More than 35,000 fish now have a new house, thanks to welding students and their teacher Mike Sorrentino at the BOCES 2 Career and Technical Education Center in Spencerport. The students built three 20' x 5' x 5' pens to house 25,000 Chinook King Salmon and 10,000 Steelhead Trout. After spending 30 hours building the pens, the students volunteered their time during spring break to help stock the pens, in Sandy Creek (Hamlin), with the fish. The fish came from the Department for Environmental Conservation, which oversees the state-funded pen-rearing project to stock Lake Ontario with fish. This community project brought more than 60 volunteers. Once the fish were in the pens, volunteers signed up for four-hour shifts to feed the fish. The goal of the project is to get the fish familiar with the smell of the water so they will return to Sandy Creek in a few years to spawn. According to Charles Chick, co-chairman of the project, the salmon are "programmed" to return to the water where they were raised because they are familiar with the smell. |
