Woke up about 8 am and wandered over to the marvellous restaurant on the banks of the river Dalävan for breakfast. It is a wonderful big hall with seating for about 100 people, I was the only one there. So I had a really nice breakfast, scrambled eggs and bacon. On the way out I noticed a salmon set in a case at the top of the stairs, it was huge so I went to take a picture. I asked the lady at reception, she said it was the local river record, something over 36kg !!!!!
As promised, at 9.30, Erik Petersson of the Swedish Board of Fisheries turned up to take me to Alvkarleby Salmon Farm. “We’ll take my car Erik”, “No need” said Erik, “We can walk”. So fifty yards down the road was the salmon farm, to one side of the great hydropower turbines built in 1915. The tanks were quite compact in some of the original old buildings but the layout was neat. This site produces about 200,000 salmon and a similar number of sea trout to compensate for the loss of spawning and nursery area above the dam.
As well as the main fish rearing tanks I saw some pretty awesome facilities including an experimental spawning stream with glass sides, a fantastic visitor centre with aquariums made up to look like streams and an artificial stream for stocking experiments. Now that is progressive thinking and what I have wanted for a long time at my hatchery.
The trapping and sorting facilities were well thought out with the minimum of handling for salmon.
I was very impressed with the way they combined the production side of the salmon farm with research and a very good visitor centre which had something like 20,000 visitors per year.
After a hearty lunch, generously paid for by Peter, I said my good-byes and made my way back down south to Stockholm
Picked up Hakan no problem and we then drove about 3 hrs south to our overnight stop at a Eurohotel, in a place called Jonkoping
No comments:
Post a Comment