The fishway is constructed using 11 concrete weirs and is approximately 300 feet wide by 400 feet long. The boulders are approximately 5 feet in diameter, with 2.25 feet projecting above the crest of the weirs. The gaps between the boulders range from 3 to 5 feet. In total, there are over 700 boulders in the fishway.

For the simulation shown, the drop from normal pond to the tailwater downstream of the last weir is approximately 6.4 feet or 0.58 foot per pool. The fishway is passing 890 cfs, 237 cfs of which is spilling over the top most weir from the headpond and the remainder is being supplied by 5 overflow gates. The 5 gates have varying levels of submergence on their tailwater sides, depending upon each one’s location, and they are each passing from 108 to 137 cfs. The velocity varies throughout the fishway, but is generally less than 6 feet/second. The nominal cell size in the mesh is 3 feet but decreases to 0.75 foot on the tops of the weirs to capture hydraulics between the boulder gaps. The largest cells have sizes of 96 feet and are located primarily in the headpond away from the fishway.

The model is run using the full momentum equation, with an eddy viscosity mixing coefficient of 0.44. The computational timestep is 0.1 second and the Courant Numbers max out at around 0.6, with the highest values being in the cells on the downstream sides of the gates where water is flowing into the fishway. The timestep is very small, but the model does not need to simulate a very long time since it is a quasi-steady model, meaning there are constant boundary conditions (a constant inflow hydrograph at the upstream end of the model and a stage hydrograph at the downstream end of the model).  The model achieves steady state in less than 1 hour of simulated time.  Model run-times averaged about 3 hours.