Rich Landers: Fish aplenty, fishermen scarce at productive Sprague Lake

Basketballs aren’t the only things going through hoops this month as the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife tries to do the same magic with Sprague Lake that Tony Bennett did with the Cougs.

In case you’re not a fisherman, the 1,840-acre lake along Interstate 90 west of Spokane has the potential, at the top of its game, to reel in enough anglers to fill all of Spokane’s NCAA tourney spectator seats.

Currently, however, local chess tournaments are drawing bigger crowds than Sprague Lake.

The proposal to use rotenone to erase the current unappealing fishery in preparation for restocking a better balanced lineup of species got a boost last weekend at a stakeholders meeting that rallied nearly no opposition.

The stakeholders gathering at the department regional headquarters included representatives from area bass, walleye and fly fishing clubs, biologists, Adams and Lincoln county commissioners, Sprague business owners and, most important, landowners around the lake.

Still, the proposal is anything but a slam dunk from reality.

The Fish and Wildlife Department must satisfy the labyrinth of legal requirements and permits from other agencies. Public meetings must be scheduled, possibly as early as late May.

Faced with the prospects of eradicating the fishery, a few anglers are rising from under the bleachers to protest, saying Sprague Lake is their prized honey hole for crappie, walleye and catfish. “Few” is the operative word to describe this contingent.

“The issue isn’t a lack of fish. It’s a lack of fishermen who can catch them,” said Chris Donley, Fish and Wildlife’s district biologist in Spokane.

Indeed the lake is stacked with walleye, according to several years of net-survey data. But they are so difficult to catch in Sprague’s waters, even the Spokane Walleye Club eliminated the lake from its outing schedule.

“Maybe it’s all the feed in the lake, but Sprague walleye are difficult to catch regularly,” said Chuck Dunning of Walleye Unlimited.

“Most of the organized walleye anglers we talked to said they would look forward to going back to the years after the 1985 rehab, when Sprague was a great place to catch bass, perch, crappie and bluegill,” said Steve Jackson, the state warmwater fisheries manager.

The department has done several years of surveys at Sprague to back up its proposal to rehabilitate the lake. Key findings:

“The lake attracts fewer than five anglers per acre a year, about half as many as relatively diminutive Downs Lake.

“The few anglers still fishing the lake average less than one fish for every two hours of effort, except for the crappie fishery during ice-up, when the fish congregate and the catch rate goes up.

“Slightly more than half of the anglers surveyed said they were not satisfied with the fishing experience.

“When a lake is in its prime, the satisfaction rate should be closer to 90 percent,” Donley said.

To sum up, he said, “We have low effort, low harvest and low satisfaction, all from a lake that is considered to be one of the most productive in the region.”

The fish biomass in the lake is roughly 55 percent walleye; 30 percent carp and tench; 6 percent catfish; 6 percent crappie, bluegill and perch; 3 percent bass, and 1 percent rainbow trout.

“That translates into an 8-to-1 predator to prey ratio,” Donley said. “That’s why we don’t think the lake will ever provide good fishing for panfish unless we change the balance.”

The state liberalized the fishing regulations last year so anglers could keep just about any walleye they caught out of Sprague Lake. “But anglers aren’t an effective control on the walleye population because they can’t catch enough of them there,” he said, noting that anglers caught and killed only 3.5 percent of the lake’s walleye population last year.

“For anglers to be effective in controlling walleye, that percentage would need to be up around 25-30 percent,” Donley said.

Alternatives to treating the lake with rotenone include stocking vast numbers of trout and panfish to create a fishery despite the impacts of walleye and carp, changing the habitat or gillnetting walleye and carp.

“Using rotenone would be the surest method and the least expensive of all the alternatives over a number of years,” Donley said.

Learning from the evolution of the fishery after the 1985 rehab, biologists propose that no walleye or smallmouth bass be restocked into the lake.

The plan is to plant rainbow and Lahontan cutthroat trout, crappie, bluegill, largemouth bass, channel catfish, and a few tiger muskies.

Trout would boom in the first few years to provide a popular fishery while the slower-growing warmwater species mature.

“Ultimately, we want to take advantage of this lake’s productivity for growing largemouth bass and panfish,” Jackson said.

If the rehab can be done this fall, state officials say the fishery could once again be attracting anglers from all over the region and generating close to $2 million a year to the region’s economy within two years, if the last rehab is any indication.

That’s the attraction of a good fishery.

And, unlike the NCAA tournament, anglers would never have to resort to eBay to get tickets into the action.