And so it begins, another season at ice-out at Colorado’s largest lake. With it comes another chase for the state’s largest fish and, with that, more virulent debate over how Blue Mesa Reservoir should be managed. Welcome to the latest hair-pull over size versus numbers, emotion against economics.
The first signal flare went up just over a week ago when Denver angler Matt Smiley landed a 31-pound lake trout. Although this might rank as the fish of a lifetime for most, it is by Smiley’s standards — and those of the lake — not a particularly fetching specimen.
Smiley, who in 2003 set a state record of 45 pounds, 6 ounces, since broken, scoffed at the catch as little more than a warm-up to a season that won’t reach its prime for another two or three weeks, when water temperature rises along with the metabolic rate of the trout.
Smiley, distribution sales manager for Wright & McGill, caught mackinaw fever as a student at Western State College, a malady from which he expects never to recover. He has released a couple others in the range of 42 or 43 pounds, along with others in the high 30s.
“We’re trying to release these fish, to maintain a trophy fishery,” he declares of a crusade by a close-knit group of enthusiasts. “People love to catch them. They spend thousands of dollars on a trip to Canada for lake trout not nearly that big.”
Over the next few weeks, anglers who troll or bounce bottom with large jigs will catch monster fish, perhaps even one larger than the state record.
Smiley and his people bridle at what they feel is a ruinous eight-a- day creel limit and a hostile management strategy by the Colorado Division of Wildlife.
Indeed, this has become Colorado’s most intense fish management dispute: lunker lake trout against millions of kokanee salmon, with a few hundred thousand rainbow trout tossed in to tip the scale a bit.
In one form or another, the argument has simmered since the early 1990s, when lakers stocked by the Colorado Division of Wildlife as a big-fish component found conditions right for natural reproduction. The result has been a relative explosion by what may be the fastest-growing population in the western U.S. — grand for those who thrill to the tug of a trophy, appalling for that greater number of anglers who have seen a popular fishery for kokanee salmon and rainbow trout dwindle alarmingly.
“Except for one year when our stocking rate went way up, we’ve seen a steady decline in the catch of kokanee for the past 16 years,” said John Alves, DOW’s acting senior biologist for the Southwest Region.
Alves ticks off statistics to back this up: 175,000 kokanee brought to net in 1993, a mere 30,000 in 2008. The overall population estimate for 1994 numbered between 800,000 and a million salmon; the 2008 estimate came in at less than 200,000.
The biologist is certain he knows why.
“A 40-inch lake trout can digest 50 pounds of salmonids a year,” Alves said of the preferred diet of kokanee and rainbow fingerlings. DOW this spring flushed 3.2 million salmon fingerlings from its hatchery upstream from the reservoir.
Many grow to a size that at one time attracted thousands of angling tourists, but those numbers are declining with the catch.
“As the kokanee catch goes down, people go away,” Alves said.
More recently, the agency has stocked 10-inch rainbows to put them past the laker teeth, an expensive endeavor that resulted in a catch of just 10,000 in 2008.
Brown trout, another active predator, also are prospering. The 2008 creel survey counted 12,000 browns, perhaps the first time that catch ever outnumbered rainbows.
Alves’ alarm extends to the fact that Blue Mesa ranks as Colorado’s primary brood stock for kokanee that are distributed to dozens of other lakes around the state. Over the past 10 years, 60 percent of the annual average of about 10.5 million kokanee fry have been produced at Big Blue.
“There’s a ripple effect to other reservoirs around the state,” he said.
So there you have it. Colorado’s most dramatic fishery on one hand, a broad recreation resource for many more people on the other. Biologists believe they’ve turned the corner in the effort to rein in lake trout numbers, that the population has passed a peak that never will be matched.
Meanwhile, Smiley and his fellow enthusiasts will greet another spring season with the fervent hope that it isn’t so.
Charlie Meyers: 303-954-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com
