It’s Not All Pleasant There : Fishing for Wild Trout Excellent in Owens River, but Fishery’s Management Is a Question

Trout season ends in the Eastern Sierra at the end of this month, except for the lower Owens River south of Crowley Lake through Pleasant Valley and beyond.

The name Pleasant Valley sounds as if it’s the setting for a family television series. Parts of “True Grit”--John Wayne’s 1969 Oscar effort--were filmed there, where the river snakes lazily through grassland.

There is no development--not even a farmhouse--because the land, like most of the Owens Valley, belongs to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. There are few trees for shade, but at 4,500-feet elevation the sun is welcome in the winter months when fishing continues.

However, when the tourists go home, trouble remains in Pleasant Valley.

The first five miles of the river--eight or 10 if you track its meanderings--are designated a wild trout fishery, meaning that all of the fish are native German browns--no hatchery wimps here.

Hatchery fish are “all too damn much the same size,” Ray Milovich said.

Milovich and fishing pal Dan Young are lifelong residents of Bishop. They don’t have much use for hatchery fish. John Wayne probably didn’t, either. Pleasant Valley doesn’t need them. Locals will match their river against any of the premier fly streams in Montana.

“I fished the Madison this summer,” Lou Franke said. “Not a thing.”

Milovich said: “Dan and I have 60 years fishing this thing. You can catch more fish here in 10 minutes, even the way it is, than you can out of the Madison.”

With only native trout and a two-fish limit--below the standard five-fish limit for the state--bait and barbed hooks are still permitted. The combination of conditions doesn’t make any sense, Milovich and other locals maintain.

Under the state Department of Fish and Game’s wild trout program, a full-fledged wild trout stream, such as Hot Creek a few miles up the road, allows only artificial flies or lures and single, barbless hooks. Fish may easily be released to observe the zero limit.

That’s how Milovich and his cronies would like to see Pleasant Valley managed.

Fish tend to swallow baited hooks, and if they’re barbed, an angler often must decide between killing the fish or snipping off his leader. For a good fisherman, that can mean a short day fishing in Pleasant Valley, if he obeys the law.

Fortunately, Milovich said, “Ninety percent of the fishermen don’t know how to catch (native) fish. The German brown is not a salmon egger. If you know what you’re doing with a worm or a fly or some of these lures, you can catch them.”

Unfortunately, some of the wily local fishermen who work Pleasant Valley in the winter know how to catch them an easier way: crickets. “These guys get in here with crickets and just murder them,” Franke said.

Franke said he was fly-fishing one day, watching a fishermen using crickets for bait on the other side of the river. “He cast in five times in the same hole and pulled out five fish--nothing less than 14 inches. And these guys keep them. They’re meat fishermen.”

Young said: “They throw them in their freezer until next spring, when they clean out their freezer (and throw them away).”

The limit, he said, is meaningless, adding: “People know there aren’t too many wardens around.”

Franke, Milovich and Young also would like to see Pleasant Valley closed for a month or two each year, especially during the spawning period in November.

The Department of Fish and Game thinks Pleasant Valley is doing fine as it is. Darrell Wong, a DFG fishery biologist based in Bishop, has a personal as well as a professional interest. He fishes Pleasant Valley often.

Wong said: “The wild trout concept doesn’t really lock one into barbless (artificial) lures, and unless we have evidence to show why the majority of the public should be excluded from fishing for wild trout, we don’t feel we would be able to justify it. We haven’t been able to demonstrate that bait angling has decimated the population. Brown trout are very difficult to catch.”

John Deinstadt, head of the DFG’s wild trout program, said: “The catch rate is as good as it’s ever been . . . one fish every two hours.”

Also, the evidence is that trout don’t readily swallow crickets. “The majority of fish are hooked in the lip area (and easily released),” Wong said.

Nor is there any reason to close the river during spawning, Wong said. Many of the fish heading upstream at nature’s call are diverted into a spawning channel that is off-limits to anglers.

“There’s nothing wrong with taking spawners, as long as there’s enough fish coming into the population to keep it healthy,” Wong said.

Other locals agree that the rules are fine in Pleasant Valley.

“They have adequate regulations,” Noel Kobayashi said. “They just need to be enforced. A lot of locals will go out there and take a dozen fish.”

Fred Rowe of Sierra Bright Dot in Mammoth Lakes is a dedicated fly-fisherman, but he said: “One of the things I like (about Pleasant Valley) is that they do allow bait fishing. It’s OK to bait fish, but we’ve got to get the non-fly-fishermen into catch-and-release (fishing).”

That’s where most serious fishermen--fly and bait--agree.

Milovich said the fish aren’t worth eating most of the time, anyway. “For the first two months of the season, they’re edible,” he said. “After that, they take on that grassy taste from Crowley Lake (when) the water starts getting that green junk in it--an algae condition. It’s the same water that comes down here. It’s a bum taste. You can’t even smoke them and get rid of it.”

Deinstadt said the mean size of the fish has dropped recently from 12 inches to 10 or 11 inches, perhaps attributable to lower water flows during the current four-year drought. But the DFG doesn’t want to adjust regulations to address a temporary condition. It’s better, Deinstadt said, to wait until two or three years after the drought ends and conditions settle down to normal, then look at it.

Tightening regulations, he said, would shift Pleasant Valley’s emphasis toward the elite fisherman, and from the beginning, he added, “We wanted the wild trout program not to be exclusively for the fly angler.”

Perhaps what bothers Milovich, Franke and Young the most is that Pleasant Valley isn’t the way it used to be.

They are appalled to see visitors camped hard against the cut banks of the river, just upstream from the DWP’s pristine day-use area.

“These people spook the heck out of the fish . . . put them down for hours,” Milovich said. “You see them washing their clothes in the river, with liquid soap . . . taking a bath.”

When the water flows are high enough, they see people floating by in inner tubes.

They miss the days of fishing the spectacular Owens River Gorge upstream between Crowley and Pleasant Valley Reservoir, before the DWP’s diversion tunnel took most of the flow in the late 1930s.

Milovich recalled: “The gorge, you had to want to go fishing if you went there. And fish--the sizes of them you wouldn’t believe. A friend of mine got a 26-pound brown. My dad got a 17 3/4, a 15, a 14 1/2. Didn’t even consider fishing in the five-pound class. It was ordinary.”

Old-timers tell tales of being dragged down the gorge by monster fish, through brush and over rocks, at risk of tumbling into the violent rush of water. The gorge is still fishable in places, where seepage allows flows of up to 18 cubic feet per second.

“It contains a tremendous population of brown trout, (but) it’s extremely difficult fishing,” Wong said.

The river’s flow through Pleasant Valley is more placid, varying from the present 125 to 750 cubic feet per second during high releases from the Pleasant Valley Dam.

The landscape is unchanged from when Milovich and Young fished here with their fathers in the ‘30s, using rods and flies imported from England. “This is where they fished,” Milovich said.

The problem, probably, is that it’s not 1930 anymore.