The farm sat anchored in Deepwater Bay, southeast of Cypress Island in the San Juan archipelago, west of Bellingham Channel. The pen structure had been placed there in 2001, measured roughly 182 feet by 436 feet, and hung from 65 to 100 feet below the surface. It had been stocked with 369,312 smolts in May 2016 and held about 305,000 fish at the time of the failure, an estimated biomass of 2.8 million pounds scheduled for harvest beginning the following month. Washington was then the only state on the American Pacific coast where Atlantic salmon were farmed. The industry prefers them because their domestication is much further along than any Pacific species: generations of selective breeding for fast growth, disease resistance and docility have produced a fish that does well in a cage. None of those traits helps a fish that is suddenly not in one.

This was not the first sign of trouble. A month earlier, on 24 and 25 July, the same pen's mooring failed, was repaired, failed again, and was repaired a second time. The August collapse came during the strongest tidal currents of the summer, which is precisely when accumulated biofouling matters most, because every added ton of growth increases the drag that the moorings have to hold against. A boater reported the break. Then came the arithmetic dispute: Cooke initially put the escape at four to five thousand fish. The Department of Natural Resources estimated between 243,000 and 263,000. The company later revised its own figure upward to around 160,000. Even taking the lowest official number, this was one of the largest accidental releases of farmed fish in the region's history.

Washington's Department of Fish and Wildlife did the only thing available and authorized unlimited catching of escaped Atlantic salmon. Roughly 57,000 were recaptured, which left two thirds or more of the fish somewhere in the Salish Sea with no one tracking them. Coastal tribes did most of the work. The Swinomish, Samish and Lummi all put boats on the water, and the Lummi Nation declared a state of emergency, taking about 44,239 fish weighing close to 393,000 pounds. Through November and December, members of the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe were pulling Atlantic salmon out of the Skagit River itself, and they were still finding them in April 2018, eight months after the pen came apart. Wild Pacific salmon runs in these rivers are already under severe pressure, and nobody could say with confidence what several hundred thousand loose Atlantics would do to them.

Cooke bought the recaptured fish back at thirty dollars a head. Then the company made the Lummi an offer: forty-two dollars a fish, a raise of forty percent on a catch of more than forty thousand, if the Nation would drop its campaign for a prohibition on salmon aquaculture in Washington waters. The Lummi refused. It is worth being precise about what that refusal cost, roughly half a million dollars turned down by a tribal government with no shortage of uses for it, and about what it bought. The campaign continued, and it won.

In March 2018 the Washington State Senate passed a law banning the farming of Atlantic salmon in state waters, to be fully in force by 2025. The following month, Thurston County Superior Court upheld the Department of Natural Resources in terminating Cooke Aquaculture Pacific's farming licence, which meant the company could not restock its pens in the interval before the ban bit. An industry that had operated in Washington for decades was ended by a single badly maintained net. Annie Crawley's documentary short about the collapse, Frankenfish, screened at the Seattle International Film Festival in 2018 and at the NOAA and University of Washington Sea Grant River and Ocean Film Festival the same year. Deepwater Bay is empty water now.