A Bit of the Arctic : Fly-Fishermen Need Go No Further Than Eastern Sierras to Find Grayling

You’re in trout country. The lakes and streams are full of them. You’ve caught a few. Now you want to try something different.

Think grayling. Arctic grayling, an acrobatic game fish found in abundance in Alaska and northern Canada. And in this part of California, too.

Leave Bridgeport and head north on California 395 for a dozen miles or so. Turn right on a gravelly, but well traveled dirt road. A few miles uphill and you turn right again, onto a not-so-well-traveled road, one bumpy enough to separate the cars from the trucks.

As you bounce along in your four-wheel-drive, notice the colors of fall lining the canyons and hillsides--bright-leaved aspens and colorful cottonwoods in sizable patches of yellow and gold.

Whitetail deer amble through a small wooded canyon and onto the road, then spring out of sight, into the shelter of trees and shrub.

You cross a shallow stream once, then again farther up the road, heading deeper into the Sweetwater Mountains, which straddle the California-Nevada border.

You wonder if you’re following the directions you got in the Bridgeport sporting goods store, then realize that the stream you crossed is being fed by a lake, probably the one you’re looking for.

You’ve passed the 8,000-foot level and the autumn afternoon air is growing chillier.

Then, suddenly, your tires scratching over the top of one last hill, it comes into view--a puddle of a lake called Lobdell.

It’s not what you had expected, having spent much of your time around Bridgeport, with itspine forests, its 500 miles of streams and 35 lakes beautifully arranged in a radius of only 15 miles.

Lobdell Lake, atop a plateau of sorts, is surrounded by dirt. The only noticeable vegetation is a stand of pine trees off in the distance.

But there are fishermen here at this tiny, remote reservoir because it provides a fishery unlike any other in California.

Those who know about it--the fishery and how to get to it--find Lobdell Lake the ideal place to practice the tricky art of fly-fishing, and to catch something unique in the process.

“What makes this place special is that it’s the only place in California where you can catch Arctic grayling,” guide John Pelichowski says.

Pelichowski, 30, has been at Lobdell Lake for an hour or so, instructing two beginning fly-fishermen.

“These guys, this is their first time ever holding a fly rod,” he says while watching the two from shore. “And they’ve already caught six or seven.”

He points out the lack of surrounding trees.

“Basically, this is a great place for learning technique, a great place to practice because there are no obstacles in the way,” he says.

Standing waist deep in waders, their fly rods whipping under a clear blue sky and flies flashing out across the water, Scott Savoian and Jim Hart are getting the technique down. Hart hooks into a grayling and it is breaking water 25 feet away.

Pelichowski tells of catching a 16-inch grayling at Lobdell Lake.

“(And) last year, I caught a 14 1/2-inch fish,” he says. “The biggest taken anywhere weighed about five pounds.”

Closer to six. The world record is a five-pound 15-ounce grayling caught in the Northwest Territories’ Katseyedie River in 1967. The biggest grayling ever taken on a fly rod is a three-pound 10-ounce fish caught last July in the Northwest Territories’ Kasan River.

Savoian is attempting to cast, taking advice from Pelichowski, and eventually places his fly perfectly. He waits a few seconds and begins stripping in his line slowly, as instructed, and his fly is attacked by a small grayling, an eight-inch fish he brings in and carefully releases.

“This is my first day,” Savoian says, later remarking that it would be difficult to detect a bad cast at such a reservoir. “Here, if I have a bad cast, I can just say, ‘I meant to throw it there,’ ” he says.

Even if they are having trouble casting, the Orange County residents have no trouble catching fish. When they drive off, it’s after having caught several of a species most travel thousands of miles to fish for.

Grayling are not big, but they do offer tremendous sport at the end of a five- or six-weight fly rod, or a light spinning outfit with a fly beneath a floating bubble.

They almost always jump when hooked, spreading their sail-like dorsal fins and showing off their iridescent colors of violet-gray and silver.

A grayling will dart about and fight to the end, where a faint aroma of thyme emanating from the freshly caught fish explains its Latin name, thymallus arcticus . On the table, its flaky white flesh is considered excellent fare, some say better than its oilier salmon and trout relatives.

Grayling were documented as a species in 1865 and have been extremely popular ever since. Before the turn of the century, grayling nearly became extinct south of the Canadian border--there are token populations in a few of the contiguous United States--because of habitat destruction caused by lumbering and overfishing.

They were virtually slaughtered in the Midwest between 1870 and 1880, when they lined the shores of Michigan’s Au Sable and Manistee rivers. They were hauled by wagon to restaurants in Detroit and Chicago, but tons of them rotted on the banks.

Residents of Crawford, Mich., voted to change the city’s name to Grayling. Alaska also has a city named after the fish, with Grayling Creek running right through the town of 228.

Bridgeport residents are not likely to follow suit, however, as grayling do not abound in the rivers and streams so famous for trout. They are found only in Lobdell Lake, and to some extent in Desert Creek, which flows out of Lobdell into Nevada.

Nevada ranchers created Lobdell Lake as an irrigation reservoir several years ago, diverting Deep Creek into a shored up basin atop the plateau high in the Sweetwater range. A trout fishery existed for a while in Lobdell Lake, and it was not uncommon to catch a rainbow or brown trout weighing up to four pounds.

But because the fishery was susceptible to fish kills--heavy winter icing led to low dissolved-oxygen levels--the DFG stopped stocking rainbows and the fishery faded.

The lake became a natural candidate for grayling when the DFG decided to create viable fisheries where trout fared poorly. It started planting grayling in the early 1970s.

“Grayling are able to withstand lower dissolved-oxygen levels so we tried it in waters known to have fish kills because of over-winter icing,” said Darrell Wong, a DFG biologist based in Bishop.

But by and large, the plan was a failure.

Samuel McGinnis, a professor of biology at Cal State Hayward who was critical of such efforts, said time could be better spent “correcting and improving some of the stocking programs for other species.”

All of the other grayling fisheries failed. But Lobdell Lake continues to produce grayling.

“It has the only self-reproducing population,” Wong said.

Lobdell’s grayling--which reach about 16 inches--spawn during the spring in Deep Creek, which flows into the lake at its southern edge, and there are signs that the fishery is not only surviving, but expanding. “Grayling have begun to survive in (Desert Creek) and I’ve had reports that they have been reported even over the Nevada line,” Wong said. The Nevada border is about 10 miles east of the lake.

And the fact that the fishery continues to thrive under adverse conditions--mainly caused by successive years of drought--makes it all the more astonishing, to fishermen and biologists alike.

Nevada ranchers still have water rights to the reservoir and they draw water each summer. Lobdell Lake currently covers little more than two surface acres and Pelichowski, a resident of Bridgeport since 1974, said he has seen it covering as little as one acre.

Fortunately for the grayling, the dynamics of the reservoir make it impossible for the ranchers to drain all the water without installing a system of pumps.

Prolonged drought and the subsequent low water flows are being blamed for the demise of the trout fishery at Lobdell Lake, but the grayling are thriving.

“The grayling are out-competing, and are able to survive better than the trout are,” Wong said. “It’s incredible that these things can survive, but they have been for 15 years or more.”