Watching Our Water Ways

UPDATE: Ray Frederick of Kitsap Poggie Club has informed me that Don Larson will talk to the Poggie Club about his hopes for a Bremerton underwater park as well as a bicycle trail from Bremerton to Gorst during the club’s Sept. 10 meeting. The meeting will begin at 7 p.m. at Sheridan Community Center, 680 Lebo Blvd., in Bremerton, and everyone is invited.

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Hundreds of old tires were removed last week from Saltwater State Park near Des Moines, where they were dumped years ago in hopes of forming an artificial reef for fish.

The Associated Press wrote about the project in a short piece carried by many newspapers, including the Kitsap Sun. But the original press release from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife tells a more complete story.

Greg Bargmann of WDFW estimated that more than 500 tires were sitting in 50 to 60 feet of water over 55 acres offshore of the park.

The tires were placed there in the 1970s, when it was common to use tires as artificial reefs. Tires are now believed to break down in salt water and are considered an environmental hazard.

Don Larson, a Bremerton scuba diver who knows Saltwater State Park, says the tires never really worked as fish habitat. While fish generally congregate around rocks, concrete, wood pilings and even shipwrecks, the tires remained barren, he said.

In the late 1990s, a group led by Bruce Higgins, who helped develop Edmonds Underwater Park, tried to create a rocky reef off Saltwater State Park, according to Larson. The late state Sen. Bob Oke of Port Orchard pushed through an appropriation of $250,000 for the project, Larson said, and state officials approved a plan to create a reef of large rocks.

Larson recalls that the National Marine Fisheries Service put the brakes on the reef project out of fear that lingcod and other large fish that would occupy the reef would eat juvenile chinook salmon, which had become listed as threatened species.

Another question regarding the placement of artificial reefs in Puget Sound is whether they actually increase fish populations or simply create an attraction for fish already in the area. If it is the latter, then reefs can encourage predation from other fish and human fishers. See Journal of Fish Biology.

I believe the current thinking is new artificial reefs should include some kind of marine conservation area, or no-fishing zone to protect these long-lived fish. These larger, older fish can become a brood stock for smaller fish to spread out and repopulate a larger area.

Larson has been a longtime advocate of sinking part of a ship or a pile of rocks in a protected area off the Bremerton waterfront, probably north of the Turner Joy. It could become a major attraction for scuba divers and boost the recovery of Puget Sound bottom fish, which have been largely wiped out by over-fishing.

Larson points to the Artificial Reef Society of British Columbia, which has sank about half a dozen destroyer escorts, which have become popular dive spots. The key, he said, is to seal off enclosed passageways and to cut holes in the hulls and superstructure to allow divers to swim into areas where they can see the way back out ahead of them.

Sinclair Inlet isn’t deep enough to sink a full ship without creating a navigation hazard, Larson said, but there are other locations in Puget Sound and Hood Canal that might be suitable.

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Tags: artificial reefs, Puget Sound, Saltwater State Park

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 3:38 pm and is filed under Fish, Puget Sound, Streams. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.