Bandon Hatchery

Fish Hatchery Road leaves Highway 42S about half a mile east of Bandon, on the way toward Coquille. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife runs the hatchery at its end. Water comes down from two reservoirs held behind earthen dams, and wood ducks keep to those intake reservoirs the year round. Herons and kingfishers are about in every season, and swallows from May through September. Below them is a show pond of large rainbow trout, which visitors may feed. A camp host lives on the grounds, and there are picnic tables and a restroom.

The trout in the show pond are the only fish on view in every month. The hatchery collects adults, incubates eggs, and rears young fish of three kinds: fall Chinook, winter steelhead, and trophy-sized rainbow trout. In a 2014 grant application the department called Bandon the largest producing fish facility in Oregon outside the Columbia River Basin. It reported more than three million Chinook from two stocks incubated or reared there each year, and more than 400,000 winter steelhead from four stocks. In 2011, the same application said, about 11,000 fall Chinook caught in Coos Bay had come from this hatchery.

Bucks, jacks, and green females

Adult Chinook come in during October and November, and adult steelhead from December through March. Spawning runs from October to March, usually on Tuesday mornings, and visitors may watch.

The Coquille Indian Tribe recorded one such Tuesday in late October 2021. Hatchery manager David Welch stood waist-deep in a holding pond with a net. He looked at each salmon and called it as he tossed it into a pen: “Buck.” “Buck.” “Jack.” Grown males went in one pen. Jacks, young males that had come home a year early, went in another. “Green” females, still a few weeks short of ripe, went in a third. When Welch found a female ready to spawn, he held her up for Kassandra Rippee. Rippee was the tribe’s archaeologist and historic preservation officer, and that day she held a wooden club.

Three females were ready. Rod Knoebel, an ODFW senior technician, squeezed milt from three males, and Todd Martin caught it in separate paper cups. Welch and Knoebel then took the eggs from the three dead females, usually between 2,000 and 5,000 to a fish. They split each female’s eggs among three plastic dishes and fertilized each dish with milt from a different male. That made nine parent groups, which Welch said gave the new generation the widest possible genetic mix. Tribal member Kristopher Murphy counted the eggs with a hand clicker. After tissue samples were taken, the carcasses went back to the river.

The hatchery normally has three employees, and that autumn one position was vacant. “I don’t know where we’d be without that,” Welch said of the tribe’s help.

Trout for the streams of this locality

Salmon were hatched near Bandon long before the Ferry Creek ponds were dug. The Oregon Historical Society records that the Oregon State Fish Commission set up an experimental hatchery station on the Coquille River near Bandon as early as 1902. In 1910 the commission leased land beside the river and built a simple hatchery building. The society notes that this first Coquille River hatchery may have stood somewhere other than the later one. In 2002 its writer, Kathy Tucker, described how hatcheries of that era worked. Crews barricaded streams with wooden racks, took the eggs and milt from salmon held back by the racks, and released the fry into streams across the state. She called the early program largely unsuccessful and wrote that the success of hatcheries “continues to be debated.”

The present hatchery began as a trout plant. In 1924 the Oregon state game department was setting up a trout hatchery on Ferry Creek, on about ten acres donated by Elbert Dyer. The site was chosen because its water and temperature suited the hatching of trout. Temporary buildings were put up for the first season, and the trout eggs came from a newly opened egg-taking station on the Coos River. ODFW gives 1925 as the year of construction.

In March 1925 the Western World reported the “State Trout Hatchery Now in Operation Here.” The paper placed it “a mile east and a little south of town.” It said the site had been picked for its advantages and in recognition of local sportsmen who had “worked tirelessly for the project for several years.” Moss Averill was in charge, and that season the plant turned out 850,000 fry. High water in the fall had carried away some of the temporary buildings, which were then replaced. The commission planned two batches of a million each the next year, with possibly another half-million, to stock the streams of the locality and supply trout elsewhere. The paper called it “the only hatchery specializing on trout in this part of the coast.” A staff residence followed in 1929, and in 1934 a hatchery building with wood exterior walls.

Three in the morning, November 1950

By 1950 the Western World described the hatchery as sitting where Ferry and Geiger creeks meet, with some ponds in the path of each. After torrential rain on a Sunday night that November, superintendent Willis Baker made his usual check of the water at about 10:15. He found both creeks rising fast.

At 3 a.m. on Monday, a wall of water about 12 feet deep had backed up into the canyon above the Geiger Creek dam, and the east end of the earthen dam gave way. The water pushed in a concrete slab about 6 feet high and 40 feet long that had formed the end of the first pond below the dam. Logs and snags crashed into a pond where 936 female cutthroat brood fish had been sorted from the males ahead of spawning. The logs broke the pickets, buckled a section of concrete wall, and mixed the sorted trout back together. The pond below held 15,000 young silverside salmon, six to 12 inches long, due for release into fishing streams. An undetermined number washed down Ferry Creek, and the paper judged they had probably gone into the Coquille River or out to sea. Many were netted after the water dropped and returned to ponds that now held a mixture of kinds.

The flood ran on into town. At 4 a.m. George Hawkins came to open Surfside Dairy, near Third and Garfield, and found 12 to 20 inches of water across the floor. He and his son Warren worked in it until it went down, between 5 and 6 a.m.

The other dam, on Ferry Creek, also feeds the reservoir that supplies Bandon’s city water. Its spillway proved inadequate in the 1964 flood and in other big storms. Early in 2014 water was found seeping under the concrete spillway. It had opened voids underneath, and the spillway had cracked and sunk in places. The reservoir was drawn down several feet, and fish production suffered. That March, staff and volunteers packed the damage with bentonite as a temporary fix. Tom Rumreich of the ODFW Charleston office then applied for money to rebuild the spillway in concrete. The plan called for the City of Bandon to lend equipment for the demolition, and for volunteers to do the rebuilding. These were crews, the application said, who had been building fish facilities in the district for more than three decades.

Brood stock from the mouth of Ferry Creek

In 2010, by the tribe’s count, more than 30,000 fall Chinook returned to spawn in the Coquille River. By 2021 the number was a few hundred. Ed Hughes, ODFW’s acting fish district biologist in Charleston, said returns crashed along much of the coast starting around 2018. “Other coastal basins recovered,” he said. “But in the Coquille here, they didn’t bounce back.” Biologists tied that failure to invasive smallmouth bass, which eat young salmon. ODFW closed the Coquille to Chinook fishing in 2021, and the Tribal Council declared an emergency.

On Tuesday, September 28, 2021, tribal employees and volunteers gathered in downtown Bandon where Ferry Creek enters the Coquille. Tribal biologist Helena Linnell and a helper set a seine from an ODFW boat. Men in waders dragged it through the shallows and herded the fish toward shore. Six adult Chinook were netted, carried up the beach to a truck, and taken to the hatchery’s holding pond about two miles upstream. “It was the first sign of our relatives returning,” said tribal chairman Brenda Meade.

Only 16 fall Chinook had reached the hatchery in 2020. By the end of October 2021 there were 81. The tribe counts the breeding pairs collected as three in 2020, 24 in 2021, and about 150 in 2022. The first young Chinook from the 2021 spawning left on June 15, 2022. That same year the tribe and the state signed an agreement to co-manage fish and wildlife across five southwest Oregon counties, and they set up a conservation program for the Coquille’s wild fall Chinook.

Under that program the fish are spawned at Bandon, raised at Cole Rivers Hatchery, and brought back to Ferry Creek to imprint before they go to sea. In September 2026, tribal fisheries workers stretched a seine across the creek and pushed hundreds of finger-sized smolts downstream. “They get the scent of the river, and then they’re ready to go out to the ocean,” said Jesse Rodriguez, a technician who had stood in the creek in rubber waders all day. That month Meade said the fish from the tribe’s first releases were coming back. “This year is so important,” she said, “because that four-year rotation of the smolt that we were a part of releasing for the first time are now the fish that are coming back into the river.”