TWIN LAKES — There will always be doubters, and ample room for debate: There are those who insist that catching fish constitutes an act of pure luck, while others purport to have it down to a science.
There are, of course, skills and know-how involved. But the bottom line is that some of the best things to happen in fishing sometimes happen by accident.
Not your life-altering, lightning bolt-type accident, mind you. More like your “right place at the right time,” twists-of-fate accident. In fact, accident probably isn’t even the right word. More like serendipity.
But even good fortune requires a catalyst, and on this occasion the role was filled by the June 1 for repair work to the earthen dam creating the uppermost impoundment along the South Platte River. The 2,500-acre reservoir near Fairplay has long been regarded among Colorado’s to have uncanny ability to quickly grow robust rainbow and cutthroat trout.
Stocked annually with a million trout fry, the nutrient-rich South Park fishery attracts anglers from miles around, both summer and winter, with hopes of latching onto some of the torpedo-shaped adults the fry grow into.
“The take-home message from Antero is that it doesn’t have that northern pike predator like Spinney Mountain or Eleven Mile reservoirs (just downstream),” said Jeff Spohn, Colorado Parks and Wildlife aquatic biologist for the upper South Platte River basin. “A million fish sounds like a lot, and it is, but we stock about 45,000 12-inch trout at Spinney every year, and it costs about the same as a million 2-inch fish at Antero. If we had a major predator species like pike in Antero, we couldn’t get away with that.”
What Antero does have, unfortunately, is suckers. The population of white and longnose suckers in the reservoir overtook the population of all other species of fish in the lake — rainbows, cutthroat, brown trout, kokanee salmon and splake — combined back in 2011. And the percentage has grown steadily more lopsided since.
“Even with the addition of a million fish a year, there’s still more suckers than trout,” Spohn said. “I haven’t run the numbers yet for our current fish survey, but my guess is the sucker population is probably in the 75-80 percent range right now.”
As fate would have it, the sucker population in Antero is about to take a major nosedive, along with the rest of the reservoir. Reservoir operator Denver Water has almost entirely by Aug. 5 in order to repair the dam. The move just happens to double as a reboot for the fishery, at least temporarily restoring the balance of sport fish and suckers once the reservoir refills, ideally sometime next summer.
“The bottom line is that if CPW owned the water rights in Antero, we would drain the reservoir every five to seven years just to get rid of the sucker population,” Spohn said. “Right now, the trout growth and survival of fish is nowhere near what it can be.”
Just the same, there are still some pretty big game fish prowling the waters of Antero, and a lot of time and money invested in growing them. In an effort to recoup a portion of that investment, Spohn and a team of CPW biologists will conduct a fish capture coinciding with the reservoir draining in coming weeks. Sport fish will be moved to other Park County lakes such as Spinney, Eleven Mile and Tarryall reservoirs, with some large trout even going to spots like the Fairplay Beach and Staunton ponds that otherwise are incapable of producing fish heavier than 5 pounds.
Meanwhile, wayward anglers with high hopes for Antero’s summer fishing are now forced to look elsewhere until the reservoir is refilled and restocked. Which leads us to the aforementioned serendipity.
Failure to recall the official closure of Antero left our trio of anxious anglers scrambling for a suitable surrogate Sunday. Not far off the beaten path, we found a spot to launch the canoe and savor the high-country scenery in the largely overlooked , just above Twin Lakes at the eastern edge of Independence Pass.
Considerably smaller at just 275 acres, the lake is a hotbed for catchable hatchery trout ranging from 12-15 inches and routinely produces some of the best catches of lake trout in the upper Arkansas River basin.
“I’m digging it,” said Longmont resident Tim Brass, who joined Russell Bassett of Westminster on the exploratory mission to cap off the annual Backcountry Hunters and Anglers Rendezvous last weekend. “There’s hardly anybody here, the scenery is amazing and there’s just a ton of these stocker rainbows. I’d really love to get into some of those big lake trout though.”
It didn’t take long to fill a two-man limit of rainbow trout from the canoe. Even shore casting proved productive. But lacking bait or the heavy, deep-water artillery needed to attract lake trout that regularly exceed 40 inches in length, catching one might have only happened by accident.
Stranger things have happened.
