Team Effort Helping California’s Fish Live the Good Life

By Dana M. Nichols, The Record, Stockton, Calif.

Jan. 2–SAN ANDREAS — Next time you catch an exceptionally fat trout, you might want to address your prayer of thanks to the other anglers sharing the water with you or even the bait store that sold you the worm.

Foundations, businesses and individuals are playing a growing role in the fish hatchery and planting business in California, fishing advocates and state game officials say.

Individuals are doing everything from feeding German brown trout that spend the winter in fattening pens at New Melones Reservoir to designing a remodel of the visitors center at the historic Mount Whitney Fish Hatchery near Independence.

Although there have been private organizations for decades that supported hatcheries for oceangoing salmon, new grass-roots groups began appearing in the 1990s when state budget cuts threaten to close inland trout hatcheries.

In towns on the east slope of the Sierra Nevada, locals feared that losing the hatcheries would kill the fishing-oriented tourism that sustained their economy. So they fought back.

“I made T-shirts and sold them,” said Margaret Mairs, a store owner in Independence who founded the group that eventually became the Friends of Mount Whitney Fish Hatchery. “Truck drivers who went though town signed the petition.”

That was in 1994. A similar group, the Hot Creek Hatchery Foundation, formed in 1998 to boost the fortunes of the Hot Creek Fish Hatchery, near Bishop. Those groups amplified their efforts and others formed when a state budget crisis threatened hatcheries again in 2001.

“Some hatcheries were left with one person,” said Steve Martarano, spokesman for the California Department of Fish and Game. “It was really a scramble there for a while trying to figure out how we were going to keep the hatcheries afloat.”

By the end of 2004, the state game agency’s hatchery program had lost $2.6million in yearly funding and 44 employees — a quarter of the hatchery work force. That November, the agency signed a deal under which the Hot Creek Hatchery Foundation would raise $142,000 a year to buy fish food, fuel and other supplies for that hatchery, about 40 percent of its annual budget.

A private nonprofit organization called the Mad River Fish Hatchery Board signed a similar deal in December 2004 under which it promised to help fund the reopening of a steelhead trout hatchery in Humboldt County.

Michael Seefeldt, a retired fishery manager for the Department of Fish and Game who is now vice president of the Hot Creek Hatchery Foundation, said donors include businesses in the area, major corporations such as Berkeley Tackle that produce sporting goods, and some individuals.

Kokanee Power, a nonprofit organization that has fish population improvement projects at New Melones and Pardee reservoirs as well as elsewhere in the state, gets most of its funding from individual anglers, said Gary Coe, the organization’s president.

And some stocking is done by businesses directly, such as the 64,000 pounds of large farm-raised rainbows being stocked at Pardee Reservoir in preparation for opening season, Coe said.

Over at New Melones, it is New Melones Lake Marina housekeeping supervisor Aleta Deshon who goes out each morning to feed a submerged pen of rainbow trout and a pen of brown trout.

By April, the trout will have buffed up from the 1-pound-each weight at which they started in December to as much as 5 pounds each.

Kokanee Power built the pens at a cost of about $2,000 each in 2004 and has spent about $2,000 a year on fish food since them. State game officials provided the fish. The organization has similar fish-fattening projects at Collins and Shasta lakes. In all, Kokanee Power donated $60,000 toward California fish-stocking projects in 2006, Coe said.

The various organizations say they expect their efforts to grow. The Friends of Mount Whitney Fish Hatchery is spending $40,000 on remodeling the 1917 Tudor-style hatchery, said Bruce Ivey, vice president of the group.

After that work is done in April, the group will start on a much more ambitious construction program to give the historic hatchery a modern visitor center. Ivey said theme-park planners with the Disney Corp. are volunteering to help plan the hatchery improvements.

“We feel ultimately it will be a major tourist attraction here,” Ivey said. The goal of those improvements is to help support the hatchery through sales of T-shirts and other souvenirs. The Mount Whitney hatchery is particularly beloved, he said, because it is the only one that successfully incubates the eggs of the golden trout — California’s state fish — taken from the golden trout’s native range.

Seefeldt, of the Hot Creek foundation, said his group also is shifting its focus from day-to-day operations to bricks and mortar.

That is in part because of Assembly Bill 7, which the foundation supported. It was written by then-Assemblyman Dave Cogdill, R-Modesto, and guarantees that a third of the annual revenue from California fishing-license sales will go to boost fish populations — both hatchery-raised and wild.

“We need to repair the old equipment and replace it, but we just haven’t had the money to do it,” Seefeldt said. “It will take a few years just to get us back up to speed.”

Even the estimated $15million a year the new license funding will generate for hatcheries isn’t likely to be enough to do the job entirely, however, Seefeldt said. And that’s where private groups such as his come in.

“Our main focus now is going to be to try help add financial augmentation to the infrastructure issue,” he said.

Contact reporter Dana M. Nichols at (209) 754-9534 or dnichols@recordnet.com.

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Copyright (c) 2007, The Record, Stockton, Calif.

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