20 years ago

Homer’s Stacey Borgman is going to the Olympics. With a win Wednesday in the women’s lightweight double sculls event at the U.S. Olympic Team Trials for rowing on Lake Mercer in West Windsor, N.J., Borgman and scull-mate Lisa Schlenker, from Oregon, earned a spot on the U.S. team and a ticket to Athens, Greece, for the 2004 Olympic Games in August. Borgman and Schlenker defeated Julia Nichols and Renee Hykel by 6.75 seconds to take the best two-out-of-three team trial. Borgman, a competitive swimmer since the age of eight, graduated from Homer High School in 1993. She picked up rowing at the prodding of her mother while at Columbia University’s Barnard College during her sophomore year.

— From the issue of July 1, 2004

30 years ago

An infectious virus that attacked sockeye salmon fry at the Crooked Creek Hatchery over the winter will mean very weak runs in 1997 and 1998 that could be disastrous for lower Cook Inlet fishermen, hatchery officials have announced. Cook Inlet Aquaculture Association hatchery workers were forced to kill more than 11 million fish destined for Kenai Peninsula and Cook Inlet-area lakes. Those are fish that, based on historical data, would have been expected to produce a return of around 350,000 sockeyes over that two-year period — roughly two thirds of them in lower Cook Inlet, said Tom Mears, executive director of the association which has operated the hatchery since taking it over from the state in July 1993. The fry were killed to prevent the spread of the infectious hematopoietic necrosis virus in fry headed for Tustumena Lake, Leisure Lake, Hazel Lake, Chenik Lake, Ursus Lake, Brian Lake and Upper and Lower Paint River lakes, Mears said yesterday.

— From the issue of June 30, 1994