1.2 million

One of our on-going projects has been to clean egg trays.  There are 200 egg trays holding about 1.2 million eggs.

One of two tray rooms.

In November some eggs will be taken from the brood stock here at the hatchery but most of the eggs raised here will be brought in from another hatchery close by.

By April the eggs have hatched into salmon fry and are ready to be moved to indoor tanks.  By that time the trays are pretty scummy.  Water is circulated through the trays to keep the scum from drying and hardening on the trays.  Once dried, the scum is very hard to remove.

When we would have an hour or two to spare we would tackle the on-going job of cleaning the trays.

Each column of trays has its own water supply that would need to be turned off and the water drained from the trays.

This is a very wet and messy job.

It was a good job for a warm, sunny day.  It would take a while to get everything set up before we could actually start power washing the trays.

The trays are very dirty.

There are three parts to the tray.  

The top screen keeps all the eggs in place.  Mark had to carefully power wash the screen so that it wasn't damaged.

The first inside tray is screened so that water can continuously circulate.  It is the tray that holds the eggs. 

The bottom part of the tray holds the water that is continuously circulated.  It’s the dirtiest part and has lots of crevices that are hard to clean.

The bottom gets cleaned inside and out.

 

This has been a great project to work on when we have extra time.  There wasn’t a big rush to get it completed.  When the days were warm we could take a couple of hours to clean a column or two of trays.