No Limit to Fun on Opening Day : Trout: Perfect weather, good fishing and improved facilities contribute to anglers’ enjoyment.

Mother Nature couldn’t have been kinder, and the fish couldn’t have been hungrier.

Or so it seemed Saturday, the opening day of the general trout fishing season.

The sky was clear, the air warm and stirred only by the gentlest of breezes--and the fishing was generally red-hot throughout the Eastern Sierra.

Big fish, as usual, were played out on this festive day: the biggest as of late Saturday being an 8 1/2-pound rainbow trout caught by Richard Victor of San Gabriel at Convict Lake, one of the range’s more picturesque reservoirs, located south of Mammoth Lakes.

So much for the big-fish reign at Twin Lakes in Bridgeport. For the last three years either upper or lower Twin produced the opening-day best.

Gull Lake on the June Loop produced a 7-pound 13-ounce rainbow and a 7-10 brown; and Kirman Lake in the Bridgeport back-country yielded a steady number of brook trout in the four- to five-pound class.

But the attention, as usual on opening day, was at Crowley Lake.

This time, however, the thousands of fishermen enjoyed not only 70-degree temperatures and some of the best fishing in years, but an efficiency and graciousness long missing from this popular reservoir.

The Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks is gone, after 50 years, and Sierra Recreation is the new concessionaire.

Worn-out boats have been refurbished and restrooms attended to, and the general atmosphere was well-received by the public.

“I’ll tell you the difference: when we checked in we were greeted with smiles,” said Galen Sandwisch, 54, a Santa Barbara resident who has visited Crowley every opening day for the last seven years.

Sandwisch, while turning on the faucet at the cleaning station, with a limit of rainbow trout averaging better than a pound apiece, added: “And when we came in we found the water running.”

Kenny Parks, 63, a Templeton resident who along with three others caught their five-fish limits by 9:45 a.m., said that last year when he rented a boat he found himself standing in four inches of water.

“This year is much better,” he said. “Overall I think they’re going in the right direction.”

On the water, most of the 6,000-plus fishermen were about as busy as Sandwisch and Parks.

Sam Present of South Lake Tahoe posted the first five-fish limit--at 6:30 a.m. Most others were done fishing by noon.

Bob Waggoner, the lake’s new general manager, said the rate at which fishermen were pulling in fish--estimated at more than two per person per hour--was the highest ever.

“Even years ago, back in the heyday of Crowley, they were only averaging something like 1.5 or 1.7 fish per hour per angler,” Waggoner said.

According to the Department of Fish and Game, about 90% of the boaters on the lake reported limits.

The average weight of the fish coming out of Crowley: 1 1/4 pounds.

At lakes Mary, Mamie and George, accessible for the first time in years, nine fishermen out of 10 reported limits, according to Don Barrett at the Lake Mary Marina. The same was reportedly true at the lakes on the June Loop.