Shivers and 8,000 fits

The parade of cars and trucks stretched more than 250 miles, from Los Angeles through Bishop and up toward the peaks of the Eastern Sierra.

World War II had just ended, and for thousands it was time to resume the spring pilgrimage to a region that now contained, under the biggest and bluest of skies, a body of water measuring 6 miles long and 3 miles wide -- more than twice the size of any other nearby.

Los Angeles had dammed the Owens River to create the storage reservoir, which filled in 1945, and though less scenic than some of the nearby Alpine lakes, it was flush with nutrients and flourished almost immediately as a fishery.

With luck, the drive took a full day. But those making it probably would have traveled by covered wagon if that’s what it took for the chance to toss worms at the hungry browns and rainbows that mobbed the waters of Crowley Lake during its early “trout openers.”

In the nearly six decades since the first opener, blizzards and howling winds have driven anglers to shivering fits and tears. Yet at dawn on Saturday, an estimated 5,000 to 8,000 men, women and children with rods and reels will again swarm the banks and venture out in boats and float tubes, kicking off another season. “This is not all about big fish,” said Jim Craig, 69, of Pasadena after last year’s opener. “This is mostly just a time when we can all get together and do some fishing and enjoy a big dinner on Saturday night.” At least that’s what he’s been doing since it opened.

Father John J. Crowley would be proud to look down upon the reservoir that bears his name. The Owens Valley’s first resident priest, who died in an automobile accident in 1940, had pushed trout planting as a way to lure money-spending anglers to the area. By the late 1930s, nearly a million tourists a year were vacationing in the Eastern Sierra, plenty of them with trout fever.

The priest blessed their equipment and took collections in a creel.

In 1961, an estimated 19,000 anglers hauled in more than 40 tons of trout on opening weekend. These days the crowds are smaller -- fishing in general has been slowly declining in popularity -- and the California Department of Fish and Game has reduced the daily bag limit from 10 to five. But there’s still an onslaught, and during the first two days of the season, all those thousands of hooks will catch about a quarter of the season’s total take.

As a “put-and-grow” fishery, Crowley is unique to the Eastern Sierra. Fish and Game dumps in about 400,000 sub-catchable trout after Aug. 1, and there are no regular plants during the main fishing season. For the rest of the year the trout are harassed only by catch-and-release anglers until the close of the general season in autumn. Some spawn in tributaries, making their offspring “wild origin.”

Enormous browns used to be prime targets -- a fisherman caught a 22-pounder in the early 1950s and from then into the next decade, anglers often hauled in browns topping 10 pounds. No more. And biologists aren’t sure what happened. Curtis Milliron, who has managed Crowley for Fish and Game since 1987, says the brown trout fishery began to decline in the early 1980s, when broodstock in the Mt. Whitney hatchery developed whirling disease and crews killed them all. Fish from a different stock have not grown well in the hatchery and most were too small to survive after planting. Virtually all browns caught are from wild stocks.

“But the wild stocks just cannot put out enough numbers to satisfy brown-hungry anglers,” says Milliron. “And under such pressure very few browns can live long enough to become monster specimens.”

The rainbows aren’t monsters either, topping out at seven or eight pounds. But they’re healthy and generally active throughout the season, mainly because Fish and Game now plants three strains, each with different characteristics. The Coleman strain, for example, prefers the middle of the lake and is caught primarily by boaters. Kamloops rainbows, the more acrobatic of the two, prefer the shoreline. Together, they make up the primary catch on opening weekend. Eagle Lake rainbows typically start showing on hooks later in the season and carry over well into the next season.

On Saturday, most fishermen will be too busy to bother with such details as they maneuver around the lake and each other, casting and reeling, or stand shoulder to shoulder at the cleaning station, sharing stories.