerned that the current fish pens, just south of Ediz Hook, would be too close to a pier proposed by the Navy at the Coast Guard station on Ediz Hook in Port Angeles, and the Navy wants to remove the structures currently used to access the fish pens, Cook said.
The Navy has proposed building the pier to accommodate as many as seven escort vessels that guard submarines traveling between Port Angeles Harbor and Naval Submarine Base Bangor in Hood Canal.
Congress has approved $20.6 million for the 2016 fiscal year for the project, which has an estimated cost of $27 million.
The Navy has proposed building the pier 2,000 feet east of the Puget Sound Pilots station just outside the field office entrance and 1,600 feet from the underwater riprap reef known as the rock pile, a popular scuba-diving attraction.
Close to fish pens
Cook said Icicle Seafood operators are worried the pier’s location would have the high-powered escort vessels passing within 50 feet of the net farm’s floating pens, which contain as many as 820,000 salmon.
He said powerful engines on those boats could create 6-knot flows across the pens. That could collapse the pens and allow thousands of Atlantic salmon into the environment, he said.
Any escape of fish would be reported to the state Fish and Wildlife Department, and a recapture would be attempted, he said.
Typically, escaped fish mill around the pens because it is the only home they know and are easily recaptured, but Cook said if they do get away, a fish derby would be opened for sport fishermen to catch all the Atlantic salmon they want.
Cook noted that an attempt to plant Atlantic salmon smolt in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s failed because the fish are not adapted to survive in the conditions here.
Moving the operation would have other benefits, he said.
The fish waste would not build up in the harbor, and the pens would depart an area designated as being sensitive for native aquatic species.
The proposed new location is more ideal for raising salmon, Cook said.
He said the salmon currently in the pens are maturing and scheduled to be harvested in December, so ideally, the new pens would be stocked with new young salmon.
The Navy hopes to begin pounding pilings in December, so all fish in the existing pens would have to be harvested earlier in the fall because the noise from the pile driving would kill them, Cook said.
Comment on a draft environmental assessment for the Navy proposal was closed Jan. 28.
The final environmental assessment is expected to be released this summer.
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Reporter Arwyn Rice can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5070, or at arice@peninsuladailynews.com.