North Silver could use a lot of winter snow

The first full fishing season in 15 years at North Silver Lake is winding down with a whimper.

Fly fishers thought they’d secured their Holy Grail in 2002 when, after more than 10 years of research and negotiation, they convinced a private landowner to allow public access to the Spokane County lake.

Today their hopes are high and dry as a Royal Wulff on a mud flat.

North Silver was dependably among the top few trout-producing lakes in Washington before public access was lost in 1989.

In their negotiations, members of the Inland Empire Fly Fishing Club paved the way to reopen the lake as a quality fishery, with no motorized boats and no bait fishing allowed, plus other rules to protect trophy trout.

They bought an aerator and recruited donations and volunteer work from business and groups such as the Inland Northwest Wildlife Council.

The fly fishers also pledged to contribute thousands of dollars worth of sterile rainbow trout that were virtually guaranteed to splurge on the lake’s smorgasbord of aquatic insects and grow into footballs with fins.

They were not dreaming.

Chris Donley, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife fisheries biologist, was as optimistic as anyone over North Silver’s potential.

“It’s a perfect piece of habitat to grow trout,” he said last year as the lake was being groomed for its new lease on life as an angler’s paradise. “The whole thing is a supper table.”

The 80-acre lake was treated with rotenone in October 2002 to eradicate the infestation of bottom-mucking tench.

The water was trout-clear when it was stocked with thousands of rainbow fry plus 5,000 catchable-size rainbows plus another 1,000 sterile rainbows that were 1.5 pounds a piece.

The fishing was decent in spring 2003 when the first abbreviated season was opened, although everyone knew the best was still to come as the fishery matured.

“By the time the fish got bigger and the fishing was good that first spring, people had lost interest,” said club member Steve Aspinwall. “But I had a great time. Even into the hottest part of the summer, I’d go out real early and have great fishing until it got warm.

“A lot of the time, I was all alone.”

The lake was stocked last fall and this spring with more trout, including tiger trout, but the fishing was surprisingly slow when the lake opened on March 1 for the first full season.

Donley put out sampling nets and confirmed the fish were there and bulking up like NFL linebackers.

“I think the fish are just so well fed the fishermen haven’t figured out how to make them strike,” Donley said in early April.

Most anglers lost interest again after fruitlessly casting into the lake’s waters, which were noticeably shallower.

Aspinwall said he once again had plenty of elbow room.

“I fished it late in the spring and caught a few rainbows and some Eastern brook they put in there,” he said. “They were nice fish, but it wasn’t anything like the year before.”

By summer, even Aspinwall’s hopes had dried up, along with most of the lake.

“The drought has caught up to us,” Donley said. “My hopes were up with that wet spring we had, but the bottom line is that there hasn’t been enough snow in the past few winters and the lake level kept going down.”

Donley said he was concerned about the lake level even in 2002.

“But you do these projects assuming you’ll eventually get a normal snowpack,” he said. “All we needed was one good snow year.”

But they didn’t get it.

“The lake level is down about six feet,” he said.

“We couldn’t even get the boat in the water to put out sampling nets,” said Pat Kendall, IEFFC president. “As far as we know, the lake’s at an all-time low.”

Cormorants apparently caught on to the new fishery much faster than anglers and gulped down most of the young trout plants in April, Donley said.

But it was the low, warm water that apparently did in a high percentage of the bigger trout.

Donley released 10,000 more young trout into the lake in October when the waters had cooled, betting that snow will come and the fishery will recover for next spring.

“Over half of them died,” Kendall said. “The fish were on top of the water gasping for oxygen, and the birds were there in large numbers picking them off.”

Donley has called a temporary halt to stocking any more fish.

“We’ve spent a lot of time, effort and money on it,” Kendall said. “We’re taking time out, but we haven’t given up.”

Fishing at North Silver is open for its catch-and-release season through Dec. 31.

“I don’t know of any club members who have been fishing there lately, even though there are probably a few fish left. I mean, you can’t even hardly launch a float tube,” Kendall said.

“It’s still got the potential to be a great fishery,” Donley said. “The whole mechanism is set up. We got rid of the tench and installed an aerator. If we get a snowpack, we’ll jump on it next spring.

“It’s just a matter of water.”

Elk hunter blues: Last week’s column on the “Brotherhood of Hope” that binds Washington elk hunters struck a cord with numerous readers, and even had some appeal in the relatively fertile elk fields of Idaho.

One reader reported seeing a rig with the Idaho vanity license plate that features the image of the elk.

The license text read: AMDUE.