Today we took our spawn...spawning!

There are certain things that occur in the North West that make it worth the 10 months of rain. July and August, for instance, are beautiful months when the sun shines and it gets warm (hot for a few days). In the month of October, is the Salmon Spawning, or as they have officially dubbed it in Redmond this year, Salmon SEEson. Today we took the kids to see the fish. Salmon are not attractive fish, but it is so cool to see them swimming up the little streams and fighting to get home...to procreate then die. The kids were so excited to find the fish, which in our area are sockeye, so they are bright red and easy to spot. We think they were wild salmon, not farm raised. There is a way to tell that has to do with a fin that gets cut off of a farm raised fish. We saw around 12 fish in the area where we went. The biggest was around 24 inches long. (There was a HUGE dead one, probably 36 inches, but his tail was missing, so, we won't count him.) Liam would spot them fairly easily, and get so excited, then he'd throw a rock in the stream and move on. Anders wanted to touch them and go swimming. Elleory would run ahead to see if they were any bigger than the last. Brian and I were just so amazed by the whole process, and glad to see the children enjoying it so much. However we were both sad not to see any salmon jumping over logs, or up waterfalls, like you see in the nature shows, this is just your average everyday commute home...upstream...really tired. I always feel a little guilty, after I see how hard the whole process is, with how easy it is to cook and eat one of them. Maybe we don't work hard enough for our Salmon. (But then that gets me going on the whole fishing thing...) We discovered today, from a 'Native' that it's the first week in October that is the best time to see them. I guess by the time you get as far into the month as we did they are almost done, and I guess a little smaller and more tired. Elleory and I made a promise to write it on the calendar for next year. Brian got a great video of two salmon swimming. Might make you want to join us on next years' outing.