A Five-Grand Gesture

The big one didn’t get away from Laura Anderson at Lake Pend Oreille Sunday.

She purposely let it go.

The Spokane angler let the fish swim back into the lake’s inky depths, even though she knew that bonking it could net her $5,000.

When her friend, Randy Phillips, boated the 20-plus-pound rainbow, thoughts raced through Anderson’s mind as fast as the line that had screamed off her reel when the lunker rainbow struck her Rapala plug.

“She asked if it was a hen, and I said yes,” said Phillips, a Spokane guide who runs R-Fly Tackle Co. He pointed out the trout’s small, bullet-shaped head and the egg chute at its vent.

“I could tell it hadn’t spawned because the fins were all real sharp and I could feel the egg skeins in its sides,” he said.

The morning’s tensest moment wasn’t when the trout came to the surface to hit the plug, or as it ran and jumped or when it sounded, or anytime during the 40 minutes Anderson fought the fish to the boat.

The tension mounted after the rainbow was netted and taped at 35-1/8 inches long and 22 inches in girth. Phillips reached for his calculator and quickly applied a formula used by taxidermists to determine a rainbow’s weight based on measurements (Length times girth times girth divided by 800 equals weight.

The fish was at least 21 pounds, he told her.

The leader for the $5,000 first-place prize in the Lake Pend Oreille Spring Challenge Fishing Derby, which runs through this week, is a 20-pound, 5-ounce rainbow.

Anderson has fished for 25 years, but didn’t troll her way into trophy trout fishing until last year, after she’d become good friends with Phillips.

She’d come to appreciate the odds a rainbow faces in growing so large.

“Our friends took pictures, then Randy put the fish back in the water and held it in the net while I thought about releasing it,” she said. “I wish I could say the decision was easy, but it wasn’t.”

“She knew the fish would put her in first place,” Phillips said.

On the other hand, Anderson had heard about concern over declining fisheries.

“If it had been a male …,” she said without finishing the sentence. “I let the fish go because it was a big hen that hadn’t spawned,” she continued.

“I caught a 17-pound female last fall and felt kind of bad after I killed it. When we hunt deer, we focus on bucks instead of does.

“I decided this time it would do more good to put that big hen back in the lake than putting $5,000 in my pocket.”

Problem is, she might have been mistaken.

The conservation ethic of catching and releasing trophy fish is butting heads with scientific research in this critical period for Lake Pend Oreille fisheries.

Next month, the Idaho Fish and Game Department will hold public meetings to propose liberalizing catch limits for trout in the big lake.

In other words, biologist believe anglers need to kill more big trout, at least for a few years.

Phillips and other guides have been instrumental in the research that is leading biologists to make those proposals.

In the past few years, guides have helped researchers by tagging and releasing fish their clients have caught, as well as aiding in taking stomach samples to learn what the fish eat.

Results show that once a Lake Pend Oreille rainbow is longer than 16 inches, its diet wanes from insects and focuses on kokanee.

Further research indicates that floods, impacts on spawning areas and other factors have left the kokanee near the brink of collapse. Analysis suggests the lake’s declining kokanee are in a “predator trap.”

That is, habitat conditions have depressed their numbers to the point that normal foraging by rainbows and mackinaw might prevent the kokanee from rebounding.

If the forage fish collapse, the trophy trout fishery will go belly up, too.

After hearing what Anderson had done, Fish and Game biologist Jim Fredericks hesitated over his words with the care a man might apply to footsteps through a field of mines.

“It’s taken generations to instill a catch-and-release attitude in fishermen,” he said. “I’d hate to say anything that might sound like criticism, but we currently have a unique situation at Lake Pend Oreille.”

He praised the conservation ethic among the lake’s anglers and said the emphasis on catch-and-release has been the reason a trophy trout fishery has survived despite all the lake’s problems.

“But we’ve been taking a hard look at the effect of predators on the existing kokanee,” he said. “I’ve told people, if they ever want to harvest a trophy rainbow, this is a great time to do it.”

Earning $5,000 to boot would seem to make the timing even better.

“Most of the men I’ve told say they couldn’t have released the fish,” said Anderson, who works at ACME Materials and Construction. “But they’ve been very supportive.

“The thrill for me was catching it.”