Prescott Arizona News and Events - Read It News Magazine

Who's catching all the fish?

The last week of September Arizona Game & Fish Department stocked 20,000 5-inch brook trout in Lynx Lake and another 10,000 in tiny Fain Lake.

“They might not be catchable size when first placed into Lynx and Fain lakes, but next summer should prove to be a boon for trout angling enthusiasts,” AZG&F spokesman Zen Mocarski said in a press release.

Sounds great, but, I emailed him back, “Whatever happened to the 15,000 brookies you guys put in Lynx Lake last year? I've never heard a single report of anybody catching one bigger than five inches, right after stocking. Bass food?”

Zen sent Regional Fisheries Program Manager Andy Clark to deal with me.

“Yeah, the brookies haven't exactly set the place on fire, but we did hear of occasional catches up to 9-inches or so until about July,” Andy emailed me. “We also captured one about that size in June during electrofishing surveys. So that's better performance than the browns we were putting in several years back.”

True enough. I got pretty excited about those big stockings of “subcatchable” brown trout at the time, like a kid knowing in July that he's getting a new .22 for Christmas, but they turned out to be duds before those 15k brookies did. Pardon me if I seem a bit reserved about this latest sorta-bonanza.

On the other hand, these occasional stockings of subcatchables aren't carefully planned events of fisheries management – they're surpluses that should go somewhere other than the landfill. “In other words, eggs were ordered and fish were raised and for some reason the waters they were destined for couldn't receive them - maybe dried up or water quality was bad,” Andy said.

His next comment about tossing tens of thousands of 5-inchers into Lynx Lake verified the irritated conjecture in many anglers' conversations: “They may take some cormorant heat off the catchable sized rainbows going in next week, too.”

I never believed the eagles at Lynx put that much of a dent in the trout population there, but the cormorants are another story because there are more of them. Me, I don't care about the capitalism of trout stockings and any financial “loss” – it costs about $1 to raise the fish, which returns approximately another $3 into the community – to the wildlife that views Lynx as a trout buffet. I like that the stockings attract wildlife and I think it's worth the cost. I also think it's futile to get irritated (or jealous) about being out-fished by professional anglers like eagles and cormorants.

If those brookies survive the pros to grow to catchable size next summer, remember that they tend to feed closer to the bottom, so the usual suspects among weighted flies – beadhead anythings and wooly buggers, for example – are good choices. Andy says worms and Powerbait will work, too.

If you're a bait fisherman, there's more good news: in late September AZG&F also stocked 750 pounds of catfish in the lagoons at Dead Horse State Park in Cottonwood. The cats average about two pounds; I'll let you do the math to come up with the numbers. Andy recommends using hot dogs, night crawlers, mealworms, and dip baits for the catfish. Chicken livers work well, they're cheap and, really, it's the only good use for them anyway. Yuck.

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