At Hesperia, There’s No End to Rainbow

It’s a still morning on the shore of Hesperia Lake, but the winds of change are stirring.

Fishermen are bundled in sweatshirts. On previous mornings, they were in shirt sleeves.

Fred McDaniel has been fishing for catfish all summer. Now he’s concerned about those pesky trout.

“If I catch a trout, I’ll give it away,” he says.

Across the cove is Robert Abbett, a trout fisherman trying to avoid those annoying catfish.

“I don’t eat catfish; I only eat trout,” he says.

Then there’s Julius McLendon, who at dawn, while fishing for catfish, caught a 6-pound trout.

“I’ll fish for whatever’s available,” says the 68-year-old from Monrovia, a smoldering cigar in his mouth.

It has been that kind of morning on the banks of this inconspicuous little reservoir on the outskirts of Hesperia, a high-desert community along I-15 near Cajon Pass.

But all one has to do is gaze across the water to see that scenic Hesperia Lake, though it is neither sprawling nor spectacular, is primed to become one of the top Southland destinations during a trout season just getting underway.

Rainbow trout trucked from Mt. Lassen Trout Farms in Northern California are literally jumping all over the place.

“That’s the way it was last year -- all jump and no bite,” jokes Merelynn Johnson, 68, of Highland, as a fish seems to leap directly over his line. Johnson then concedes, “In another week they’ll be biting like crazy.”

Early Tuesday morning, the lake received its fifth plant of 4,000 pounds of Mt. Lassen rainbows. The weekly stocking will soon be increased to 6,000 pounds a week, says Manager Ed Rister, adding that 10% of every load will be fish weighing 10-15 pounds.

Rister was hired four years ago to transform seven-acre Hesperia Lake -- which also boasts a campground and RV park -- into a fishery on par with other paid-entry lakes such as Corona Lake, Santa Ana River Lakes, Laguna Niguel Park Lake and Irvine Lake.

Concessionaires at these reservoirs buy trout from private growers and lure anglers with the prospect of landing fish much bigger than those they might catch almost anywhere else.

Mt. Lassen Trout Farms, near the town of Red Bluff, grows them to about 30 pounds, using a complicated technology.

It involves thermo-shocking eggs with hot water precisely between the two-cell and four-cell stage of miotic cellular division, about 10 minutes after fertilization, which results in the fish retaining an extra set of chromosomes.

They become sterile and grow to abnormal sizes because they conserve energy otherwise spent on sexual development.

That may be too much information for the average angler, but the fact is, for many of them, size does matter and these lab-produced rainbows are immensely popular.

And competition among concessionaires at these pay lakes -- where fishermen are charged $15 to $20 per day but do not need fishing licenses -- is cutthroat.

Corona Recreation Inc., for example, has an exclusive deal with Mt. Lassen Trout Farms to buy its biggest rainbows for Corona Lake, Santa Ana River Lakes and Anaheim Lake.

Hesperia Lake, thus, receives trout to only 15 pounds.

“My hands are tied for the time being,” Rister acknowledges, pointing out that he emphasizes more quality fish versus a comparative few gargantuan specimens stocked at the other lakes.

Santa Ana River Lakes, currently closed, produced a 28.1-pound rainbow last November. It was a state record in the hatchery-raised category until January 2006, when an aquaculturist caught a home-raised 28.33-pound rainbow on his private lake near Chico.

(The state-record naturally-grown rainbow is a 27-pounder caught at Lake Natoma near Sacramento in January 2000. The all-tackle world record is a 42 pound 2 ounce rainbow caught in Alaska in 1970.)

Hesperia Lake faithful can at least take solace in knowing that there are bigger fish in their pond. The lake-record catfish stands at 44 pounds.

And the ambience of the San Bernardino Mountain foothills is certainly more pleasant than that at Santa Ana River Lakes, adjacent to a freeway junction in Anaheim.

“As a matter of fact, this is the best lake I’ve found in the L.A. area,” says McLendon, who is all smiles after reeling in perhaps a 5-pound catfish, far from his personal best of 32 pounds. “And I’ve fished Corona, Guasti, Prado, Anaheim ... all over.”

Across the shore, brothers Ralph and Jesse Frausto have teamed to catch and net what looks like a 2-pound rainbow.

Nearby, local resident Walter Corbin bemoans lost opportunities.

“I had a couple of nice fish but they ripped the bait right off the hook,” he says.

To his left, fishing before an audience of ducks and geese, Bryan Friedman has put two large rainbows on his stringer and now is practicing catch-and-release and the subtle art of mini-jig fishing.

“This is a great jig lake,” says the 22-year-old owner of Lip Ripperz, a company that produces the popular lures. “We fish here a couple of times a week and we always seem to at least hook up into something big.”

And he isn’t talking about catfish.

pete.thomas@latimes.com