COLUMN ONE : Lure of Fishing Is Fading : Thousands are quitting the freshwater sport each year. Reasons include drought, pollution and the poor quality of the fish produced by hatcheries.

The deciding moment for Bob Verberkmoes came last spring when thousands of rotting fish mysteriously washed ashore at Lake Crowley. Whatever happened to those rainbow trout, Verberkmoes is sure of one thing: “Certainly they didn’t die of old age.”

This year, Verberkmoes joined the half-million Californians who have quit fishing since 1985. Every year, about 100,000 more anglers abandon the sport, and the dwindling license sales have left California short of funds to protect natural resources and wildlife.

“I’ve had a license all my life until this year. But it just isn’t worthwhile any longer,” said Verberkmoes, a retiree in Bishop who has fished for about 65 years, half of them in California.

Although experts offer many theories on why anglers are packing up their rods and reels, drought, pollution and development get much of the blame.

Who wants to cast a line in the west fork of the San Gabriel River, a wild trout stream that has withered to a trickle after four dry years in Southern California? Or eat fish from the Upper Sacramento River tainted by chemicals from a paper mill upstream? Or drive eight hours from Los Angeles to the High Sierra only to find a reservoir drained and the picturesque East Walker River filled with silt?

“We’ve had this exploding population in California and it’s been altering our natural environment. The fish populations we had with our grandparents or parents are gone,” said James Edmondson, Southern California regional manager of California Trout, a statewide sportfishing and environmental group with 4,000 members.

Contributing to the exodus of anglers are changes in the way we live and play. For many, a peaceful day of fishing cannot compete with the allure of Nintendo or mountain bikes. What is more, families have split apart, leaving single parents with less time and money for faraway outings.

“We just don’t see the families coming up here like we used to,” said Rick Rockel, who has run a tackle shop for 26 years in Bridgeport, a small town east of Yosemite surrounded by some of the West’s best wild trout streams. “I hate to see it because kids shouldn’t be deprived of the opportunity to enjoy the outdoors.”

While conservationists do not want too many people fishing because it strains resources, they do not want too few either. As anglers disappear, there is fear that more of California’s streams, rivers and lakes will fall into disrepair because no one will notice or care.

“The more people use them, the more the public wants these streams preserved instead of turned into shopping malls or parking lots or irrigation schemes,” Edmondson said. “When people visit a place regularly it becomes something magical they want to protect.”

Since 1985, sportfishing license sales have dropped 24%, the sharpest decline for any state in the nation. California is expected to sell about 1.48 million freshwater licenses this year, contrasted with 1.58 million in 1989 and 1.96 million in 1985. No one knows when, or if, the downward trend will level off. Just freshwater fishing has declined. Ocean fishing, which requires a separate license, remains as popular as ever.

With 85% of its funding from licenses, the state Department of Fish and Game faces a chronic, severe shortage of money to pursue its tasks, which include safeguarding California’s endangered species, catching poachers and polluters, stocking streams, protecting birds and marine life from oil spills, and trying to stave off development of animal habitats.

The department’s new budget shows a record deficit of $12 million. The Legislature in September granted $8 million in emergency funds to bail the agency out, but $4 million in programs must be eliminated. About $1 million will be cut from programs that protect and manage fish habitats. One of Southern California’s three hatcheries, where fish are bred for stocking waterways, will be shut and five fisheries biologists of a staff of 58 will lose their jobs.

As the budget crunch hampers management of fishing grounds, more anglers will abandon the sport, leaving the department in worse financial shape.

Most anglers dropped out of fishing because they could not find good fisheries nearby or did not have enough time for the sport, according to a 1988 survey of 1,526 anglers conducted by Cal State Chico.

More than two-thirds of California’s anglers live in urban areas, with 36% from the four-county Los Angeles Basin, according to the survey. For Southland residents, the best spots to fish are in the Eastern or High Sierra, and many believe the long drive is not worth it.

“In Southern California, there are very few places to go fishing, especially in summer,” said Sandra Wolfe, special projects manager for the Fish and Game Department.

For those who have time to fish, the hassle can be too much. Verberkmoes, a 74-year-old Union Carbide retiree, used to fish about 10 times a year, but he is so dissatisfied that he has decided to save the $20 annual license costs.

The black, scrawny trout that the state breeds and stocks at his favorite spot on the Owens River is a major reason Verberkmoes dislikes fishing. He wonders how anyone can call those ugly things rainbow trout.

He also was driven off by occasional unexplained fish kills at Lake Crowley, north of his hometown of Bishop. State biologists say the trout probably die from natural causes or below-normal water levels rather than pollution, but Verberkmoes is not convinced.

“It’s come to the point where I wouldn’t touch the fish in Crowley. They say they’re safe for people to eat. But why did they die?” he said.

Although Lake Crowley remains one of California’s best fishing spots, its popularity has sunk. About 7,000 anglers attended the most recent opening day, contrasted with 15,000 about five years ago.

In nearby Mammoth Lakes, sporting goods store owners say there is not as much business to go around.

“There was a time when every little gas station or hardware store in town had a little tackle store inside. Now they don’t any more,” said Bob Waggoner, a co-owner of Kittredge Sports in Mammoth Lakes, one of the few stores there that stocks a full line of fishing gear.

There is a problem of perception, too. People hear about drought, pollution and low fish counts, so they ignore those streams and lakes where fishing remains good.

“It’s one-third perception, two-thirds reality,” Edmondson said. “The perception is that fishing is horrible everywhere. But there are four-pound rainbow trout caught in Lake Crowley. That’s awfully good fishing.”

Some California fishermen are heading to other states where it is easier to find rivers that run full, lush landscapes and waters brimming with trout.

“People don’t think twice any more about going to Montana or Alaska or New Zealand,” Edmondson said. “We relish our free time so much we’re willing to spend big bucks for a high quality experience. They want to go someplace where the odds are better in fishing.”

Fifteen other Western states have shown decreases over the past five years, including Arizona and Nevada, although none is as large as California’s, according to a survey conducted by the American Fisheries Society. Most Eastern and Midwestern states had an increase in fishing licenses during the same period.

Why the decline is so severe in California is the subject of lively debate at Fish and Game offices from Long Beach to Sacramento. The state’s four-year drought does not deserve all the blame; the trend started before the dry spell did. But the drought has hit hard at many of California’s best fishing spots, especially on the western side of the Sierra Nevada and in Southern California.

In the San Bernardino Mountains, one-tenth of the mountain streams have dried up, and the rest have only half their normal flow. Deep Creek, a longtime popular fishing spot in San Bernardino National Forest, is no longer deep. It dried to pools this summer. The Stanfield Cutoff, on the east end of Big Bear Lake, used to be lined with anglers, but now the water does not even reach there.

“We have some streams that are completely dry now when there were fishermen there two years ago,” said Steve Loe, a U.S. Forest Service wildlife biologist in the San Bernardino National Forest. “We’ll probably have to completely restock them when the drought is over.”

The drought is not the only reason that running water is a vanishing resource in California. Many streams, especially in the Eastern Sierra and Central Valley, have been dammed or drained to supply water to households and farms, or paved for development.

Until two years ago, East Walker River, an hour north of Mammoth Lakes, was considered one of the best trout streams in the West. In 1988, its reservoir was drained to supply water to Nevada farmers and the scenic mountain river filled with silt. The fish populations still have not recovered.

“There is a lot of competition for water in California. It’s more and more difficult to keep the streams flowing at a level we’d like to see for the fish, and that’s sure to continue,” said Tim Farley, state Department of Fish and Game’s assistant chief of inland fisheries.

Some anglers have their own past practices to blame for lower fish counts.

“I’ve seen too many rivers and streams that have been raped because of the male ego,” said Don Stehsel, an avid fly-fisherman from San Pedro who has seen others take home 20 trout apiece at rivers where the limit is three. “This is not the days of Davy Crockett. You can’t keep taking all the fish and still have them left for your grandchildren.”

Some fishing spots have been spoiled by the same urban pressures many anglers are trying to escape. City dwellers have to fight traffic to get to the High Sierra, the premier fishing spot in California. When they arrive, smog often awaits them and many popular trails are congested with people and manure-dropping pack mules.

“The bottom line,” tackle shop owner Rockel said, “is there are too many people in California and it’s a hassle to do anything.”