Monstrous lure

THE REEL TURNS. THE LINE tightens. And as the bluegill-pattern crankbait dives deeper, the reporter senses that he has just fulfilled a journalist’s solemn obligation: Fishing in a sea of rumors, he’s latched onto a cold, hard fact.

Actually, it’s a reservoir of rumors under investigation on this cool morning. For four years, water has been pouring into this dammed-in stretch of desert -- Southern California’s newest and largest freshwater reservoir -- and that’s been more than enough time for imaginations to conjure aquatic beasts of mythic size and appetite.

As the waves rose against Diamond Valley Lake’s earthen walls, flooding a basin where mammoths and mastodons once roamed, word spread of a remarkable proliferation of fish, most notably a Florida strain of largemouth bass. It was said that a researcher had caught a 10-pounder on the lake’s northern shore. Then rumors that a trespasser had hooked a 12-pounder coursed through the fishing grapevine. That fish grew into a 15-pounder and suddenly the dusty Riverside County town of Hemet had become bass fishermen’s idea of heaven.

In the months leading up to Friday’s opening day, anglers clambered to get at the lake, which measures 4 1/2 miles long and 2 miles wide, and averages 200 feet in depth. They flooded phone lines, asking about reservations. The 250 permits to launch on the first day sold out in hours, and there are reports of $500 offers for a weekend slot.

Some couldn’t wait. No trespassers have been caught, but evidence that scofflaws have crept down the shoreline’s weedy trails abounds: lures of various shapes and colors dangling from the branches of half-submerged brush and trees.

Even those with the discipline to wait are squirming with anticipation. Back in 1995, Chris Nicoll, 41, a mechanical engineer from Fallbrook, persuaded a friend working on the reservoir’s dams to give him a tour. He videotaped the lake bed and banks so he would know where to find likely bass habitat after water submerged it. He’s been studying the video ever since.

James Stratton of Vernal, Utah, explains the phenomenon. “What you have out there is a brand new lake with 10-pound fish that have never even seen a lure.

“This is a bass fisherman’s dream,” says Stratton, whose persistence earned him one of those coveted permits to launch Friday. “It ought to be the best fishing on the planet.”

Mike Giusti peers into Diamond Valley Lake’s wavering depths and, 200 feet below, sees the office in which he once worked. It’s as if the water isn’t even there. In his mind, every boulder, every pile of brush and every clump of rocks is visible. “I can’t find anything in any literature where somebody has designed a fishery from scratch,” he says. The unspoken addendum, reflected in Giusti’s proud-father smile, is “until now.” Because that’s what the career biologist, who also happens to be a lifelong fisherman, has done.

A California Department of Fish and Game employee on contract with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California to create the fishery, Giusti is quick to point out that the Southland’s first big reservoir in nearly 30 years is first and foremost an awe-inspiring piece of the Southland’s water puzzle, built by the MWD to provide the region with a six-month supply of drinking water in an emergency. The water is supplied via pipeline and canal from both the Colorado River Aqueduct and State Water Project (with origins at the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta), and is supported by three earth-and-rock dams, ranging from 130 feet to 285 feet in height and measuring in length from half a mile to about 2 miles. At 1,700 feet in elevation, it is high enough to gravity-feed an area stretching from Malibu to the U.S.-Mexico border.

But unlike Southern California’s other large reservoirs -- Pyramid, Castaic and Perris lakes, for instance -- Diamond Valley Lake was designed from the start to be a world-class fishery. Giusti, extensively trained in a variety of fishery issues, worked on his strategy in an old ranch house in the basin that was home to about 100 families. Though at least one pioneer clan, the Domenigonis, battled hard to stay, the water district eventually bought them all out, meanwhile seducing the surrounding communities with construction jobs and the promise that the reservoir would flood the hardscrabble towns with free-spending recreationists.

The water district purchased 13,000 acres to establish wildlife reserves to mitigate the environmental impact, including a 2,500-acre buffer zone that connects Diamond Valley Lake with nearby Lake Skinner. The agency spent $360 million alone on land acquisition, as part of a project with an overall price tag of more than $2 billion. Camping, hiking, horseback riding, museums and a golf course are in the works. But it’s the 2-million-plus Californians who fish -- there are more than 44 million nationwide -- that the reservoir is really baiting. And residents of Hemet are like Alaskan grizzlies awaiting the salmon spawn.

It’s been a long time coming. Eight years ago, crews razed buildings in the basin and began bulldozing dirt into dams. Archeologists uncovered evidence of Native American habitation dating back more than 7,000 years. Paleontologists found the skeletal remains of not only mastodons and mammoths, but sloths, bison, a lion, a camel and other animals. Workers removed bones and artifacts for later placement in museums being built on MWD property.

Then as the earthmovers rumbled across the valley floors and dirt haulers roared in and out, Giusti, 47, and his colleague John Banacky, 35, began mapping existing habitat that fish would find inviting, and plotting locations to provide additional structures in which bass, trout, bluegill and catfish might want to hide. Filling an 80-acre pond on the lake bottom, they brought in the beginnings of the fishery: 35,000 bluegill and 15,000 red-ear sunfish -- species also known as forage for bass.

In 1999, the fishery makers visited San Diego’s Lake Hodges, where they found the purest, Florida-strain largemouth bass. With an electro-fishing boat they traveled from cove to cove, using penetrating probes to stun fish long enough for them to float to the surface. They eventually collected the beginnings of the bass fishery: 217 2-to 5-pounders.

With the help of dam workers and their machinery, they had placed 2,200 pipes with eight-, 12- and 18-inch diameters at different elevations to provide habitat for catfish, which spawn in caves and presumably would use the pipes as such. Workers constructed and anchored nearly 4,000 brush piles at various locations, pushed up against the banks 300 rock reefs, some more than 100 yards long. As staging areas for the work, they cut two miles of terraces into the hillsides at various depths.

Nature was at work too. The bass had taken to their new home, and to one another. The spring 1999 spawn of 6,000 to 10,000 bass spread out that winter as water began pouring. The next spring, about 300,000 bass hatched.

Since then, the fishery has blossomed beyond even Giusti’s expectations. On this morning, just days before the opening, he has been showing off his adopted lake to the host of a radio fishing show and a representative of American Bass, one of several organizations considering Diamond Valley Lake as a regular stop on their amateur and pro circuits. Giusti has no doubts his fishery is tournament-worthy, and trots out data with pride. Today, he says, the reservoir contains an estimated 45,000 bass 12 inches or longer and nearly 400,000 smaller bass, products of the latest spring spawn. “And for every largemouth bass you can figure probably 10 times as many bluegill,” he says. “So you’re looking at another 3 to 4 million bluegills out there of various sizes.”

Trout are the secondary game fish in the lake, and Giusti says that many of the 200,000-plus fish stocked beginning in 2000 are probably running 8 to 10 pounds. Counting smallmouth bass, catfish, various baitfish species that came with the water and all of the fry, there are between 20 million and 50 million fish swimming about the brush piles and other structures in an impoundment that contains nearly 260 billion gallons of water.

But it’s not so much the number of fish that surprises Giusti at this point in his fishery’s development. It’s that the fish are growing almost twice as fast as those in many other reservoirs. An abundance of nutrients released from the soil for the first time is a huge factor, Giusti says. “Phenomenal” algae and zooplankton blooms provided a boost to a surprisingly large number of baitfish that came in with the water. A mild climate helped, as did the fact that the fish are free to swim around without lures there to tempt them.

“You know what’s supposed to happen, but the growth rates ... are really off the charts,” Giusti says. “We’re seeing almost two pounds a year of growth on our [largemouth bass].”

If such growth continues, fishermen may find their lines yanked by 20-pound bass in five years. And some are already dreaming of breaking the all-tackle world record (22 pounds, 4 ounces) set in Georgia’s Lake Montgomery in 1932. “I’d give that five to seven years, at least,” Giusti says.

For many bass fishermen, however, the next three days will be an eternity.

Hemet Mayor Lori Van Arsdale can hardly wait herself. The desert community of trailer homes and single-story ranch dwellings already has housing tracts springing up and road-widening projects in place. A Hampton Inn is in the planning stages and Van Arsdale says she hopes to see more lodging, restaurants and gas stations move in.

Still, she confesses that she doesn’t understand the attraction, especially when so many bass fanatics haul in their prey and then plop it right back into the lake for someone else to catch another day. “I don’t really understand that about fishermen,” she says.

But then she wasn’t out on the lake that morning as a bass hit from below, dived briefly, then leaped clear of the water, shaking its massive head. There it was, a dark silhouette against the orange light of the rising sun -- satisfying proof that the fabled Diamond Valley Lake is more than a fevered fisherman’s elusive mirage.