Commentary : Crowley Trout Opener: Is It Worth the Hassle?

I can’t hold this back any longer.

After covering my eighth consecutive trout-season opener on Crowley Lake last Saturday, I’ve decided that, yes, 18,825 trout fishermen can be wrong.

I covered my first Eastern Sierra opening day in 1978. I met an older gentleman, a fly fisherman, fishing alone on nearby Hot Creek. What he said to me that morning stuck with me.

“I wouldn’t be caught dead on Crowley,” he said, almost sneering. “The people who show up at Crowley on opening day wouldn’t know a wild trout from a halibut. It’s a slob fisherman’s convention.”

And so on my eighth consecutive Crowley opener Saturday, I once again found myself at the lake’s cleaning tables at mid-morning, watching a hundred or so fishermen clean trout. It’s a spectacle that might resemble the carnage of Verdun.

I looked at the appalling mass of boats trolling in every direction on Crowley, almost 2,000 of them, the seemingly endless string of shore fishermen, the traffic jam of fishermen in vehicles still waiting to get through the gates, the blowing dust and sand, the litter. I couldn’t help but think of the old fellow on Hot Creek. I think he had it right.

Crowley Lake on opening day is a phenomenal spectacle. This year’s opening-day crowd, an estimated 18,825, was a record. So was last year’s, 16,650. If this keeps up, they’ll have to build a parking garage and run a spur off Highway 395 to the other side of the lake.

There seems to be no shortage of California fishermen who will endure any hardship, experience any humiliation, to catch a quick limit of one-pound hatchery-raised trout--fish that can’t tell the difference between a Purina trout chow nugget and a Needlefish No. 2 Fire Pearl trolling lure.

Why would anyone put up with such chaos to catch a limit of trout not appreciably bigger than you can catch at, say, Irvine Lake?

“It’s a tradition with our family,” one Crowley angler told me. “It’s just something we’ve always done and we enjoy it.”

Said Mammoth Lakes fly fisherman Dick Dahlgren: “If Crowley were turned into a wild trout lake, it’d be one of the top 10 fishing lakes in the Western Hemisphere, and certainly the most accessible. But the way it’s run now, it’s disgusting. There’s a new type of fisherman we’re seeing there now, very rude, many of them drunk, racing around on motorcycles, tearing up the sage. It’s sad, really.”

It may be sacrilegious to suggest such a thing, but if you enjoy thoughts of trout as long as your leg, you can conjure up some interesting alternative scenarios for Crowley. There are biologists and wild trout-oriented people who believe that if Crowley were managed by the Department of Fish and Game as a wild trout lake, the world record for brown trout might be broken there every year.

We’re talking 30-pound trout here.

This summer, a small step in the direction of wild trout fishing at Crowley will be taken. From Aug. 1 through Oct. 31, the limit will be two fish, minimum size 18 inches, and only artificial lures with single, barbless hooks may be used.

“Crowley could be one of the great brown trout fisheries in the world,” said Dick May, president of CalTrout, an organization that encourages the establishment of wild trout fisheries in California.

“If you had a zero-limit, a one-fish limit or some other kind of restriction, you could grow world-class trout in Crowley. But really, it’s a far-out dream, a fantasy. There are so many people who like catching those fast limits of little trout, you’d have a hard time selling them on the idea.”

It’s accepted by biologists that hatchery trout planted in Crowley--about 20 truckloads every August, or roughly a half-million trout--grow at a faster rate than in any other body of water in the world, about 5 to 7 inches in nine months.

Said May: “I doubt if the strain of rainbows (rainbow-Coleman) they put in Crowley would grow much larger than they do now. They’re what we call short-fused fish. They grow very quickly in the first year or so, then slow down their growth rate, and die young.

“I believe the red-band trout from Goose Lake would grow to enormous size in Crowley. Red-bands between 10 and 20 pounds were commonly caught in Goose Lake (on the Oregon-California line) as recently as 15 years ago. And they’d grow even larger in Crowley.”