Bowden Fish Hatchery transformed into state

Click here to stay informed and subscribe to the Mountain State's Trusted News Source.

Click #isupportlocal for more information on supporting our local journalists.

Learn more about HD Media

BOWDEN — Recent renovations to the state's largest trout hatchery might help anglers catch more, bigger and healthier fish next spring.

Division of Natural Resources officials think it will happen, and they have 10 million reasons to believe it will. That's roughly how many dollars it took to turn the inefficient, 60-year-old Bowden Fish Hatchery into a modern, state-of-the-art trout factory.

"A lot of advances have been made in aquaculture worldwide, and we are now able to take advantage of some of those advances here at Bowden," said Jim Hedrick, the DNR's supervisor of hatcheries.

The most significant improvement was to the facility's very lifeblood — its supply of clean, cold water. When the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service built the hatchery in the early 1960s, they designed it to draw its water from two large limestone springs and from the nearby Shavers Fork River.

Problems soon arose, however. Construction of a nearby four-lane highway restricted the flow from one of the springs, and the water from Shavers Fork turned out to be too warm in summer, too cold in winter, and too acidic all the time.

From the get-go, those shortcomings kept the hatchery from producing as many trout as it was designed to supply. Hedrick said he believes the renovations, which took more than three years, solved the facility's water problems all at once.

"As was the case with many hatcheries of its time, Bowden was built so water passed through it only one time," he explained. "The water went first to the hatch house, then to the raceways where we grew the fish, and then out the effluent pipe and into the river."

Now that the renovations are complete, water used in the hatch house and raceways gets cleansed and recirculated back into the system.

"Instead of water returning to the river immediately, it's sent through a recirculation building," Hedrick said.

"A series of drum filters, which contain big revolving screens, filter all the solid waste out of the water. After the water goes through the drum filters, it goes through ultraviolet sterilizers to remove microbes. From there, it gets pumped up into a degassing tower, where fans blow through it to remove excess carbon dioxide and also to boost its oxygen content."

With the new recirculation system, the hatchery no longer needs water from Shavers Fork, which Hedrick considers a threefold benefit.

"One, the water from the springs is of a consistent temperature and water quality," he added. "Two, it's free of the wild parasites and diseases that the river water used to bring into the hatchery. And three, we no longer have acidic water from the river causing the walls of the concrete raceways to deteriorate."

All 40 of the hatchery's existing raceways were resurfaced during the renovation. Hedrick said the contractor told him the product used to resurface them is more durable than the concrete itself, and should last for decades longer.

The contractor's crews also constructed 20 brand-new raceways, which theoretically will boost the hatchery's capacity by 50%.

"We had been producing about 200,000 pounds of trout a year with the old setup," Hedrick said. "I’m pretty confident that, with these changes, we can push that up to more than 300,000."

All of the newly constructed raceways are covered with netting, a feature designed to protect young trout from being eaten by herons, kingfishers and other predators.

"They don't bother the big fish very much, but they can eat hundreds of the little ones," Hedrick said. "We originally planned to cover all of the raceways, but we had some unexpected expenses that caused us to only cover the new ones. We hope to get netting on the others eventually."

The renovation also brought 21st-century computer control to the entire facility. From his desktop unit or from an app on his cellphone, Bowden superintendent J.R. Wilson can monitor each raceway's water temperature, pH, dissolved-oxygen content and flow rates. If a piece of machinery malfunctions, the computer's alert system sends Wilson a warning via text message.

"It's nice to have all this technology," said Wilson, who has managed the facility for more than two years. "We’ve learned a lot, but we’ve definitely still got some learning to do."

Since the Fish and Wildlife Service sold Bowden to the DNR in 1997, the facility has ranked as the state's largest by a wide margin. Despite its size, its inherent water-quality problems prevented it from being as useful as officials might have liked.

"We haven't had much success at spawning brook and brown trout here, due to disease problems caused by the river water," Hedrick said. "Now that we’re no longer using river water, we can."

The refurbished facility eventually will produce all five varieties of trout stocked in West Virginia — rainbow, golden rainbow, brook, brown and tiger (a brown-brook hybrid).

The new recirculation capability also will allow the hatchery to use a piece of infrastructure that has sat idle since it was built in the 1960s.

"We actually have two hatch houses here but, until now, we’ve only had enough spring flow to use one," Hedrick said. "We didn't want to use river water on such young fish. Having two functional hatch houses will definitely help boost our capacity."

Anglers won't have long to wait to enjoy the renovation's benefits. Hedrick said a bit of forethought during construction has allowed the hatchery's crew to seamlessly accelerate Bowden's trout production.

"We planned ahead and started the process a couple of years ago to grow enough brood fish so we’d have enough eggs," he explained, "and then, last year, we had enough eggs laid down so we’d have enough fry to fill all these raceways. The bottom line is that we’re operating this hatchery at its capacity the very first year."

The fruits of those labors should become apparent next spring, when the fish currently being reared at Bowden will be ready to stock.

"Barring any catastrophe, we’ll be looking at a significantly higher stocking rate," Hedrick said. "We expect the overall allotment of trout to rise for each of our stocked waters."