Once the eggs are harvested from the female fish and fertilized with milt from the male fish, they are incubated in vertical incubator trays at the hatchery until ready for shipment to other facilities. There is much work and care involved in getting the lake trout eggs from the stage of newly spawned green eggs to eyed eggs ready for shipment. The incubator trays must be flushed twice a week to remove silt and debris from the hatchery water supply, Sullivan's Creek. Once the eggs are 50 percent developed to hatch-out and have their dark eye-spots showing easily, they are shocked so the good and bad eggs can be separated. Shocking turns the unfertilized eggs a solid white color while the good eggs stay a clear orange-pink color. Once shocked, the eyed eggs are ran thru two mechanical egg pickers, these pickers sort the good eggs from the bad eggs by using a photo-eye. If the light beam from the photo-eye goes thru the egg, it is good and ends up in one bucket; if the light beam does not go thru the egg, it is bad and ends up in a different bucket. The good eggs are put back in the incubators and picked through one more time by hand with a suction bulb to get any remaining bad eggs out. The eggs then stay in their incubator trays until packaged in coolers for shipment.

The final eggs from the 2004 spawning season were shipped on Jan. 24, 2005. Eggs from this season's spawning have been shipped to: Pendills Creek National Fish Hatchery; Jordan River National Fish Hatchery; Iron River National Fish Hatchery; Allegheny National Fish Hatchery; Marquette State Fish Hatchery; Purdue University; and the Chippewa Ottawa Resource Authority.