the net pen was managed by cooke aquaculture, a canadian company based in new brunswick and one of the largest aquaculture companies in the world. it took over the cypress island aquafarms in 2016. the pen that was breached was a 10-cage salmon pen that contained 305,000 fish, placed in 2001. it was anchored in deepwater bay, southeast of cypress island and to the west of bellingham channel which separates cypress island from guemes island. the pen was submerged from to . it was approximately wide by long. the august 2017 pen break was preceded by an incident a month earlier in the same pen between july 24–25 where its mooring failed twice. this incident occurred during the highest tidal current level in the summer of 2017.