Striper ‘Chum Line’ Feeds DFG, Castaic Anglers’ Concerns

Amazing what a little chum can do. . . .

No tuna-fishing trip would be the same without the tossing of a few sardines over the rail. It drives the fish wild. Think barracuda or bonito would stick around your boat long if you didn’t offer them a periodic handful of anchovies?

The fact of the matter is, without chum, the saltwater fishing experience would not be nearly as exciting.

But what about the freshwater fishing experience?

The chumming of live fish to catch freshwater fish, of course, is illegal in California. This is not to say there aren’t loopholes. Bass fishermen have found a doozy--they let the state do their chumming for them.

It’s no coincidence that within minutes after the Department of Fish and Game trout truck arrives, there’s a dramatic increase in largemouth bass activity. It’s also no coincidence that those catching the biggest fish are casting lures bearing a stark resemblance to rainbow trout.

But have you seen what happens when a load of rainbows is dumped into a lake with striped bass in it? The voracious predators set upon the poor rainbows with a surface-churning vengeance not normally associated with any West Coast freshwater game fish.

It used to be a common sight at Lake Pyramid, where the trout truck could be spotted a mile away on the road from the hatchery and would be greeted by dozens of gleeful anglers who knew they were about to become involved in a line-sizzling affair with 20- to 30-pound stripers.

But the DFG, citing a poor return on trout by fishermen, said it would no longer “feed the stripers” and stopped stocking the reservoir five years ago. Pyramid’s stripers, no longer able to gorge on trout, are mere “fish sticks” now, averaging 3-6 pounds, with an occasional 10-pounder livening things up.

It was once a common sight at Silverwood Lake as well. Those casting homemade lures were occasionally rewarded with battles with stripers in excess of 30 pounds. But the DFG stopped stocking Silverwood at the same time it did Pyramid. The stripers haven’t made a splash since.

Now large striped bass are boiling on the surface at Castaic Lake whenever the trout truck shows, and it has lake regulars both saddened and excited--and more than a little concerned.

Once the West’s premier largemouth bass fishery, Castaic in the last five years has become overrun with stripers, which have replaced largemouth bass at the top of the food chain. As a result, largemouth bass have been knocked down to size.

No longer are 15- to 18-pounders coming in on a regular basis: It’s news if a 10-pounder is caught. This is unfortunate from a bass fisherman’s standpoint because, before the stripers came, everyone was in agreement that the next world-record largemouth--the current record is a 22-pound 4-ounce bass caught in Georgia 65 years ago--would come from Castaic.

Nobody is sure how stripers got into Castaic. Some of the more paranoid bass fishermen have gone so far as to accuse regulars at nearby Casitas Lake--the region’s other preeminent bass fishery--of dumping them in to sabotage the Castaic fishery.

More likely, the stripers somehow made it through holes in screens of the California Aqueduct and washed in via Pyramid Lake.

In any event, the stripers are well-established and there to stay, and striper fishermen are thrown into as much of a frenzy as the stripers every time the trout truck dumps its load.

But they are a worried bunch, believing the DFG is about to pull the plug on the trout plants, just as it did at Pyramid, Silverwood and, more recently, Riverside County’s Lake Skinner, the last of four Southland reservoirs holding stripers. Skinner has since contracted with a private hatchery in Idaho to supply the lake with trout.

At Castaic, concern began to mount when the trout truck failed to show for three consecutive weeks in December. (Typically, lakes are stocked every other week.) Jim Adams, manager of the DFG’s Fillmore hatchery, which supplies Castaic, assured at the time that the absence of trout plants was merely because Castaic had received its allotment for 1997.

But Adams would not rule out the possibility that the DFG may eventually drop Castaic from its stocking schedule, citing heavy predation by striped bass.

“If an angler wants to catch stripers, he should not have to rely on a chum line to do so,” Adams said.

He brings up a good point, but so do anglers who claim that money they spend on fishing licenses is spent on keeping reservoirs stocked with trout. They point out that after every trout plant, there are trout fishermen on the banks and on the concrete ramp of the reservoir, filling their stringers with trout.

I made a trip to Castaic earlier this week, hoping to get lucky and arrive soon after a trout plant. No such luck. It was a blustery Tuesday morning and the lake’s limited shore space was nearly deserted.

There were about 20 fishermen in all, most of them sitting in beach chairs soaking Power Bait trying to catch trout.

Mike Arnold was obviously not after trout. Dangling from the Lake Elizabeth angler’s line was a double-jointed wooden lure painted to look like a rainbow trout.

“Any luck?” I asked. “Nope,” he said. “I was hoping the trout truck would show today.”

It hadn’t shown in more than a week, and the stripers had gone deep.

It is Arnold’s belief that while the DFG may be feeding the stripers to some extent with its trout plants, it is also creating a fair opportunity to catch trout and a fantastic opportunity to catch stripers.

“Isn’t it their responsibility to enhance fishing opportunities?” he asked. “There’s also this matter of the striper stamp we have to buy [$3.70 annually] to fish for stripers here. The money goes to enhance the striper fishery in the [San Joaquin] Delta. What about us?”

I left Arnold to stew in the parking lot and drove to the Mobile Mini-Mart, a bait and tackle shop and a longtime hangout for Castaic fishermen, and got the same spiel from manager Stephanie Justice, whose small business relies on the state of the Castaic fisheries.

“That should be their goal, for people to enjoy themselves and go fishing,” she said of the DFG. “The trout plants can’t hurt the stripers or the [largemouth] bass.

“It’s not as though they’re trying to save this ancient ecosystem. It’s a man-made dam and part of the reason it’s here is so people can go fishing.”

I called Dwayne Maxwell, senior biologist for the DFG’s inland fisheries branch. It wasn’t the first he had received on the matter.

“Castaic is still on the stocking schedule for 1998, and we haven’t cut its allotment,” he assured. “I don’t know where they’re getting their information.”

Maxwell, however, acknowledged that dropping Castaic is a consideration of the department.

“The [Fish and Game] Commission has a policy that there should be at least a 50% return for planted trout. We admit that we don’t know if we’re getting that at a lot of places, but we do know that where we have stripers, we have heavy predation by stripers.”

Maxwell acknowledged that part of the DFG’s role is to enhance fishing opportunities. But he said that role does not include using hatchery-raised rainbow trout to chum for stripers.

“The complaints are coming mainly from people who depend on a feeding frenzy for their fishing enjoyment. I’m not saying we’re going to stop planting at Castaic.

“But whether doing so is appropriate is a policy question that is going to have to be addressed one of these days, and it’s a question that will probably be answered above my level.”