Lucky seven: Snoqualmie family rescues flood-stranded goldfish

Published 3:55 pm Tuesday, January 27, 2015

This is a fish story, but not about the ones that got away. In this tale, the fish come back home, and are all living happily ever after, thanks to an observant neighbor.

Jesse Herrin of Snoqualmie is the hero of our story, rescuing seven large goldfish stranded in his back yard by the rapid rise and fall of the Snoqualmie River Jan. 6.

It all started when the river overflowed its banks Jan. 6, rolling through the back yards of the Southeast Park Street neighborhood, and making the fishes’ pond a whole lot bigger. The fish, pets of Rick and Maureen Irey, just swam into Herrin’s back yard, where the slowly receding water left them stranded by Tuesday night.

“When I left (for work) Wednesday morning, there was no water in the yard,” Herrin told his wife, Diana Fender, as the two recounted the story for the Record last week.

When he came back a few hours later, to care for their daughter Viviane who was ill, the yard was dry enough that he decided to start cleaning up.

The flood had left behind a fine layer of silt, and had scattered clutter throughout the yard, he said, so he just started picking up toys.

He noticed a bright fish in the grass, he said. “I thought it was a toy… it was just bright gold, and the sun was out,” he said. Then he picked it up.

“I knew for sure that it was someone’s goldfish,” he said.

The fish didn’t look good, but he decided to put it in water anyway, a large outdoor water table in the yard. He was pleasantly surprised to see that the fish got more lively, but then went back to his cleanup job.

“I came across another one, and then near it was another one,” he said. “They did not look like they were going to make it.”

Herrin guessed they’d been out of the water about eight hours by then.

Into the water table they went, though, and when he saw them perk up, too, he decided to do an actual search for the fish.  After a sweep of his yard, he’d found six, all of them starting to revive in the water. He spotted another one in a neighbor’s yard, and rescued that, too.

When he couldn’t find any more fish, it was time to find their owner.

“My contribution to this story was just to tell him that he had to find the owners, or else this story wouldn’t have a happy ending, it would have a sad one, with those fish getting eaten by a raccoon overnight,” Fender said.

They almost did, anyway, because Herrin and Viviane walked around their neighborhood,  knocking on a few doors, showing their camera-phone pictures of the fish and asking everyone, including friends on social media, if they knew someone who owned a pond and might be missing some fish.

They’d started to think that the fish may have come from further away than their own neighborhood, and it was early evening by then.

“We were just about ready to stop looking,” Herrin said, when they talked to their next-door neighbor, who knew the Ireys, and knew they’d just gotten back from a vacation.

Maureen Irey was “ecstatic” when Herrin showed her the pictures of the fish.

“I couldn’t believe it when he showed up at the door!” she said.

They joked that Herrin found Nemo, but none of the fish have names. They are all special to Irey.

“I put in a pond three years ago, and bought 10 little fish,” she said. “Ten fish for a dollar…

“I bought the ones they sell for food. I said ‘we’re going to rescue 10 of them, at least.’”

The rescued fish flourished in her pond, and they reproduced there, too.

Irey said there were 15 goldfish in the pond before the flood, and she could find only four afterward, but she thinks there might be more, once the silt settles.

“They were all getting down in the mud,” she remembered, in the days before they left on their trip. “They must have known something was coming.”

As for the missing fish, Irey hopes they are in the river, or found their way to someone else’s pond.

Her own fish are now community pets; the Herrins are invited to stop over and see them any time.

The seven fish that Herrin found went into this water table, where they quickly revived.

Maureen Irey shows Jesse Herrin and his children to her goldfish pond. “How are the fish?” they always ask.

The Herrins back yard had about four feet of water flowing through, when the fish came to vist and got stuck in the yard by the receding water.