The Daily News
By Tom Paulu
August 30, 2012

Fishermen who reel in salmon during the current Buoy 10 season have been leaving a boat launch looking and smelling better when they head home.

Anglers have been lining up to use the new custom-built fish-cleaning station at Astoria’s East Mooring Basin.

The facility was designed with multiple goals of improving the overall fishing experience, reducing indiscriminate dumping of fish waste inside the boat basin and enhancing the aquatic food web in the lower Columbia estuary.

“In the past, people were just cleaning fish right there at the dock or the boat ramp and just pitching it,” said Troy Laws, an Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist and project coordinator for the cleaning station. “It was a real mess,” which was getting worse as fishing seasons have improved over the past 10 years.

Earlier this summer, the Port of Astoria, in cooperation with ODFW, completed construction of the $130,000 facility with funding and technical assistance from a cadre of partners.

The 20-by-16 foot building is located at the end of 36th Street between the causeway and boat ramp at the East Mooring Basin. The covered, ADA-accessible structure has room for several anglers and features a big aluminum table for cleaning fish.

The facility is equipped with Teflon cutting boards, overhead lights, spray nozzles, waste receptacles and a drop chute for delivering fish waste into a floating barge stationed below the building.

The barge moored outside has a 2,500-gallon hold. When filled, it’s taken out to the main river channel and dumped. “You have to kind of watch it,” Laws said. “When it gets full or smelly, about every two or three days,” the time has come to get it to the river.

The agencies considered grinding up the fish entrails and putting them in Astoria’s sewer system, but the city didn’t want the waste, Laws said. Hauling the fish guts to a rendering plant would have cost too much, he added.

An advantage of dumping the waste into the Columbia River is that nutrients from the material may end up as food for fish, crabs, invertebrates, sea lions, birds and other aquatic life. Fish agencies regularly dump fish carcasses into spawning grounds to provide nutrients there; Laws said it’s also beneficial in the open waters of the Columbia River Estuary.

One of the facility design challenges was creating an operation that would function during both low and high tides, which in Astoria can change water levels by more than eight feet. Project engineers dealt with this issue by using a suspended, 18-inch wide pipe over part of the span between the building and the barge, which itself raises and lowers with the tides. The barge is designed to deter the mooring basin’s numerous sea lions, which loll nearby.

The Port of Astoria manages the facility, which will be open during daylight hours from spring through fall fishing season. It will be closed during the winter.

People up and down the coast, including other ports, are looking at building similar facilities, Laws said. The Port of Astoria might install a similar station at its West Basin.

“Fish waste disposal is a central problem for most entities engaged in this activity at their facilities,” he said.

At the Port of Kalama, however, which is jammed with anglers this time of year, fish cleaning is not allowed. Most anglers comply with the regulation, said Port of Kalama marketing manager Liz Newman.

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