Freakoid fish?

John Chapman is one of the few holdouts dotting the lake’s shore on a cold, gray afternoon before Christmas. His line drifts with the current, this way and that, lazily cutting the murky green, its hook baited with a concoction of top designer baits: a yellow Crave Amino Egg and a Power Worm, doused with White Lightning Crave Nitro Grease.

Then, in a flutter, the line flies from his spool. Chapman closes the bail, setting the hook, and the rod doubles over.

For 20 minutes, he pumps gently and reels quickly, trying to coax into his net a monster created in a Northern California lab.

A few days earlier, Phil Mackey had left in Santa Ana River Lakes his calling cards -- gargantuan rainbow trout hatched from eggs manipulated to produce fish with three sets of chromosomes instead of two, enabling faster and greater growth. In the tricky business of triploids, Mackey raises the biggest of the unnaturally big, a skill both highly prized and scrutinized.

When he finally gets a look at his catch, Chapman, an ultralight fisherman who uses only 2-pound-test monofilament, figures he has both a new state record and a line-class world record. “You never know until you see them,” he says.

But it’s easy to tell how extraordinary such fish are after visiting their birthplace near Red Bluff, Calif., about a two-hour drive north of Sacramento. Mt. Lassen Trout Farms is a network of spring-fed hatcheries swarming with fish. Some are pushing 30 pounds. One of its trout, stocked recently at Santa Ana River Lakes in Orange County, weighed 28 pounds upon entry, nearly 2 pounds bigger than the state-record rainbow -- another Mt. Lassen product caught there last year.

Although some call them freaks, with bodies too big for their fins and tails, that no self-respecting angler would touch, the trout have a following at Santa Ana River Lakes and nearby Corona Lake. The lakes’ concessionaire has a lock on the Mt. Lassen monsters. Other nearby lake managers compete with stock from other private hatcheries, but when it comes to size, none can match Mackey’s trout.

“I wouldn’t place him in the category of mad scientist,” says Bob Hulbrook, chief aquaculture coordinator for the California Department of Fish and Game. “But he’s a very sharp guy with a good background in genetics and, obviously, in rearing and raising fish.”

Triploid phenomenon

On a fall morning the sun begins to poke over 10,457-foot Mt. Lassen as Mackey, a reddish-haired man of 50, tours by truck some of the trout farm’s dozen facilities.

The hatcheries, mostly low-slung wooden buildings with inside raceways and outside pens, harness springs emerging from fissures in the otherwise dry countryside.

Mackey got his start here in 1971, after graduating from high school in Red Bluff. “I don’t have any formal education,” he says, “but that doesn’t mean that you can’t continue to learn from some of the top researchers in the world.” Mackey worked for more than a decade alongside the trout farm’s original owner and his staff, read extensively and conducted research.

At the farm’s headquarters, still on its original site established in 1946 along Highway 36, the operations manager taps at the computer keyboard, arranging delivery schedules. Outside, four employees grade fish according to size in long, rubber-lined concrete pens. Inside, smaller pens teem with newborn rainbows less than an inch long, some of them triploids.

Achieving triploid eggs is tricky. Thermo-shocking with hot water must occur precisely between the two-cell and four-cell stage of miotic cellular division, about 10 minutes post-fertilization, which results in the fish retaining an extra set of chromosomes. The extra set renders the trout sterile, allowing them to conserve energy that otherwise would be spent on the development of sexual organs or mating. “It does occur fairly frequently in nature -- we’re just making it happen more frequently by manipulating the spawning cycle,” Mackey says.

The use of triploidy technology is only now becoming widespread as state fisheries agencies seek guarantees against genetic contamination of wild stocks. Because triploid trout are sterile, they can share lakes and streams with wild brown or steelhead trout. And because they continue to grow after diploid trout slow down to begin sexual development -- at about 2 years -- triploids are attractive as trophy fish.

Purists who prefer to catch wild trout cringe at the thought of these or any hatchery-raised mammoths in waters they like to fish. Fly-fishing legend Ralph Cutter labels it “blasphemy.”

“The angler who proudly boasts his conquest over a ‘Frankenfish’ is the wet equivalent of the great white hunter who shoots a Siberian tiger from the back of a pickup on a Texas game farm,” he says of Chapman’s record catch.

But with profits at stake, other private hatcheries have begun to grow triploids for sale as trophy-size game fish. One is Troutlodge in Sumner, Wash. “We’ve only been able to get them to about 20 pounds so far,” says Jim Parsons, vice president of technical services. Troutlodge specializes in eggs, with triploid eggs now making up about 20% of sales.Tim Alpers, whose Owens River Ranch-raised rainbows are known to anglers throughout the eastern Sierra, is a recent buyer of triploid eggs. He has grown diploids to 22 pounds, and calls Mackey the most progressive fish grower in North America.

It’s unlikely that any grower could coax a trout to more than 30 pounds because it would take five or six years, near the end of its life span when it has little fight left. And it’s highly unlikely that a manufactured trout could approach the all-tackle world record rainbow, a 42-pound, 2-ouncer caught in 1970 off Bell Island, Alaska, where nutrient-rich waters support large fish. Hatchery-raised fish feed on nutritional pellets until their release. They do not know how to chase baitfish, and grow little in the wild.

Sluggish monsters?

Doug Elliott, president of Corona Recreation Inc., which runs Santa Ana River Lakes and Corona Lake, has an exclusive agreement to buy the biggest rainbows Mackey can produce. “We always wanted to bring the Alaska-Canada type of fishing to this area for people who couldn’t afford to go to those places,” Elliott explains. “So we prevailed upon him to get as big a fish as he could possibly get.”

The “super trout” have gotten bigger as Mackey has refined his operation, and competition among “pay” lakes -- most notably Santa Ana River Lakes/Corona Lake, Irvine Lake and Laguna Niguel Lake -- has intensified.

David Noyes, general manager of the Serrano Water District and concessionaire at Irvine Lake, has criticized Mackey’s fish -- mostly in news releases touting the fish he buys -- as sluggish and with poor fin structure.

Three years ago, Noyes started trucking in brown and brook trout from Calaveras Trout Farm on the Merced River in Central California, and more recently he has acquired steelhead trout from another private hatchery.

Rick Mendoza, who runs Laguna Niguel Lake, lets his fish -- beautiful, broad-tailed rainbows trucked in every other week from Pine Creek Trout Ranch in Bicknell, Utah -- do his fighting. His faithful say that these 1- to 15-pounders are the hardest-fighting trout in the Southland.

Elliott pays more than $800,000 to stock his waters with Mackey’s fish and about $300 apiece for the really big ones. The payoff: From 5,000 to 10,000 customers, at $18 a day for adults, visit each month during a six-month trout season beginning in early November.

Two seasons ago, Elliott began stocking fish bigger than the 23-pound state record trout. The record was broken time and again, with Whittier’s Robert Vandevelde, who landed a 26-pound, 1-ounce rainbow on 2-pound line, claiming the record. The California Department of Fish and Game approved his record, but in a separate hatchery- aquaculture category. The International Game Fish Assn. has no plans to add any such category, and it approved Vandevelde’s catch as a line-class world record.

“Records were meant to be broken, not bred,” says Cutter. “Allowing a science fair byproduct into the record books dumbs down the quarry, the angler and the sport to its lowest common denominator.”

A Christmas record

As Mackey’s tour continues farther into the shrubby countryside, he talks of winter storms and lightning bolts that strike his pens. “Lightning will selectively kill the largest trout,” he says. “It’s not unusual for us to lose 10,000 pounds of trout a year.”

The bigger fish are fattening up at the sprawling complex’s Mill Seat facility amid the pines at 4,000 feet. Water rushes through the raceways at 7,000 gallons per minute. Trout face the current. Gazing at them like a proud father, Mackey predicts that the state record will fall again this season.

Nearly two months later at Santa Ana River Lakes, Chapman finally has his trout netted at his feet. “This is it,” he says to himself. Beaming, he hefts the whopper into the back of his truck and speeds to the concession scale, where it tops out at 27 1/2 pounds.

A long slump is broken. If approved, Chapman’s catch will become not only a new line-class world record but also a new state record. Not quite the perfect Christmas gift for the recently laid-off painter, “But it helps,” he says.

Pete Thomas is a Times staff writer.