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Outdoors : Right Place, Wrong Time : Corona Lake Teeming With Rainbow Trout but Excited Anglers Mostly Come Up Empty as Fish Adjust to New, Warmer Waters

TIMES STAFF WRITER

They had marked last Saturday on their calendars weeks ago, and with visions of rainbows dancing in their heads, many of them arrived a day or two early and slept in their vehicles.

None wanted to be turned away on what one angler called a special day.

Corona Lake, a tiny reservoir on the outskirts of town, had in the previous days been transformed from a catfish pond to what should be a very productive trout fishery.

More than 10,000 pounds of rainbow trout, many of them weighing 10 to 20 pounds, were trucked down from a Northern California hatchery and dumped into the lake in preparation for opening day of the lake’s fall trout season.

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That’s five tons of trout, in a lake small enough to swim across in an hour. A lake so shallow--about 20 feet in the deepest spot--that the fish have no deep pools in which to seek refuge.

“The best way for people to come and enjoy a day of fishing is to let them come and catch some fish,” said Steve Miller, vice president and general manager of Outdoor Safaris International, which runs the concessions at Corona and Irvine lakes.

They came all right.

“We got here at 6 o’clock last night, and we were still 50th in line,” said Kevin Hixson, 35, who brought his sons, Kevin Jr., 13, and Jerhid, 9. “It was crazy.”

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By midnight Friday, traffic was backed up for a mile or so on the access road leading to the lake.

And in the darkness before dawn Saturday, at 6 sharp, the gate opened and eager fishermen flooded onto the dusty grounds and staked their claims to nearly every inch of available shoreline.

Those with boats slid their vessels down the ramp and motored slowly out into the blackness.

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An eerie fog rolled through the canyon and a steamy white mist hovered over the lake.

But that didn’t dampen spirits. The fishermen threw everything they had into the water, hoping to hook a big one. It was an all-out assault, from dawn to dusk, by a crowd nearly 400 strong.

And by day’s end, all that was left in little Corona Lake was about . . . 10,000 pounds of trout.

Yes, it was crazy all right. But for all the wrong reasons. Five tons of trout went in, but hardly any came out, at the end of a line, anyway.

They were apparently still trying to adjust to their murky new home, struggling to get acclimated in water 15 degrees warmer than the clear spring water they were used to at the Mt. Lassen Trout Farm.

Some went belly-up, and lake officials scooped them out and put them in the trash.

“I’m not lying, there’s record ones in there,” said Ken Phillips of Temecula, pointing to a trash can a dozen or so yards up the bank. “They put five tons of fish in here? I’d be willing to bet that there’s a ton of fish in here, dead on the bottom.”

Phillips probably would lose that bet, according to Miller and an expert at the hatchery, who played down the die-off, saying it was minimal.

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“We put 10,000 pounds of fish in there,” Miller said. “When you’re dealing with that many fish, you’re going to lose some. People have to realize that there are still tons of fish out there--alive.”

Phil Mackey, president of Mt. Lassen Trout Farms, the largest private producer of trout in California, agreed, saying the number of fish that had succumbed was probably a few hundred at best.

He said that number would probably have been lower, had the weather not changed in the days before the massive stocking.

“They had been tracking the water temperature and saw a downward trend,” Mackey said. “Then they had a little heat wave and the lake warmed up a bit. It was at 67 degrees and going down when they [set the date for opening day]. And then right before the opener it rose to 69 degrees. That little warming trend just tipped things over a bit.”

Most of the fishermen realized that their timing might have been off. One angler joked to another, appropriately, “You should have been here two weeks from now.”

By then, everyone seems to agree, the water temperature will have dropped and the fish will have livened up.

Brad Grieder, concession manager, said fishing was slow during last year’s opener as well.

“It took about two weeks before the fish really turned on,” he said. “Then it was phenomenal.”

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Shift manager Gary Greenland went so far as to guarantee that such will be the case again this year. As soon as the nights cool and the water drops.

“Anybody dissatisfied after paying their $12 [the cost for entry to the private lake], well, they can come back in two weeks and they won’t be dissatisfied,” he said. “They’ll nail ‘em. No doubt. They can throw any gold-bladed spinners, either Roostertails or Kastmastersoddler found on opening day of the trout season at Corona Lake.

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