Monday April 20

    Today was a really awesome experience and I learned a lot. We woke up really early and went to the Buford hatchery. We got there at 8am and after a brief talk with our contact Pat, we were put to work. The first thing he had us do was a mortality count. We went from raceway to raceway and scooped out all the dead fish, counted them, and then recorded the number into their log. In one raceway there was over 100 dead which was a lot to count. We then took a tour with Pat and he showed us their filtration system. He explained it to us and it is basically a combination of mechanical and biological filtration. The end of the day was the best part. We collected fish found out the average fish / pound in a raceway. The stocking truck was then pulled up and we netted the fish and put them in the truck right after weighing them, so they could see how many fish they were releasing. We then fallowed Pat and got to stock the Chattahoochee river.