Sprague to get extreme makeover

With the rehabilitation of Sprague Lake’s fishery in the final stages of approval, Washington Fish and Wildlife Department biologists are preparing to clear the lake of fish.

Officials last week were delivering final letters around the lake to property owners who already had given permission to use rotenone, a short-term chemical that essentially suffocates fish by affecting their ability to process oxygen.

The plan calls for ridding the lake of carp, tench and hard-to-catch walleyes that are stunting more desirable fisheries, and then restock the waters next spring with rainbow and Lahontan cutthroat trout, crappie, bluegill, largemouth bass, channel catfish, and a few tiger muskies.

The massive project of applying rotenone powder and liquid to the 1,840-acre lake and related waters is tentatively scheduled to begin in the first week of October, said John Whalen, department regional fisheries manager in Spokane.

Meantime, as soon as agency Director Jeff Koenings signs off on the project, all catch limits will be removed to give anglers about a month to catch and salvage as many of the lake’s bass, catfish, crappie, perch and walleye as possible.

The announcement for removing limits is expected this weekend or early this week, Whalen said.

And anglers have always been able to take as many carp and tench as they desire.

While some anglers might have a heyday with the lifting of limits, most anglers will have difficulty bringing in a bounty.

“People are catching fish, but very few are catching limits,” said Scott Haugen of Four Seasons Resort.

“That’s the reason we started looking into this project,” said Chris Donley, department district biologist. “We have this amazingly productive lake near a population center yet there are very few fishermen using it because they weren’t catching many fish.”

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 8.7 percent of the lake’s walleye population last year.

“For anglers to make a dent and control the walleye fishery, the exploitation rate should be 30-35 percent.”

State biologists were embarrassed this summer to realize they had made a mathematical error in estimating the lake’s walleye fishery for making their case that the predator-prey balance was way out of balance. Shades of the Hubble Space Telescope error, they confused hectares and acres in converting the number of walleye caught in sampling nets and estimated the lake had 65,000 walleye. The correct number is about 26,000, Whalen said.

“The error doesn’t change the fact that the fishery is out of whack and fishermen are staying away,” Donley said. “The ratio needs to be about 10 prey fish to one predatory fish and it’s just the opposite in Sprague Lake.”

According to several years of surveys and studies, 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.

Nevertheless, the few anglers who are fishing the lake are coming up with pleasant surprises.

“We had a 10-year-old boy catch an 8.5-pound walleye last week,” Haugen said, noting that most of the notoriously hard-to-catch walleyes in the lake run about 2 pounds. “I saw a 3-pound rainbow the other day. Some guys have had good days on small bass. The crappie fishing isn’t as good as it was in June, but fishermen tell me the bite should come on again in September.”

Gene Hall of Spokane has been devoting as many days — and nights — as possible to catching the lake’s trophy channel catfish, an effort that paid off with an 18-pounder last month. He caught the fish at 7:30 a.m. off the Four Seasons dock after soaking worms on the lake bottom for four hours.

“I grew up in eastern Oklahoma and catfish is part of my name,” he said. “The fact that they’re going to rehab the lake kind of disgusts me, to tell you the truth. I started fishing Sprague Lake after they rehabbed it in the mid-1980s and it took years for these catfish to grow to these sizes.”

Hall said he regularly has company on the resort dock at any time of day or night and it’s not uncommon for anglers to catch fish running 8 to 14 pounds.

“I’d like to think we could be more creative than to kill off the lake and start over,” he said.

Fish and wildlife officials studied alternatives to treating the lake with rotenone, Donley said.

Alternatives 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.

Some anglers have suggested controlling the carp by letting commercial fishermen work the lake and sell carp for dog food or fertilizer.

“The problem with that idea is that there’s no commercial interest in fishing for carp,” Donley said. “We already offer permits to do that, but there’s no market. If there were a huge value in carp, we wouldn’t have so many carp problems all over.”

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

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

Ultimately, biologists want to take advantage of the lake’s productivity for growing largemouth bass and panfish, said Steve Jackson, the department’s state warmwater fisheries manager.

“We think the catfish will be doing a lot of the control to keep the prey populations in balance,” Donley said. “Catfish grow fast out there. Five-pound catfish should be common in four years.”

Donley said a lake resident has been given a permit to use a set line and catch big catfish so they can be stored in a net pen and transferred to the state’s warmwater hatchery where they will be held until they can be restocked into the lake.

“Trouble is, somebody’s been stealing those fish out of the net pen,” Donley said.

As the rotenone is applied in October, many dying fish will float to the surface. Years ago, people were allowed to use nets to salvage these fish. Nowadays, the lake will be off-limits during the rehab and no fish salvaging will be allowed.

“It’s a liability issue,” Donley said. “If somebody picked up a rotten fish and got sick, we’d get sued.”

If the rehab goes as scheduled this fall, Donley said 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.