Qualla: Cypress Island Atlantic Salmon Pen Break

Cypress Island Atlantic Salmon Pen Break: Introduction

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The company blamed the eclipse. When a ten-cage salmon farm broke apart in Deepwater Bay on 19 August 2017, releasing a quarter of a million non-native Atlantic salmon into the Salish Sea, Cooke Aquaculture Pacific attributed the failure to freak tidal currents generated by that week's total solar eclipse. Washington State Department of Natural Resources investigators went and looked. The currents that week, they found, sat comfortably inside the range the same pen had survived in previous years, and the eclipse had no meaningful effect on the tides at all. What the investigators did find, hanging on the nets, was one hundred and ten short tons of barnacles, mussels and marine growth on a net structure that weighed eighteen. The pen was carrying more than six times its own weight in filth because nobody had cleaned it.

Cypress Island Atlantic Salmon Pen Break: What Was in the Water

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

Cypress Island Atlantic Salmon Pen Break: The Pen Had Already Warned Them

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 b...

Cypress Island Atlantic Salmon Pen Break: Catch Them All

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Cypress Island Atlantic Salmon Pen Break: Thirty Dollars, or Forty-Two

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Wa...

Cypress Island Atlantic Salmon Pen Break: The Ban

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 f...