Gluttony thrives at Rufus Woods

Trout anglers wondering what it might be like to cast into a fish hatchery full of lunkers can quit dreaming and start catching.

North Central Washington’s Lake Rufus Woods has been even better than a hatchery.

And it’s legal – at least for the minority following the rules on the Columbia River reservoir.

The windfall for fishermen stems from a commercial trout farm that recently folded after losing roughly 300,000 rainbows over the past year from poorly tended net pens and driftwood damage.

That’s the assessment of Ed Shallenberger, fisheries biologist for the Colville Tribe and a former manager of Columbia River Fish Farms.

“It’s a zoo down there,” Shallenberger said Wednesday, assessing both the commercial fishing operation and the sometimes shoulder-to-shoulder recreational fishing scene the mismanagement has spawned.

“The guy I sold the fish farm to in July 2005 ran the place into the ground,” he said. “Another outfit, Pacific Sea Foods, bought the place out of the bankruptcy a couple of weeks ago and they’re in the process of making major changes. But it will take time.”

Rufus Woods – the reservoir that backs up behind Chief Joseph Dam and reaches upstream toward Grand Coulee Dam – had a relatively unremarkable fishery until the 1990s.

The change began after Shallenberger helped with the pilot program for commercial fish farming on the south side of the reservoir. In 1994, he moved Columbia River Fish Farms to the north shore in agreements with the Colville Tribe and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The sterile rainbow trout, which originate from the Trout Lodge Hatchery north of Moses Lake, were raised and fed in the pens to sizes of 6-7 pounds before being marketed to grocery chains and restaurants.

Three sets of commercial net pens were established and continue to produce fish on the reservoir:

•Two that are about 2 miles apart, now operated by Pacific Sea Foods under the name “Pacific Aquaculture,” which can produce about 4.5 million pounds of trout a year.

•One located another 10 miles downstream, operated by Chief Joseph Fish Farm, producing about 1 million pounds of trout a year.

It’s no coincidence that in February 1998, Robert Halverson of Republic was fishing near the net pens when he caught the 25.45-pounder that became Washington’s grotesquely fat rainbow trout record.

Fish that occasionally got out of the pens – plus the 5,000-10,000 trout the Colville Tribe contracted for release almost yearly to create a recreational fishery – didn’t go far. They hunkered below the pens and bulked up on natural food and the bounty of feed that drifted down through the nets.

A headline-netting progression of Washington state record rainbow trout was caught from Lake Rufus Woods in the next few years, ending with the current record, a 29.6-pounder caught in November 2002 by Norm Butler of Okanogan.

Another record fish isn’t likely soon, Schallenberger said.

“You’ve got way too many fish in the river and way too much fishing, legal and illegal,” he said. “It’s pathetic.

“In the 12 years I worked (at the fish farms), I’ll bet we didn’t lose more than 20,000 fish, mostly in two incidents. The big numbers of fish they’ve lost in the past year – I’m guessing a minimum of 300,000 – has made for some good fishing, but not necessarily for big fish.

“Most of the fish are running 1.5 to up to 10 pounds, but anything bigger than that is pretty hard to find now.

“We had 40,000-angler days there last year. Even with a two-fish limit, that’s still a lot of fish coming out.”

The harvest numbers swell when the greed factor is figured in.

“Frankly, what we’re seeing is piggery,” said Sgt. Jim Brown, Washington Fish and Wildlife Department enforcement officer for Okanogan County.

“We wrote one or two tickets a month on Rufus Woods eight years ago. Last November, when word got out about the fish escapes, we started writing 15 to 20 tickets a week, and we’re not there every day.”

With more education and stepped-up enforcement with uniformed and plain-clothes officers, citations are down to seven to 10 a week.

“Literally, nine out of 10 fishing parties we made contact with earlier this year had violations.”

He said some of the citations have been doozies, noting that officers confiscated the boat of an angler who was apprehended with eight fish – four times the daily limit.

A couple from the coast was caught catching their limit and returning to catch another limit. “They lied to the officers when we asked if they had any fish hidden in their trunk, and that alone is a gross misdemeanor, a $540 ticket for each one of them right there,” Brown said. “Then each of them got a $378 ticket for possessing twice the limit.”

High-grading is the most common violation, he said.

“You have all of these 2-pound fish out there, but everybody wants to catch the big ones. It’s OK to catch-and-release fish with artificial lures or flies, because they have a high survival rate. But when using bait, statewide rules say you must keep each fish you catch up to your two-fish limit.

“We caught on to how much high-grading was going on months ago when we’d see all these seagulls swarming downstream. They were feeding on all the fish went belly up after being caught by bait fishermen and then released so they could keep bigger fish.

“Some bait fishermen were catching 40 trout to keep two, and most of those 40 fish were dying.”

But greed is alive and flourishing at Rufus Woods, he said.