Somebody help me, I'm being regulated to death! Yes friends, it looks like 2008 will go down as the year that a great variety of California groups and agencies that often oppose each other, finally came together and worked in coordination to really screw up my fishing.

Caples Lake was the first spot to suffer. This fishery on Highway 88 near Kirkwood Ski Resort in Alpine County has long been a favorite of mine, producing good numbers of rainbow and brook trout, along with some trophy-size browns and monster mackinaw. For over ten years I have carried my canoe or Porta-Bote down the corner of the dam in spring right after the ice breaks up, to be first on the water. You see the boat ramp at Caples is controlled by a private resort and launching hours are limited; no dawn or dusk patrol and no early or late season launches. This is fine with me as I have caught my biggest mackinaw, up to twenty pounds, from little cartop vessels. "We don' need no steenkin' boat ramps!" Just writing about it takes me there in my mind; trolling in zig-zag patterns as the sun begins to glow behind eastern ridges, cutting in tight to a snow-covered shoreline point, then curving out again as my rod doubles over and starts pumping hard while line streams off my reel against the lightly set drag. I look around to see if any other anglers are watching the show, but then I remember, the boat ramp isn't open yet. As I scoop a lake trout nearly three-feet long into my net I know that this moment is mine alone.

Not for long though. I found out last year that El Dorado Irrigation District ( EDID- the agency that controls Caples) has decided to put in a large, public boat ramp at the lake. Now my sunrise solitude would be broken by the fleet of white North River fishing boats. (Did North River get some kind of deal on white paint or what?) Now there would be more competition for the big trout, and more guys cutting off my trolling run from the front, or running over and cutting my line from the rear. Bitching and moaning would do nothing to stop the construction of this ramp though, so I resigned myself to the inexorable march of progress. The fish might be harder to catch, but at least they'd still be there, right?

Wrong! Sometime last summer EDID sent a diver down to inspect the mechanism of the valve that controls outflow of water at the dam, and it was determined to be in very poor condition (from what I hear a piece broke off in the diver's hand), with a high risk for ‘catastrophic failure'. Supposedly, the only way to work on this valve to fix it was to drain the lake. Conveniently, this would be the perfect time to put in the boat ramp, so the construction was moved up from 2009 when it had been scheduled to begin. Now I admit I'm a bit of a conspiracy theorist, but this just seemed a bit too convenient. I mean, I think I've seen underwater construction and welding for bridges and such on TV before, and I don't think they drained San Francisco Bay to build the Golden Gate Bridge.

Categorizing the state of the valve as an emergency situation worked great for EDID; it allowed them to circumvent environmental impact studies, and at first there was no mention of any plan to mitigate the destruction of the lake's excellent fishery. After outcry from the public and the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance (CSPA) though, a plan was hastily developed by the California Department of Fish and Game, with funding from EDID, to conduct a 'fish rescue' at Caples. CSPA took the lead in recruiting volunteers to assist in the operation, as DFG expected the undertaking to require more manpower than they alone were able to provide. Using this website as well as its own membership to spread the word, CSPA put out a call for volunteers to help with netting, fish transport and restocking in Silver Lake, and most interestingly to me, electro shocking. I've done a lot of types of fishing over the years, but use of high voltage is not one of them, and the chance to try it while helping to save trout in one of my favorite lakes was an opportunity I couldn't pass up. The electronic volunteer application form set up by CSPA stated that only anglers with commercial-type fishing experience would be considered for electro shocking, so I gave it a shot and listed my qualifications:

"Licensed California fishing guide since 2001, extensive experience netting large fish including mackinaw to over 20 pounds with long-handled nets, knowledge of proper catch and release technique. I know Caples Lake very well, I've fished it many times in the dark, and I know where the trout hold."

It worked, and I was assigned an overnight shift on August 15 (all the electro fishing was planned for night, as this is the best time to find the trout in shallow water). I arrived at the DFG's command center at the lake in the early evening as instructed, met and talked to some of the other volunteers, and listened as DFG biologist Stafford Lehr gave a talk on the operation and what we could expect. The operation had already been going on for a couple of days, and what they had learned was that electro fishing was by far the most effective method of gathering fish for transport to Silver Lake. The hoop nets and trammel nets were not catching fish, and the gill nets were catching them but killing too many, even though the mesh was supposed to be small enough that the fish would be caught by the mouth, not the gills. In fact, Stafford made the point that some fish mortality was inevitable, and that in fact the previous night a fourteen-pound mackinaw and an eighteen-pound brown trout had come up dead when they pulled the nets. I later saw the head of the giant brown in a cooler. I was told the head was kept for study to determine the trout's age, and the body had been given to a volunteer who was camping nearby and offered to cook it for her group. At least it didn't go to waste, but it was depressing to know that such a magnificent game fish had not survived the attempt to save it.

As darkness fell, several more electro fishing boats arrived. Apparently as the DFG staff found that electro fishing was the most effective technique in this operation, they adjusted the plan and scrambled to bring in more of these specialized boats from around the state.

With generator-powered floodlights illuminating the area, the boats were prepared for launching and the volunteer coordinator from CSPA began picking people to go out and assist DFG employees on the water. I let some others go ahead of me, and it soon became apparent that there were more volunteers on hand than were actually needed. Better too much help than not enough, I thought, but it also seemed as though they were trying to give everyone a turn at helping, as sort of a public relations move. I did not take caffeine pills to stay up all night and plan a vacation day at work the next day just to have a short ride in the funky boat though, so when it was my turn, I was determined to prove my value to the operation. Our captain was DFG's Mike Harris, and the other volunteer was retired DFG biologist Russ Wickwire, who lives in Woodfords and who is an avid angler I've met before on Upper Blue Lake, Indian Creek Reservoir, and Caples.

Never having tried or even seen electro fishing before, I had the idea that we'd turn on the juice and hundreds of trout would float to the surface, then we'd just drive around ‘cherry-picking', scooping them up with ease. Wrong! This was hard, and we worked for every single fish! The boat had a railing that the two people shocking and scooping could lean over without falling out of the boat, and each shocker had a foot pedal that controlled the electricity which flowed through metal arms into multiple braided steel cables, the ‘probes' that draped into the water and sent current out. The trick with the foot pedal was to take your foot off it for several seconds, then press it when the boat moved over a new area. If you left the current on all the time, trout could feel that field coming and just move away.

We found most of our fish in extremely shallow water, right along the shore. We'd go along for a while without seeing any action, then we'd hit a spot where stunned minnows and suckers would float up, inevitably followed by trout. Occasionally one would just go completely still just under the surface, making for an easy grab with the long handled net, but more often the fish would sink down quickly or go completely spastic, dancing and tail walking along the surface. Ideally, when we hit a pod of fish, the captain would throw the boat into neutral so we'd have plenty of time to scoop all we could, but the vessel we had was a ‘delta boat', borrowed from low-altitude, and didn't run smoothly at over 7,000 feet. Whenever Mike put it in neutral it stalled, so we were forced to scoop up all our fish and swing them into the live well on the run, which was tough and tiring.

After we filled the live well once, brought the fish to floating net-pens near the dam, estimated their length one-by-one then recording the measurements on a chart and separating them (browns and rainbows in one pen to go to Silver Lake, and brookies in the other pen to go to Red Lake), we headed to shore to take a break and trade out volunteers. Mike was griping about this, telling us that volunteers he had the previous night were stargazing like they were on a cruise ship, and not very effective at this fast-paced, difficult activity. Russ had done this many times before in his capacity as a DFG biologist, and I turned out to be a natural, with Mike remarking that I was doing a good job. I was also useful in the task of grabbing fish out of the live well, quickly identifying them and estimating their length- "Brookie, eight to twelve inches; brown, twelve to fifteen inches…" so I ended up with a continuing invitation to go back out for each run, and I worked until sunrise.

We netted a couple of hundred trout, and I scooped up the two largest, a rainbow and a brown trout each in the five-pound class. Some of our fish that actually came in contact with the shocking probes were parboiled and probably wouldn't survive, but I felt good about the fish we did save. All told, approximately 6,500 trout were saved and transferred to Silver and Red Lakes in the operation. Later in the fall when the lake had been drawn down super-low, DFG conducted another rescue without volunteers, using backpack electro shockers to stun and net thousands more trout for transfer to Silver and Red Lakes.

They did the best they could and enhanced the fishery at two of my other favorite spots, but it will be many years before Caples again kicks out giant mackinaw, if ever. I visited again in late October, to find the ramp construction well under way and the water down to a small, muddy pond with a maximum depth of around twelve feet according to media reports. I stood on shore and cast Rapala Countdown plugs, catching two decent mackinaw, around four pounds each. I also saw several splashes, swirls, and a huge fish, over ten pounds, rolling at the surface. I wondered if any of these trout would survive the winter, as Caples develops its annual four to five-foot thick ice cap, which would leave only a few feet of liquid water beneath, quite possibly allowing winterkill, where oxygen depletion proves lethal to fish.

Sure, EDID plans to stock the hell out the Caples next spring as a way of making up for killing the lake, but the mackinaw they plan to plant will be fingerlings, and these long-lived, slow-growing salmonids will take a long time, possible in the order of decades, to reach true trophy size. They will also have to run the gauntlet of large numbers of trollers using the new launch ramp. The Caples Lake I have known and loved will cease to exist, at least in my lifetime.

At least I still have Tahoe, my home lake and an incredible fishery in its own right. At 1645 feet deep, it would be a bit of a challenge to drain like Caples, or poison like Davis Lake. I was especially enthusiastic about fishing The Big Lake hard this fall, since I had caught my largest brown trout ever, an 11.2 pound hen in June (photo at top). Every year is different here, with the wild trout following certain patterns reliably but also breaking the known rules and surprising even veteran Tahoe anglers. The brown trout bite is always best in spring, but 2008 was just incredible! Experienced brown hunters found the fish more than willing, and even several new guys I know managed to get in on the action. My big catch came on an eight-inch AC Plug, a hand-carved rainbow trout imitation made by my friend and legendary trophy-trout angler Allan Cole. These lures have hooked many of my largest trout since I started using them in 2003, and on June 5, I launched at Cave Rock for my last trip of the season in my little Porta-Bote, searching for giant mackinaw. I had a feeling it would be a good day- some other hardcore local anglers have been catching big macks on the late spring topline by targeting areas on the east shore near where Nevada Department of Wildlife has been planting thousands of little rainbow trout.

I started fishing at legal time (one hour before sunrise) and worked the AC Plugs for an hour, catching one 6 pound mackinaw. Switching one rod to a Rapala, I hooked then snapped off a very large fish on 8 pound line when it ran right at the boat then jumped 30 feet out! Argh!

No more bites for a few hours, trying a variety of Rapalas, Bombers and AC Plugs, then at 10:00 am in full sunshine with a bit of chop on the water, I hooked up again!

I was running the AC Triple Skinny in rainbow pattern coated in Pro-Cure Trophy Trout Super Gel fish attractant, and I had just decided to give up and switch to slow-troll with live minnows to at least put some average fish in the boat. I throttled the motor down and started reeling the lure in as fast as I could to change up, when my rod bent over hard and started pumping.

At first I thought I had a big mackinaw, but then I saw the square tail and watched in horror as the fish scraped the line along the bottom of my boat and kept trying to hide under my outboard motor, until I had to tilt it up for safety. I sure was happy I had tied this AC Plug onto 10 pound leader.

When I finally had a net-shot, I scooped it up on the first try and headed right back for the boat ramp with my biggest brown to date. It was a fat hen, just 29 inches long 17.5 inches in girth, and after getting two different weights on two hand scales (10.5 and 11.4 pounds), I brought it down to The Sportsman tackle shop in South Lake Tahoe where they weighed it on the giant 'photo op' scale and it came up 11.2.

Just a few days later, my friend Kombiz Farokhpour ("The Tahoe Fisherman") was taking a day off from running his charter business on the lake to do some shallow trolling with Jeff Keyser, another friend of mine, when Jeff hooked another huge brown, this one longer but slightly lighter than mine at around ten-and-a-half pounds. Just when we were both basking in our big-fish glory though, we were burned by guide Mike Nielsen of Tahoe Topliners, who on June 20 put a client onto a new lake record brown, a 15.2 pound hen. Wow! What a fish and what a season. When the shallow bite for big rainbows and browns drops off in summer due to climbing water temperatures and ridiculous boat traffic, I stop taking out my little boat, fishing only with clients in their boats on the teaching trips I offer on Tahoe. Come fall though, I was ready to test the shallow bite again, and though I caught my trophy brown in the late morning, many of my best fish have come at dawn and dusk. Fortunately the public boat ramps at Cave Rock and Lake Forest have always been open 24 hours… UNTIL NOW!

Yes dear readers, Tahoe is now closed to trailered boats from 4 pm to 6 am, thanks to the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA) and a tiny little bivalve mollusk known as the quagga mussel.

The invasive species, native to the Ukraine in Europe, has been spread to this country by commercial shipping and the quagga's proclivity for adhering to boat hulls and any other parts where it can grip and form a colony. Quaggas were found in the Great Lakes in the 1980‘s, and in 2007 they were discovered in Nevada's Lake Mead. They are considered a threat much like their cousin the zebra mussel due to their super-efficient filter feeding which removes huge quantities of nutrient and phytoplankton from the food chain, and their prodigious reproductive capacity, which allows them to quickly form huge populations that can encrust surfaces much like barnacles, clogging underwater equipment such as intake valves on dams and water supply pipes.

So Tahoe was already on ‘orange alert' for this species in 2008. Inspectors were placed by TRPA at boat ramps around the lake, checking for the quagga mussel during business hours only. Then on Labor Day weekend, a boat attempting to launch at Tahoe Keys was found to harbor quaggas. The boat had last been in Lake Mead which is known to be infested, and when inspectors spotted the little hitchhikers on this boat, it was prevented from launching and quarantined.

This raised the alert to red, and TRPA, with its bi-state, unilateral powers had an ordinance approved in a month. No legal battle, no apparent review of state or federal public access law, just a new regulation, foisted on the public and public agencies charged with enforcement, including Nevada State Parks. Cave Rock State Park had a locking steel gate installed in time for the implementation deadline of November 1, and also had to hire and pay inspectors, which had previously been volunteers or student interns. Winter ramp hours were originally slated to be ridiculously short, 8 am to 2 pm, with a complete closure on weekdays discussed, but my friend Gene St. Denis who runs Blue Ribbon Charters and launches his guide trips from Cave Rock worked hard to communicate the angler's perspective to State Parks administration. They subsequently asked for comments by phone or email from boaters who frequent Cave Rock and Sand Harbor Launches, and I made sure to give my input, speaking to one representative then a supervisor, both of whom were appreciative and seemed to really listen to my concerns. So for now, I guess we should consider ourselves lucky that the winter boat ramp hours have been set for 6 am to 4 pm, and let me just say that Nevada State parks seems to be doing the very best they can with a state budget crisis and an unfunded mandate from TRPA.

So what happens if you come back to the ramp after 4 pm, due to motor problems, really good fishing or whatever else? The sign on the gate says "Call 911", but I'm sure the Douglas County, Nevada Sheriff's Department is not about to rush down with a key to let you out just because you are were a dumb-ass. Supposedly, summer hours at this once 24-hour-access ramp will be 5 am to 10 pm, which will pose only more problems with the huge summer crowd of novice boaters waiting for inspections and forgetting to come back in time. This only affects average folks though, the commoners who can only afford to access the lake at a public boat launch. If you've got enough money to own one of the multi-million dollar properties on the lake shore, you can take heart in TRPA's recent decision to allow 128 new private piers and 1,862 new boat buoys on Tahoe. How will this help keep the lake pristine, a national jewel that not surprisingly shows up in countless publications with gorgeous, panoramic photos showcasing snowcapped mountains and trees along undeveloped shorelines? A conspiracy theorist might imagine that the rich really are manipulating our regulatory agency directly, pulling strings to make the marionette dance, but I think it's just a combination of the affluent folks exerting influence in their usual manner, the average folks being ignored as usual, and a bureaucracy that has grown unexamined and unchecked, like a tumor or nasty fungus inflaming your ingrown toenail.

So I've been subverting authority lately, ignoring the posted boat ramp hours because I have a cartop boat and a strong back. On Thanksgiving morning I carried my boat, five-horsepower motor and gear over and around the gate before the inspector arrived, and I caught a ten-pound mackinaw on an AC Plug in shallow water in the first five minutes of trolling, before any other boats had launched. Last week I launched at noon, staying past the 4 pm gate closure, and caught three rainbows and two browns to 22 inches on Rapalas and AC's, all in the last hour of light, after the trailered boats had rushed back to the ramp to avoid being locked out. If I come or go during open hours when an inspector is present, I'm of course cooperative and willing to submit to a body cavity search if necessary, but I'll keep my own launch hours until the day that they declare my very presence on the water outside of permitted times illegal.

Oh well, until they pry my fishing rod from my cold, dead hands at least I don't need to worry about the powers that be interfering with my fishing at most of my favorite spots, like Boca Reservoir, Donner Lake, Blue Lakes, and the East and West Carson Rivers, right? Wrong again, Johnny Q. Public! The Center for Biological Diversity and Pacific Rivers Council sued the DFG in October of 2006, ostensibly to protect native trout species and amphibians that may be threatened by hatchery trout stocking programs. Their attorneys from the Stanford Environmental Law Clinic argued in Superior Court that the DFG should be required to complete an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for each lake or stream before the DFG could be permitted to plant trout at any of them. (Thanks to outdoor writer Tom Stienstra for his informative and appropriately inflammatory November 30 article on the subject in the San Francisco Chronicle.) So an injunction has been put in place until the EIR's can be completed, and the DFG is, just like in the Caples Lake debacle, doing the best they can to work for anglers while playing the bad hand they have been dealt.

Their website now shows a working list of all the waters that will and will not be stocked while the legal wrangling continues and the impact studies are conducted. And while a lot of fisheries will still be enhanced by stocking of hatchery trout, plenty of other waters will be cut off. Yes, I'm sure that the mountain yellow-legged frog, Cascades frog, and long-toed salamander are struggling to survive in some areas, and maybe this is due to hatchery trout sucking down tadpoles and whatever baby salamanders are called, but just like a wounded salamander defending its young, I'm fiercely protective of my fishing way of life and the fisheries that are currently teeming with hatchery fish as well as wild, self sustaining trout populations.

Donner Lake for example is known for huge mackinaw which are wild, but which grow especially fat and sassy feeding on planted hatchery rainbow trout. Donner is now on the do-not-stock list, and you can expect to see less of the twenty-pound-plus lake trout if hatchery plants do not resume. Stampede Reservoir, a man-made lake of over 1,000 surface acres still qualifies for hatchery trout plants, but smaller Boca Reservoir, connected to Stampede by the Little Truckee River (and situated in the same watershed with the same environment and presumably the same frogs or native trout) will not be stocked. Say goodbye to the good numbers of fat holdover rainbow trout and expect a decline in the size of the big browns that feed on rainbows in Boca.

In Alpine County, the least populated county in California which relies heavily on visiting anglers for business revenue, expect the new restrictions to have an especially heavy economic impact. Upper Blue Lake will no longer be stocked with hatchery fish, though its connected by a stream less than a mile long to Lower Blue Lake, which will still receive plants of rainbow trout. Huh? Are you still trying to find a method to the madness? Silly. The East and West Carson Rivers are also on the do-not-stock list, and these are the most popular tourist spots in the county. I'm no biologist, but I have spent thousands of hours on these rivers, fishing, observing the wildlife and turning over rocks to see the insects and other trout food in the shallows. I've never seen a frog here. Maybe they will come back without hatchery fish being stocked though. Oh, wait, there are wild, non-native rainbows and browns in these rivers that would remain and eat baby amphibians. Maybe we need to poison out both of these rivers completely, then convert DFG's hatcheries to facilities for breeding endangered frogs and salamanders… (Note to self; stop giving The Center for Biological Diversity ideas!)

I understand that DFG is already working to complete the studies needed to allow hatchery plants to resume in waters currently on the hit list, and they have already begun stocking extra fish in the spots they are permitted to ‘degrade' with trout. There will still of course be plenty of trout fishing opportunities in California in 2009, but if we as anglers don't speak up, either individually or through advocacy groups like Trout Unlimited and the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, we can expect only more infringement upon our right to fish. I'm not saying I don't care about the danger from damaged dam valves and quagga mussels, or the declining population of the yellow-legged frog, but it just seems like in the clamor to attack these problems the plight of the endangered angler has been ignored. So speak up, fellow fisher people, and keep showing up on the water in 2009. Winter fishing on Tahoe is outstanding, and if we don't get a few more boats launching at Cave Rock they might just decide they can't justify the cost of a paid inspector, and decide to lock the gates completely until spring.

Finally, if you really want to protect and preserve your trout fishing opportunities in the coming year and beyond, grab a kid, turn off his Wii, yank that Ipod earbud out, kick him off the My Space, and take him fishing, before it's too late. Happy Holidays!

Until Next Time!
Mark (Never Stand In A Canoe) Wiza
Pro-Staff for AC Plugs and Pro-Cure Bait Scents
Email Me!

Mark is a licensed fishing guide offering a small number of fun and highly educational trout-fishing trips in the Tahoe area. Call (530) 545-1475 or e-mail Mark wiza@fishsniffer.com for details.