Grove Koger

My good friend Bill Cope recently asked me to take up my old role of reference librarian, and I’m glad to say that, after a bit of flailing around, I was able to help him.

Bill’s question involved the island of Balta in the subarctic Shetland archipelago north of mainland Scotland. He’d noticed a reference to it, he said, because he’d once read a book about a famous sled dog named Balto, which is another story for another day. In any case, Bill had used the satellite feature of Google Maps to look as closely as he could at the island simply to see what could be seen, which, given Balta’s small size (some 200 acres), and northerly latitude (60°45′3.6″ N), wasn’t much. But as he zeroed in, he noticed circular patterns in the waters just off the island’s shores. Were they, he wondered, evidence of some defect in Google Maps? Or were they really there? And if so, what were they?

We both speculated for a moment, and I suspected that Bill was seeing storage tanks for petroleum, which of course is being extracted all over the North Sea. However, when I looked up Balta in Wikipedia, which I use frequently but cautiously, there was no mention of oil. I learned that the island does have the northernmost fish farm and fish hatchery in the United Kingdom, but since I don’t eat fish, I didn’t give the matter much thought.

Next, I turned directly to Google Maps, and sure enough, there were the circles Bill was seeing, two sets of ten apiece just off the island’s western shore. But they looked so regular—so perfectly circular—that, like Bill, I wondered whether they were some sort of defect in Google’s imaging process. You can see what we were seeing here.

The more I looked, however, the more I read about fish farming, so I did an image search under “Balta” and “fish farming,” and sure enough, we were seeing fish cages, which I admit was an entirely new concept to me. They’re essentially large, circular nets that are open at the top and closed at the bottom. Some are designed to float at the water’s surface, but others are apparently suspended below the surface. Those being used at Balta are the former variety, and are being used to raise salmon.

I also ran across announcements that Cooke Aquaculture Scotland bought a company named Balta Island Seafare in 2016, and, given that information, found a YouTube video promoting the Cooke operation, although I’m not sure we’re seeing Balta itself.

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Bill, by the way, was the liveliest writer working for Boise Weekly back in the day. I appeared there very occasionally, but he maintained a weekly schedule, year after year. I was able to help him with research from time to time, and it’s been a pleasure to do so again. You can see a selection of Bill’s columns here.

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The photograph at the top of today’s post shows the beach at South Links, Balta, and the second shows some of Balta’s residents with fish cages and the nature reserve known as the Keen of Hamar beyond. Both were taken by Mike Pennington and are reproduced courtesy of Geograph.