Dinnel, P. and Apple, J., 2012. Community Beach Seining at Ship Harbor, Fidalgo Island, Washington, August 2012. Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA. pp. 27.

One of the goals of the Northwest Straits Commission is to facilitate citizen science by training local citizens on how to collect scientific data and monitor the status of our marine resources and habitats. A second goal of the Commission is to provide education and outreach activities for local communities. The purpose of the Community Beach Seining project is to address both of these goals by using community volunteers to collect fish monitoring data and interact with interested community citizens by including them in the sampling efforts and data collection.
Beach seining at Ship Harbor is continuing, in part, the fish sampling initiated at this location in 2010 as part of Skagit County Marine Resources Committee’s (Skagit MRC) Cannery Pond Evaluation Project, which was primarily conducted by a WWU graduate student (Dinnel and Seyl 2011). Continuation of fish sampling in 2011, 2012 and beyond will provide a longer term fish database for this North Fidalgo Island (west Guemes Channel) location, which is not being monitored for fish by any other organization. All data collected will be forwarded to Skagit River Systems Cooperative, which maintains an extensive database for seine sampling in Skagit County waters, especially in relation to juvenile salmonid species.
This report summarizes the Community Beach Seine sampling conducted at Ship Harbor on August 13, 2012. Data from this effort are presented in this report, and also includes comparisons to two previous sampling efforts at Ship Harbor (August 2011 and June 2012). Additional information and data from these two previous sampling efforts may be found in an earlier report (Dinnel and Apple 2012).
Methods
The location of the beach seining site is Ship Harbor, which is located on the northwest side of Fidalgo Island just east of the Washington State San Juan Island Ferry Terminal (Fig. 1). The tidelands are owned by the Port of Anacortes and the uplands are owned by the City of Anacortes, both which have given their permission for site access
All seining activities were conducted at high tides (+6.0 foot or higher). The site substrate is sand with a cobble fringe at the high tide level. The dominant vegetation is algae, with sea lettuce (Ulva spp.) being the dominant vegetation.
Two previous Community Beach Seine sampling and education events were held on 8 August 2011 and 14 June 2012. The sampling reported in this report occurred on 13 August 2012. Sampling was conducted with a large net beach seine measuring 120’ (36.6 m) long by 12’ (3.7 m) deep by 1/8” (0.3 cm) mesh knotless nylon net using sampling protocols established by the Skagit River System Cooperative Research Department (SRSC