BLUE MESA RESERVOIR — They’re down there.
Sixty feet or so beneath ice as thick as four Russian novels, lake trout are meandering through the humps and basins of their netherworld hunting grounds in the waters of Blue Mesa Reservoir.
A bundled-up Chris Scott dangles a little yellow octopus-looking thingamajig through a hole he has augured in the ice. He is hoping to tempt one of those hungry trout to take a bite and, in the process, to help him pay off a hunk of the nearly $4,000 in high-tech equipment he has collected for outsmarting fish in winter.
Scott has a lot of company on the ice on this early weekend morning when the Blue Mesa Reservoir Lake Trout Tournament is underway.
For the next three months, Colorado Parks and Wildlife is dangling $10,000 in prizes to anglers who can catch the most lake trout.
This contest isn’t about nabbing the biggest fish. The ice anglers instead serve as partners in fish-population control. There are too many lake trout in the state’s largest reservoir. To balance things out, Parks and Wildlife is asking anglers to help — for a potential cash payoff.
“It’s a win-win situation the way I see it,” said Giulio Del Piccolo, an aquatic biologist who inherited the tournament when he walked into his new job as the Upper Gunnison aquatic specialist three weeks ago.
The 300 or so anglers out on the ice this day say fishing for bucks is not their primary motive.
“Catching fish is just fun,” said Ivan Medina of Delta as he huddled over an ice hole in a hut with his wife and daughter. He had scored a 14-inch brown trout in his first hour of fishing. No good for the money, but fine for dinner.
Anglers showed up in droves on a day when temperatures have finally climbed out of the minus-30s, the notorious Blue Mesa winds have slumped into a wimpy breeze, and the sun is trying mightily to peep out of the cloud cover.
They dragged sleds piled with gear out onto the reservoir and erected dozens of colorful fabric huts bearing brand names like FatFish, Eskimo and Big Foot. The huts, also known as ice shanties, or “cabanes de pêche” for the fancy talkers, string out for miles on the frozen lake.
For some, like Medina, ice fishing means family time. Youngsters pop in and out of huts to play in the snow while their parents (mostly dads) zero in on salad plate-sized ice holes.
Ice fishing is also all about buddy time. Cramming into fishy-smelling huts with bros who enjoy cheap beer is a favorite form of togetherness on the ice. Judging by the crumpled Busch and Real American cans around the huts, beer is to ice fishing as Earl Grey is to a tea party.
“I’m out here for the sheer enjoyment,” said Fue Moua, who drove over from Broomfield and spent the first hour on the ice setting up a hut duplex with four friends. “Even when you don’t catch anything, it’s just good to be out here.”
Moua didn’t know about the big tourney that has been underway at Blue Mesa since the first of the year. But when CPW creel clerk Shane Gulliksen informed him about the cash prizes and the purpose of the contest, it got his attention.
The naturally flash-frozen brown trout outside his hut doesn’t qualify, but Moua said he would start targeting some lake trout, which tend to hang out at about 60 feet in depth and too prefer the tube jigs that look like mini octopi.
The method helps in other Colorado reservoirs, too
Fishing contests have become a method to help manage fish populations in a similar way that big game hunting licenses are used for leveling populations of mule deer or elk — minus any cash prizes.
Blue Mesa isn’t the only reservoir to hold a fish harvest contest. The idea came from Idaho’s Lake Pend Oreille, according to Dan Brauch who started the Blue Mesa contest six years ago. Brauch recently moved up to the statewide position of CPW angler outreach manager.
Ridgway Reservoir has targeted smallmouth bass. Elk Head Reservoir between Craig and Steamboat Springs has given prizes for northern pike and smallmouth bass harvesting help. Flaming Gorge Reservoir on the Wyoming and Utah border has a contest that also targets lake trout.
At Blue Mesa, the smaller-sized lake trout are targeted because they are known to gobble up too many of the minnow-sized kokanee “fry” — baby salmon.
Kokanee are a favorite tasty target for Blue Mesa anglers, so Parks and Wildlife wants to keep their numbers up. Besides being good catches for anglers, Blue Mesa kokanee eggs are collected to help stock bodies of water all across Colorado with the landlocked salmon species.
If the division can entice enough anglers to help check the population of smaller lake trout (“lakers” to the anglers out here on the ice), there will ostensibly be more of the kokanee and more trophy-sized lake trout In Blue Mesa. The biggest lake trout ever dragged from the Blue Mesa deeps weighed 73 pounds.
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Parks and Wildlife has tried gill netting lake trout — scooping them up by the hundreds in deepwater nets — for population control. But anglers complained. The nets were also snagging trophy-sized fish.
So, in 2020, Brauch held the first tournament. In the inaugural year, 4,055 fish heads were turned in. The second year brought in 1,704.
There was no tourney for the next two years because the lake trout population dropped. The tournament was revived last year but it wasn’t a great year for ice fishing. Warm temperatures meant only one end of the reservoir froze. The rest had queasily thin, patchy ice. Only 898 fish heads were turned in.
This year, Del Piccolo is hoping for another whopper of a harvest given the reservoir ice is growing fatter and fatter during the cold that has had Gunnison County shivering in pipe-bursting lows for weeks.
The cold has been so cold that the tournament has gotten off to a bit of a slow start. There are certain temperatures that not even ice anglers — or Parks and Wildlife officials — will brave.
Gulliksen, whose job entails counting and surveying anglers on the ice, said there have been howling-wind, snow-whiteout days that are too much for him and his omnipresent data-collecting clipboard.
“There have been days when I just scan and get back in the truck,” Gulliksen said.
It costs very little to try, but these anglers spend to win
On this day, when temperatures have climbed above zero, anglers have been lured from the huts where portable heaters have kept things relatively toasty for anglers keeping an eye on sonar scanners to observe how deep their jigs are dangling.
Outside the huts, nearly every knot of ice anglers has at least one other device called a JawJacker poised at the edge of ice holes. The JawJackers hold mini rods and reels and snap loudly if a fish bites. With JawJackers, anglers can try their luck in several holes at once.
Anthony Carrillo of Crawford built his own version of a JawJacker from a mousetrap, a bit of wood, clothes-hanger wire and a tiny red flag. Like the brand name ice fishing aid, it alerts Carrillo when there is action below the ice.
Carrillo is fishing shallow water on this day and that decision has yielded more bites than other anglers in his Blue Mesa hut neighborhood. Most of the anglers out here have deemed it a slow day.
Carrillo snagged three rainbow trout in about 15 minutes. One that was frozen on the ice, he called “grandma’s fish” because he always delivers his first keepable catch to his grandmother. No lake trout for the contest, but grandma will be happy, he said.
Nearby, Scott is using his $3,700 Livescope Fish Finder sonar device to watch what’s going on 70 feet down and for hundreds of feet in every direction. On Scott’s monitor, the deep-water glints like the speckled pattern on a brown trout. Scott can jiggle his bait and see it clearly down there. He can also see when a fish sidles by it — looking but not biting.
“It’s kind of cheating,” he said with a laugh. “You can sit up here and see where the fish are.”
He can also see where they are headed and get there before them. All he has to do is move his lime-green electric augur from place to place so he can “drop a jig in front of their face and cut them off.”
Scott said a fat cash prize would help him pay off the credit card debt on his Livescope.
Gulliksen said it is possible to get into ice fishing — and into the tournament — without all the pricey gear.
For around $100, an aspiring ice angler can procure a hand-crank augur, a basic rod and reel, and a few tube jigs for lures. But judging by the equipment-heaped sleds, the comfy huts and the sonar devices, ice fishing is one of those sports that borders on addiction, both for snagging fish and for snaring deals while trolling the aisles at Cabela’s or Dick’s Sporting Goods.
One angler has already turned in 143 heads
Winning bucks in the tournament is a bit more complicated than simply yanking fish through an ice hole. To qualify, the lake trout must be no larger than 24 inches. Their frozen heads must be bagged, tagged and dropped in special freezers located along the lake and in Parks and Wildlife offices in Montrose and Gunnison.
The angler who turns in the most heads wins $3,000. In past years, the winning numbers of heads have varied from 163 to 284. So far this year, the leading angler has turned in 143 heads.
Runner-up prizes range from $1,500 down to $500. Even anglers who turn in a single head are eligible for one of 20 $200 prizes through a drawing.
The work to determine those winners takes place in the Parks and Wildlife Gunnison division office. In a barely heated workshop housing a hulking backhoe, Del Piccolo has carved out a space where he is bent over a table using calipers on piles of bloody fish heads.
He measures each head from the end of the gills to the tip of the snout and records it on blood-speckled entry forms that have the names of contestants and in which of Blue Mesa’s three basins — Iola, Cebolla or Sapinero — they caught.
The math has already been done for Del Piccolo through previous calculations. A head that measures about 130 millimeters was once attached to a 24-inch lake trout.
Del Piccolo tosses each measured fish head into a metal tub with a loud clang — the last stop before being taken to the county dump. Each contestant has a running tab of fish heads. They add up to 444 fish heads so far this year.
By state law, anglers must eat the rest of the fish. Del Piccolo, Gulliksen and Brauch each extolled the gastronomic value of lake trout.
“Lake trout are quite good,” said Del Piccolo, who likes to grill them.
“Baked or fried, it’s a wonderful fish,” said Gulliksen, who enjoyed a lake trout sandwich for lunch the previous day.
“They are great smoked!” Brauch enthused.
There are an estimated 20,000 lake trout in Blue Mesa so no contest and no number of gung-ho fish smokers are going to wipe them out. Parks and Wildlife officials wouldn’t want that. They just want to control their numbers and keep intrepid anglers happy.
Happy can be a relative term when it comes to ice fishing.
“Ice fishing can be really miserable if it’s really cold and you don’t have a hut. And you have to have a lot of patience,” Brauch said. “We really appreciate the ice anglers willing to be part of the solution.”