Rich Landers: Trout fishing signs still present

Fly fishers shouldn’t be discouraged by the weather greeting today’s opening of several quality trout fishing lakes in Eastern Washington. Be patient.

I, too, was shoveling snow off my front steps Wednesday morning when I’d rather have been pumping up the pontoon boat and greasing the fly reel.

One fly caster e-mailed me in frustration. He wondered if any shops carry ice augers that will cut a strip about 8-feet wide and 80-feet long so he’d have a shot at opening-day rainbows in Coffee Pot Lake.

The main lake is ice-free, but anglers will need a hero in a heavy boat to bust a channel through the frozen launch site as well as the 60 yards of ice blocking the route to open water.

Let it warm your heart to know that while we were scraping windshields and dodging cars that had slipped off the road, the sun was shining in nearly cloudless skies near Moses Lake.

Nevertheless, Lake Lenore’s Lahontan cutthroats remain mostly sequestered under ice, with the exceptions of fish straying into the ends of the lake and a portion of the eastern shoreline.

But this lake soon will bloom with float tubes and pontoons during the early catch-and-release season. The fishery is at its peak, with the average cutthroat running about 3 pounds.

Dusty Lake, a good trek away near Quincy, is perhaps the best bet for today’s opener. The 83-acre desert lake is ice-free, owing to its 130-foot depth, and booming with a broad size-range of rainbows and a few tiger trout. The 14-inch yearlings should keep you pacified until you can hook into one of the 20-plus-inch lunkers.

The horseshoe-shaped lake has only a few areas at each end of the lake and near the cliffs where fish can be caught in shallows. Mostly, the fish will be in the 20- to 30-foot depth range, according to Jeff Korth, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife fisheries biologist for the area.

Nearby Burke Lake also has a good crop of trout.

Rainbows in Lenice and Nunnally lakes are suffering from sunfish infestations, although the lakes hold decent numbers of larger triploid rainbows. The lakes have been ice-free for several weeks, which means the trout should be on the feed. But the hatchery trucks bringing the annual loads of 1- to 1.5-pound triploids that will pick up the catch rates won’t arrive until April, Korth said.

No joke: Dry Falls Lake plus some good basin trout lakes in the Columbia National Wildlife Refuge don’t open until April 1.

Sprague Lake’s future: Despite the rumors, Fish and Wildlife officials say they have no intention of trying to make a trout-only fishery at Sprague Lake.

If a still-forming proposal to rotenone the lake is approved later this year, Sprague would be restocked with bluegills, crappies, largemouth bass, tiger muskies and channel catfish. Perch also would be in the mix, and trout would be stocked to provide a quick and robust fishery during the few years needed for the other fisheries to mature.

The main difference between the current proposal and the 1985 rotenone treatment and restocking that created a wildly popular fishery is that walleye would not be in the replanting mix.

“They took over the lake and very few fishermen are interested in them at Sprague,” said Korth. “Fish and Wildlife’s job is to provide a fishery that will attract fishermen.”

Power to the fish: Avista officials say I dealt them a cheap shot last week in a column that suggested they’re not doing all they could for Spokane River fisheries as they work to relicense Post Falls Dam.

Meantime, a Sierra Club spokesman called to say I was unfair in singling them out as the silt in the gears of a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission dam-relicensing process that might be running more smoothly if they had more compassion for the water needs of property owners around Lake Coeur d’Alene.

“We’ve actually been more flexible in the FERC process than the (Washington) Department of Ecology,” said club attorney Rick Eichstaedt, who maintains that Avista and state fisheries biologists have woefully little data on the river’s trout.

Bruce Howard, Avista’s relicensing coordinator, said the company spent about $1.2 million from 2002 to 2005 on fisheries studies that were directed by the stakeholders on the citizens fisheries work group.

Howard said that while no biologist would suggest he could ever have enough data, the process must move on. Avista agrees with some of the Sierra Club’s demands for continued monitoring and study, he said.

The decline in Spokane River trout populations is not necessarily related to hydropower, he said.

“We understand the rainbow population in the upper river has taken a hit in the last 10 years, but Post Falls Dam has been there for 100 years,” he said.

In the past decade, flows through Post Falls Dam have been adjusted to help keep trout spawning beds wet until the fish hatch. Nevertheless, nature hasn’t always cooperated.

“Every water year can be wildly different,” Howard said, noting that Avista is criticized for not storing more water in Lake Coeur d’Alene to provide better flows for hatching and maintaining trout during dry years.

“But we can’t do that,” he said. “We have no legal authority to store more water and raise Lake Coeur d’Alene (beyond the full-pool level).”

Possible solution: Hip waders for everybody.