KOMO 4 NEWS segment

[THE REEL HEY_YALL]

This was on the news and comes to y'all via their website. Still can't find da dang blasted Married With Children show on this weird Communist TV and funky remote control.

Salmon Using Newly Restored Hamm Creek

November 14, 2000

KING COUNTY - Coho salmon are using the new, natural estuary and streambed of Hamm Creek, which formerly ran through a roadside ditch and a one-thousand foot long pipe.

Migrating salmon and the carcasses of spawned out salmon were found in the creek last week just two months after the three-year, $3.5 million project was completed.

King County and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers designed a new two-thousand foot natural channel for Hamm Creek that includes an open ravine, wood and other natural features, 1.5 acres of estuary and three acres of wetlands.

The new channel will be easier for adult salmon to return upstream to spawn and should greatly help juvenile salmon survival rates as they head into the Duwamish River and Puget Sound. The wetlands give fish shelter when flows are high. The estuary gives them a place to acclimatize to saltwater. Virtually all Duwamish estuaries have disappeared.

The restored section of Hamm Creek is on an easement King County purchased from Seattle City Light where the utility has a substation. The easement is owned by King County as part of its contribution to the Elliott Bay/Duwamish Restoration Program.

[Wet_Willy]

Nice to see this in the news!!!

When I was about 13 my bro and I were fishing on a family friend's property high on Eagle Creek. I don't remember the exact combination of salmon but we had a hen and buck between the two of us and decided to do our own hatchery experiment. We fertilized the eggs and took them down to Johnson Creek below Leach Park where we planted them in the gravel.

We sort of forgot about it after a year or so but then an article in the Oregonian several years later talked about the possibility of a run returning on Johnson Creek.

Of course the odds of our fish making it are about as good as winning the lottery off a ticket somebody threw away, but it was nice to dream that maybe our fish made it after all.

It's been a lot of years now and there isn't a run on Johnson Creek and probably never will be again. Just chalk it up to blind enthusiasm only found in youth. It does dredge up some old memories though hearing about renewing stream habitat. Mother nature is the only cure for our problems...

WW

[STRIKE ZONE]

Great childhood story, but mother nature isn't all we have we can make a differance if we try.Good luck, STRIKE ZONE