State terminates Vashon kelp farm’s aquatic lease

Published 9:59 am Wednesday, August 27, 2025

State officials terminated Pacific Sea Farms’ aquatic lease on Monday due to the company’s inability to retrieve portions of its large kelp-growing array and 3,000 feet of line that sank in open waters between Vashon and Tacoma five months ago.

In a letter dated Aug. 25, Thomas Gorman, manager of the state Department of Natural Resources’ Aquatic Resources Division, said retrieval of the sunken equipment was necessary for Pacific Sea Farms to come back into compliance with its lease and resume farming. The state initially gave the farm until May 5 to find the gear, then granted the owners two extensions.

On Aug. 7, Mike Spranger, co-owner of the kelp farm, told the state he could not locate the gear or retrieve it from the seafloor. Spranger offered an “alternative remedy,” saying he would provide 100 hours of scuba diving to support the state’s underwater tire removal and derelict vessel programs.

“State does not accept this alternative remedy to cure the default,” Gorman wrote in his letter to Spranger. The lease termination is effective Sept. 30. “Damages in lieu of the retrieval of the sunken seaweed array and other gear” may follow, he added.

Gretchen Aro, Spranger’s business partner at Pacific Sea Farms, said in an email Monday: “We’re obviously disappointed in DNR’s decision to cancel our lease, but as the manager of our State lands it’s the DNR’s prerogative to do so.” The company did not have further comment.

Pacific Sea Farms had just become the third commercial kelp farm in Puget Sound and the first one in King County after it received a development permit from the county, won a legal challenge to operate and secured a four-year aquatic lease for 10 acres near Tahlequah in Colvos Passage. Spranger, a diver with a keen interest in food production, said in earlier interviews that he was thrilled to join the region’s nascent kelp farm industry, growing a product he hoped would someday become “as ubiquitous as tofu.”

Last September, Spranger and Aro began paying the state an annual rent of $5,984 for the right to cultivate and harvest sugar kelp, oysters, clams and mussels in publicly owned waters 300 feet off Vashon’s shoreline.

But on March 29, the dream unraveled, when Spranger learned that a section of his kelp-growing array — heavy with his first crop of sugar kelp — had broken free and was floating in Dalco Passage or Commencement Bay. In an email to the state, he said he located the grow lines and aluminum spreader bars a few hours after he learned of the equipment failure but could not pull them into the boat “due to their weight, space available on the vessel and safety considerations.”

His email said “those lines were cut and immediately sank” to a depth of about 500 feet. Some 100 pounds of equipment also sank, he said in his email. He notified the state of the equipment failure on April 2, five days after the incident occurred.

DNR notified Spranger that he was in default of his lease on April 4, two days after receiving his email, citing six specific lease provisions that Pacific Sea Farms violated as a result of the March incident. Among them was the farm’s failure “to keep and maintain (its equipment) in good order and repair and in safe condition.” The state also cited Spranger’s “failure to timely notify DNR” of the equipment failure.

In its most recent letter, DNR said it has since learned that the spreader bar “at a minimum … was inadequately designed and therefore in an unsafe condition,” another violation of the lease. The state says Pacific Sea Farms must remove all of its existing equipment from the site by Sept. 30 and must tell the state in writing when it plans to do this work.

DNR also said it reserves the right to collect Pacific Sea Farms $166,000 security for use of the site if the company fails to meet all of its obligations under its lease.

Meg Chadsey, a carbon specialist at Washington Sea Grant and coordinator of Washington Seaweed Collaborative, which supports responsible kelp cultivation, emailed the Beachcomber a brief statement Monday night after learning that the state had terminated Pacific Sea Farms’ lease. Spranger is a member of the collaborative’s advisory committee.

“Of course I am disappointed in this outcome, though I understand that DNR must act in accordance with the terms they set for Pacific Sea Farms’ lease,” she said.

Amy Carey, executive director of Sound Action, a regional environmental group that sued the county in 2023 for issuing a permit to Pacific Sea Farm, said in a statement Monday night that the state made “the right decision, but it cannot erase the fact that this outcome was preventable.”

“From the outset of this proposal, we identified substantive gaps in the applicant’s materials and the permitting agencies’ evaluations,” she said.

Carey called on the state and other permitting agencies to “use this incident as a clear warning and take immediate steps to reform review processes for aquaculture and other development proposals, particularly in ecologically sensitive or high whale-use marine areas. Transparent, unbiased and science-driven evaluation is not optional.”

— Leslie Brown is a former editor of The Beachcomber.