PORT ANGELES — A seafood company is proposing to move its Atlantic salmon fish farm operations out of Port Angeles Harbor and into the Strait of Juan de Fuca by 2017 because of plans for a Navy pier.
The current fish pens, just south of Ediz Hook, are too close to a proposed U.S. Navy pier to be located at U.S. Coast Guard Air Station/Sector Field Office Port Angeles, Alan Cook, vice president of aquaculture for Icicle Seafoods Inc. of Seattle, told about 40 members of the Port Angeles Regional Chamber of Commerce on Monday.
The Navy has proposed building the pier to accommodate as many as seven escort vessels that guard submarines travelling between Port Angeles Harbor and Naval Submarine Base Bangor in Hood Canal.
The proposed Navy pier would be built 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.
The current proposed location was offered to address concerns expressed by the Puget Sound Pilots over three other locations at the Coast Guard base considered earlier.
Port of Port Angeles commissioners proposed a secure pier for the Navy boats on existing commercial piers, but the Navy declined.
Cook said he believes the proposed pier will be completed, though the full planning process is not yet complete.
“The Navy is going to do what the Navy does,” he said.
The pier’s location would have the high-powered escort vessels passing within 50 feet of the net farm’s two floating pens, which contain as many as 820,000 salmon, Cook said.
He said the Navy’s escort boats are highly maneuverable, but an eventual incident is inevitable, and moving to a new location makes sense for the company.
Powerful engines on those boats could disrupt the thousands of salmon living in the pens, and the nets could be sucked into the propellers, loosing thousands of Atlantic salmon into the environment.
He said moving the operation would also have other benefits, as the fish waste would no longer be in the harbor and would depart an area designated as being sensitive for native aquatic species.
Icicle Seafoods’ proposed new location is two miles east of the harbor mouth, off of Green Point.
Cook said the new location offers better water flow to keep the pens clear of fish waste, and would 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 14-foot swells that are a 100-year high for that portion of the Strait, 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 not in the shipping lanes.
A map of ecologically sensitive areas shows the new location is not in an identified sensitive aquatic habitat.
The Port Angeles Coast Guard has been contacted regarding the new location, and the company was told it would not obstruct operations, but the Coast Guard in Seattle will make the final decision, he said.
There are also local, state and federal permits that need to be obtained before the move can be made, he said.
Cook said the salmon currently in the pens are maturing and scheduled to be harvested in 2016, so ideally the new pens would be stocked with new young salmon.
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Reporter Arwyn Rice can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5070, or at arice@peninsuladailynews.com.
