Diaster at Irvine trout opener!!!!!

[etucker1959]

After concluding my Fall trophy catfishing with some spectacular results, I was really looking forward to the trout opener. The catfishing was nothing short of being called epic fishing. I not only found a new catfish spot, I learned some catfish behavior I never new about before. Catfish can be in a symbiotic relationship with feeding carp in the shallows. I'm giving my positive catfish story because the trout story is so horrible! (so please bare with me, I'll get to the disaster trout story in a minute) The peak trophy catfish season at Irvine lake is the middle of October to the middle of November. (which coincides with the early season trout openers at other lakes) So as I'm looking for the mother lode of trophy catfish, I noticed an absence of other catfish anglers. (I'm guessing they were distracted by those trout in other lakes) Just to give an example of some pretty spectacular catfish results that I heard about. A friend of mine was fishing for carp one day and caught 12 trophy catfish on his carp baits! Another angler caught a 20 & 50 pounder along with some smaller catfish on the same day! I myself went from getting just 1 or 2 catfish a day, to getting 2 or 3 catfish a day. This leads me up to my best day ever at Irvine lake for catfish. I found a whole group of Carp feeding in the shallow water and caught 9 trophy catfish myself up to 20 pounds that day. The best part was, "their wasn't another angler around me for miles!" This year was by far my best for catching trophy catfish at Irvine lake. Which lead me to having high hopes for the up coming trout season.

Just because the first stocking of the year is terrible, doesn't mean the whole season is going to be a bust. It could have been just some kind of a bad start and will get corrected later on. But this is what happened. Normally they stock Irvine and all the other OC park lakes on Tuesday or Wednesday of that week. This week they stocked all the lakes on Thursday. I got earlier reports from LNL and Miles square that the fish were very small this stocking. Plus they didn't really bite that good anyway. If these are all small fish and they put in the reported amount of poundage of fish. Their should have been twice as many fish planted per lake. (the last 2 years the average size trout was about a pound) So the fishing should have been pretty epic, even if they were just small fish! Instead of some epic fishing, I counted a total of 9 trout caught for the whole lake by noon! Plus the 1 3 pound catfish that I caught. Pretty miserable fishing to say the least!

So with next week being an off week for trout stocking at Irvine lake. After that it will be 10 straight weeks of trout stockings at Irvine lake. So I'm still optimistic it will still be a good season there, it probably just got off to a Rocky start. I do blame the hatchery 100% for this miserable start. So hopefully it was just a blip from them and not some major hatchery issue, like so many other hatchery's have had in the past!