THE OUTDOORS : FISHERMAN’S HIGH : At 6,743 Feet, Big Bear Lake Has Surprising Variety of Fish to Catch

Two years ago Steve West caught a world-record nine-pound, four-ounce spotted bass at Lake Perris near his home in Riverside, but he doesn’t fish there anymore.

Too crowded, he says. Now he’d rather go to Big Bear Lake for bass.

To many, that’s like going to Barstow to surf: It’s lousy, but you have the whole place to yourself.

If the bass fishing at Big Bear is only slightly more popular than the surfing, that’s fine with West.

“People don’t know about it,” West says. “I’m kind of glad.”

Big Bear was created by a small rock dam in 1884 and enlarged by a higher dam in 1912. About a two-hour drive from downtown Los Angeles, it has long been known for a variety of recreational activities, including water skiing, sailing and some of the best trout fishing in Southern California.

With a capacity of 2,973 surface acres, it has plenty of room for an assortment of fish, even Northern largemouth bass that lurk in the grass and around the docks.

There also are catfish, some crappie, a few bluegill and coho (silver) salmon--few know about the salmon, either--offering anglers opportunities to fish several ways for several varieties of fish. Trollers, spincasters, still fishermen, a few flycasters, some float-tubers, even bow fishermen stalking carp in the back bays are part of the scene.

One day in ‘86, a local real estate salesman named Jim Hall scored a lake grand slam when he caught a four-pound, six-ounce rainbow trout, a 3 1/2-pound bass and a nine-pound catfish. The remarkable thing was that he caught them all using the same black plastic lure that fairly resembled a tarantula.

“I made it myself,” Hall said. “I call it a Jimmy Jig.”

Hall isn’t sure what attracted such a diversity of fish. Like a lot of angling lore at Big Bear, it’s just accepted, along with other more or less sophisticated secrets.

Lin Crawford, president of the Big Bear Valley Sportsman’s Club who owns a small tackle store, qualifies as a resident expert on Big Bear fishing. He dispenses his knowledge freely to visitors and readers of the local weekly paper, The Grizzly.

“A flatfish is one of the most effective lures (for trout) on this lake, (but) most people don’t use ‘em,” Crawford said. “You have to use something that gets their attention.”

But sometimes results confound expertise. The Big Bear record for a rainbow is 14 1/2 pounds, caught at the mouth of Papoose Bay at the west (dam) end in 1941. Crawford says records are sketchy, so few recall the angler’s name--only that he was using a single red salmon egg and a tiny size-16 hook.

Andy Barnett’s specialty is catfish, which he has hooked out of the warm shallows east of Eagle Point for more than 34 years.

Barnett’s secret: “Fresh chicken liver. Fresh--not frozen.”

The favored rainbow area is “Trout Alley” on the south side between Metcalf and Boulder Bays. On a summer weekend the spots off the landmarks “Rock Wall” and “Zebra Room”--a former shoreline nightclub--build up like parking lots, and farther offshore trollers cruise as if they were on Main Street on a Saturday night.

Most use worms or Powerbait--the old and new reliables.

A few veteran anglers anchor right in the traffic lanes leading into the marinas in Metcalf Bay. One, Joe Gembrin of Palm Desert, usually catches his share of trout while rolling in the wakes of boats passing through.

“They come in here to feed because there’s a lot of weeds,” he said. “Water’s water. I caught a 4 3/4-pound rainbow right here.”

Big Bear is known even less for flyfishing than it is for bass but, Crawford says, the whole north side can be good in late afternoon when the sun leaves the water, but only in the spring or fall when the weeds are gone. And then it’s not what fly anglers usually do.

Crawford advises them to troll-- not cast--a dry or wet insect pattern on spinning gear, using a three- or four-pound test leader and no smaller than a size-8 hook.

“If you catch ‘em on the feed, you can knock ‘em silly,” he said.

Bass live in other neighborhoods, on different diets. West, his companions having gained his trust in an afternoon of prowling the lake’s hot spots, reaches deep into one of his tackle boxes and reveals a four-inch black plastic lizard with white spots on its belly.

“This has been a well-kept secret here for a long time,” he says.

But, generally, “A pig and jig is good all year long here.”

Pig, in bass angler jargon, is a slice of pork rind.

West, 37, is a serious bass fisherman. He shares the spotted bass world record with Gilbert Rowe, who also caught his at Perris, but four years ago Crawford tipped him off to Big Bear’s potential. He’s outfitted like a pro, with a sleek, 17-foot bass boat equipped with a 150-horsepower outboard and electronics that tell him the water temperature and depth, display the fish on a scrolling graph and do everything but net the critters and clean them.

“It’s mostly status,” he says, selecting one of eight rods he has on board.

Standing on the bow, he works constantly, casting underhand into pockets in weedbeds and under docks, then cranking in his line while guiding the boat with one foot on the electric trolling motor control pedal.

Barnett noted later that most of his catfish were caught without such high technology, which may be just as well.

The bass were stocked in 1957 but were a local secret until recently. Few would expect to find them in an Alpine lake at 6,743 feet, but the forage is excellent. They don’t grow large because of the low water temperature--usually in the mid-60s, although it’s around 70 this time of the year--so the lake record is only seven pounds, six ounces.

“But they’re healthy with good coloration,” Crawford said.

Now the lake is trying to establish a smallmouth population with 300 acquired from Lake Arrowhead in a swap for 2,000 coho salmon. The smallmouth--identified by their red eyes and copper-colored bodies--still can’t be taken, and only five largemouth over 12 inches may be kept.

West returns his catches, anyway, and his reason for switching to Big Bear is apparent as the day progresses. Not once on a weekend afternoon does he have to compete with another angler. Every favorite fishing hole is open.

West says the secrets are “presentation, what you use, the time of day. I catch most of my fish from 4 until dark.”

Among Big Bear’s other denizens, the salmon are currently little more than a curiosity, the bluegill a diversion and the crappie, in Crawford’s view, a nuisance.

“The crappie started showing up about three years ago, and this spring they started showing up in numbers, mostly in Mallard Lagoon,” Crawford said. “Somebody dumped them in there illegally. Fish and Game doesn’t want crappie in this lake. The water’s too cold.”

The bluegill provide two services: fun for kids on shore and hors d’oeuvres for the bass.

The future of the salmon is shaky. The Municipal Water District planted 15,000 in ‘82, then added 30,000 more over a three-year span of ‘84-86.

But Frank Hoover, the Department of Fish and Game fishery biologist who oversaw the lake until recently, said: “It’s a put-and-grow situation. I wouldn’t anticipate any significant spawning.”

The problem is that the coho spawn in the fall, when Big Bear’s two main feeder streams are dry or nearly so. Also, the salmon are catchable only in the spring and fall, lying semi-dormant in the cooler depths during summer.

There is no listed lake record for salmon. Crawford was fishing with Hall once when the latter landed one about six inches long.

“Throw it back,” Crawford told Hall. “It’s too small.”

Later, when Hall realized no other salmon had been registered for the lake’s annual derby that year, he complained to Crawford: “That was my trophy fish you made me throw back.”