Anglers’ Angel Delighting Fishermen, Woman Frees Thousands Of Trout In Area Waters

The three fishermen were upstream from Mary Van Broeke, on the opposite bank - too far to see their faces, but close enough to imagine the gleam in their eyes.

“What kind of fish?” one man hollered as Van Broeke released trout into the water.

“Rainbows!” she shouted back.

“How big?”

Despite the popularity of catch-and-release trout fishing, there are still plenty of anglers who like to catch and consume. Van Broeke has been bringing them tanks full of hatchery-bred happiness for 18 years.

On Thursday, she put the last of this season’s 54,000 rainbows into the Coeur d’Alene and St. Joe rivers, and small lakes such as Hauser and Fernan.

The rainbows are hungry and easy to catch, especially for their first couple of hours in the wild.

“If you can’t catch a fish after I’ve been here, I don’t know what to tell ya,” Van Broeke said after carrying two nets full of wriggling cargo to the Little North Fork of the Coeur d’Alene.

One of the green, spotted fish kept coming back to shore.

“C’mon, dude,” Van Broeke said, nudging the disoriented rainbow with her net. “That not the way.”

Van Broeke works for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game from April through October.

Her territory is marked in pink in a Fish and Game brochure - “Trout fishing opportunities in the Coeur d’Alene, St. Joe and St. Maries Rivers.”

The fish are transported in a tank in the back of a pickup truck.

Van Broeke used to just send them all down a tube into one spot in each river. But to increase the chance the fish will be caught, biologists directed her to put small batches of fish in each pool, every week. So until the last pool, when she’s emptying the tank, Van Broeke uses a net to dip the fish out.

The rainbows used to come from southern Idaho. They were packed into three semi-trailers and hauled north early in the season. Starting this year, they’ve come in small, more frequent loads from North Idaho’s Clark Fork hatchery.

Most are 8 to 13 inches long.

“These are the best fish I’ve had,” Van Broeke said. “They’re really nice, fat, firm fish.”

Before they’re released, the rainbows live at the 45-year-old Hale Hatchery outside Mullan. That’s home for Van Broeke, her husband and daughter. It’s also an increasingly popular tourist attraction.

More than 10,000 people have visited this year, said Van Broeke, the facility’s only staffer. Visitors can picnic, stroll along the raceways, and buy 10-cent handfuls of food to toss at the 500 “show fish” in the pond.

Visitors won’t get a chance to learn about fish rearing, though. No trout have been hatched at Mullan for the past nine years.

“It’s a shame they shut it down,” Van Broeke said. “It was neat when it was going.”

The facility is unique. It’s owned by the Shoshone County Sportsmen’s Association, maintained by the county, and staffed by Fish and Game. When Van Broeke signed on back in 1977, it was a busy operation, providing fish for Lake Pend Oreille.

She was just out of high school when the hatchery manager came knocking on her door.

“He was desperate for a worker,” she said.

Van Broeke calls herself a jack-of-all-trades. She sews fish nets, mows the grass, diagnoses the truck’s latest mechanical woe. She battles with the beaver that persists in clogging the pipe that diverts water to the hatchery from the South Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River.

When a water line broke, sending a geyser in midlawn, she said, “I learned how to plumb real fast.”

The 875 rainbows that went into the wild on Thursday are the last that Van Broeke will release in 1995.

Now, she may have more time to go fishing. She especially likes to reel in a wild cutthroat or, come winter, to feel the tug of a big pike under the ice.

“But I don’t keep rainbows,” she said. “After 18 years of dealing with them, I leave those to someone else.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Color photos

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: SURVIVAL RATES SPELL END TO RIVER STOCKING Within a few years, Mary Van Broeke will stop putting hatchery trout into the Coeur d’Alene and St. Joe rivers. The rainbows will go only into lakes, where they are far more likely to survive long enough to be caught. That’s a better use of dollars from fishing licenses, said state biologist Jim Davis. Only 20 percent of the fish put in the Coeur d’Alene river are caught. That compares to the 70 percent pulled out of Hauser and Fernan lakes. It is far below the 40 percent goal set by the Fish and Game Department. It’s a mystery why the fish don’t survive. They may be too tame to withstand the current or to find food. Wild cutthroat trout may be running the rainbows out of the best pools. “We’ve told people in the St. Joe and Coeur d’Alene drainages that we will be eliminating stocking in the rivers,” Davis said. “We’d like to find places to build, or maybe lease ponds where we could put them.” - Julie Titone