Originally published Saturday, May 31, 1997

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

If you want fresh fish anywhere near Woodinville, you don't go to the supermarkets. You watch where the great blue heron and kingfishers go for their fresh fish: down the road to my neighbor Knut Olson's Gold Creek Trout Farm.

On soft summer days, as you drive by his trout ponds along 148th Avenue Northeast, you can see the glistening backs of rainbow trout moving at the surface like dozens of small Trident submarines.

And magazine-cover scenes of moms and dads, or grandmas and grandpas with children holding bamboo fishing poles over the water. And there's a whole lot of whooping and laughing when they set the hook and arc that pole to launch a frying-pan-size fish through the air and onto the grass.

This ain't exactly shooting fish in a barrel, but I've never heard of anyone not getting a fish at Gold Creek. These puppies are hand-fed from birth, and you'll catch supper before you know it.

My mother-in-law and Aunt Elsie from Chicago caught our supper in less than 10 minutes when we stopped at Knut's place a couple years back. I almost choked laughing because these two women had fished all their long lives, and there was Knut, offering instructions on how to hold the pole and how to set the hook. I thought mother-in-law was going to wrap the bamboo around his neck!

If you have $5, you can plunk a baited hook into any of several ponds and pull in a couple of 10- to 12-inch rainbow trout and go home with a little change in your pocket. On any day of the year, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

"We do close at midnight on New Year's Eve, but we open again at 12:01 a.m.!" quipped Knut in his unmistakable Swedish accent. There are special prices and arrangements for youth groups, birthday parties and similar outings.

Frankly, I was afraid to ask what they'd charge for one of those 2-foot-long submarines that look like they weigh about 10 pounds.

No one gets skunked at Gold Creek. Knut or his son-in-law, Steve Markey, will help you bait your hook, show you how to hold the fishing pole, and also clean and bag your catch. Knut's been doing that for almost 20 years, and the man still looks pretty much the same as when I first "fished" there. That could be because, at 75, he still runs 5,000-meter races and has only in the past several years cut down on his outdoor-orienteering competitions.

Steve and his wife, Peggy, Knut's daughter, pretty much run the trout farm full-time now. Steve often is accompanied on daily chores by their three sons, Benjamin, Travis and Taylor. And they, in turn, are followed by Mollie, their pony-size black-and-white Great Dane.

But after two decades of building it up and running the fish farm, Knut finds it hard not to be involved, and help out on the endless chore schedule. There are ponds to be cleaned, landscaping to be maintained, fish to be fed (some four times daily), pumps and other equipment to be repaired, and, of course, hooks to bait for customers.

Knut has created a small parklike environment on the slopes of Hollywood Hill, taking advantage of the big timber, the ferny understory and the several uphill springs that also feed 50-degree fresh water into his system of free-standing and in-ground fish tanks and ponds. The fishing area is rimmed with blooming rhododendrons and other shrubs.

And occasionally draped fishing nets, barely visible in the slanting sunlight, which Knut has installed along the edge of the property to thwart persistent heron and kingfishers, who can do to a trout farm what Herschel the California sea lion and his buddies have done to the local steelhead run.

To stay ahead of the natural predators and the occasional incursion of vandals, Knut, Steve and Peggy also farm their own fish crop, using as many as 2,500 eggs stripped from each mature female, and raise enough trout to stock private lakes and ponds from the Canadian border to Pierce County. About 350,000 rainbow are hatched out here every fall, with about half destined for private lakes.

There's some question whether the creek that runs down off Hollywood Hill through Gold Creek Trout Farm is actually Gold Creek, or Wildcat Creek, or a no-name creek, according to Knut, who's been there almost 20 years.

"Originally, this was built by (W.G.) Tyrrell (the Seattle pet food king who also built the Gold Creek athletic club facility below Knut in the Sammamish Valley) as part of a 40-acre estate, but he gave 38 acres to the county for the (Gold Creek) park and sold the house and two acres (including the trout farm)," Knut said.

There were neither fish nor fishermen enough 20 years ago to make a living, Knut said, so he kept working full time as a mechanic and fishing boat engineer in Ballard and Alaska.

"But over the years we added some ponds and we rebuilt all of them ... had to, when storms and runoff washed some of them completely out," he said.

I can remember one storm almost 10 years ago that must have gone through the trout farm like Snoqualmie Falls. Volunteers were picking lunker trout off the lawns and highway shoulders hundreds of yards below, on the main road that goes up the east side of the valley.

"We lost more than 13,000 fish in that storm ... not even one left!" he lamented.

"And later I had to remove six feet of mud out of all the ponds with a backhoe."

That was a real backhoe, as opposed to the long-handled shovel he used when he first came to this country after World War II. Knut was from a farm family near Göteborg, and was trained as a forester before serving almost two years in the Swedish Army.

"We were mostly near the Finnish border, where I can remember temperatures of minus 36 Celsius." (He could have blamed Fahrenheit, a German, instead of Anders Celsius, a Swede, but once it gets that cold, both thermometer scales sort of even out).

Because his older brother lived here then, Knut got a job as a plumber's laborer and lived -- where else? -- in Ballard. Later, for almost 20 years, he worked on and around ships, either seasonally or all year, in Alaska. It was then that he learned how to weld, work on engines and operate heavy equipment.

"It also was when I was shipwrecked when our 110-foot converted sub-chaser got wrecked on some submerged rocks," he said. "We spent two days on a small island not far from Kodiak Island before we were rescued."

He turned down a chance to be relief skipper on a tuna vessel in 1967, even though he knew the skipper, and that decision "probably saved my life, because they all went down, four men lost, on their second trip, in storms in Unimak Pass," Knut recalled.

Going "on the beach" and buying the trout farm was a good move, he concedes.

I didn't do too bad, either, moving right up the road from the freshest fish dinner on the Eastside.

Jon Hahn is a staff columnist who writes three times a week in the P-I.