It’s been a while since I’ve gotten the chance to catch a Tilapia. I was going through my pictures the other day, and found this one from a trip up to the San Gabriel River Bed last year. The last time that we were up there it looked really dead, just one cruising Carp. I heard a rumor from someone that DFG only stocks male Tilapia in California waterways, so as not to overpopulate them. Now I don’t know if this is just in the recent years or if this is true at all. I guess we will just have to make a trip down there to find out ourselves. Please if you fish there practice catch and release. If this is true there are only so many fish to be caught, and if not I don’t think that they would be safe to eat anyway.
Last Saturday morning my younger brother Steven and I had a couple of hours to go and get a quick scouting report on the main So Cal River Beds. We started the morning with Starbucks and a little bit of music to get us in the spirit.
First stop was to the LA River at Glendale Narrows. The water was clear and promising, the trees were green and lush, but the Carp were no where to be found. We walked about a mile stretch of the river with a Mallards, Geese, and Cormorants. A Chow Chow dog stopped us in the middle of our trek back to the car, as the about 14 year kid holding him back looked more scared than we did. So, off the the next Brownline on the map we went.
Next up was the San Gabriel River at Whittier Narrows which I was hoping to see stuffed with Tilapia and again not a single fish spotted. I stopped a few older Hispanic men fishing the river and after a short great of “Contraron Pescados” and after three simultaneous No’s, to the other side of the river we went. We stepped around the bushes and into the “Homeless City” we found ourselves. I quickly apologized and we said our goodbyes to our newly found friends. At this point I was starting to get a little worried, as in my mind I was thinking that this time last year there were fish all over these two stretches of River.
Our third and final destination was the Santa Ana River Bed at the intersection of the 91 & 57 freeways and by this time I wasn’t in the best of mood. We had about 30 minutes left before we had to shoot home to meet my wife and get to the Aquarium Of The Pacific to meet our friends. We walked a short stretch and one guy told us he’d seen a pod of Carp earlier that morning, but no fish again (not one). On the way back to the car I viewed an Osprey carrying a Trout from Santa Ana River Lakes in it’s claws racing to get the fish to it’s hatchlings.
In short the lack of fish concerns me, especially since I have been hearing stories of guys down at all three river beds with bait nets pulling out 100′s of fish. If you decide to fish down here, please practice “Catch and Release”. The fish aren’t good eating and it’s not like the California Department of Fish & Game stocks these waters. I will be really hard for people to petition the state to get these made into recognized fisheries, if there aren’t any fish left!
If you watched even a brief portion of the 2010 Rose Parade or Rose Bowl Football game (the outcome of which delighted my OSU alumni bride), you probably saw those striking wide angle shots of the San Gabriel Mountains sitting majestically behind Pasadena.
Without going into a full-blown SoCal geography lesson, suffice it to say that those picturesque mountains are both a blessing and a curse to the L.A. basin.
The curse comes from the fact that the San Gabriels (and their sister range, the San Bernardinos) act as a barrier to regional air flow patterns and thus trap airborne particulates and such during certain times of the year, contributing to the smog problem for which L.A. is infamous.
The blessing comes from the fact that the San Gabriels act as a barrier to regional air flow patterns and cause the moisture-laden winter winds blowing off the Pacific Ocean to dump their precious liquid cargo in the form of rain as the push over the range. This is why the mountains are lush and green on one side and dusty and dry on the other – classic textbook rain shadow meteorology.
The upshot of all this for the urban angler is: the San Gabriel River. All that water has to go somewhere and somewhere just happens to be down the canyons and gullies of the mountains and through the heart of the greater L.A. basin. The San Gabriel River is a magnificent and complex system of tributaries that drain an area of roughly 640 square miles and flow some 60-odd miles before emptying into the Pacific.
Along the way she morphs from a network of scenic mountain streams to a drab, urbanized concrete lined channel. She passes through a dozen or more cities and varies from a trickle to a raging torrent, again, depending upon the time of year.
The raging torrent thing is one of the reasons the Army Corps of Engineers was charged with building the concrete channel through the more heavily populated portions of the river’s path. Study the historical records of SoCal and you will read of massive and terrible episodes of flooding. The Corps of Engineers built a way to move as much water away from homes and businesses and to the ocean as fast as possible.
They did their job and they did it well. Along the way though, some would argue that they tamed the life out of a huge stretch of the river – collateral damage in the struggle to keep SoCal safe from the ravages of wild water.
Most folks, in fact, tens of thousands of folks, drive by the arrow-straight, graffiti-covered, urban portion of the channel every day and assume that L.A. has no natural rivers.
Drive a few miles up in to the mountains however, and the more rugged side of the river starts to reveal herself, though she is likely to be badly scarred and abused from the uncouth hordes who assume that paved roads equate to maid service and who have no qualms about throwing dirty diapers, left over fast food wrappers and beer bottles in to the river — collateral damage to the wild waters from the ravages of SoCalifornians.
Hike a few more miles back into the hills though and you will discover lots of fishable waters populated with a mixed population of rainbow trout and brown trout but without the dangers of broken glass and used hypodermic needles – uncouth hordes tend to flock to “nature”, just not too far into nature, especially if it means no asphalt.
Up in those higher stretches of water, collateral damage comes directly from nature itself. Those same seasonal downpours so dreaded in the lower elevations, tear up banks, push down trees and roll boulders along that portion of the river too, it’s just that nobody loses a back yard or has their warehouse inventory washed away.
Up there, the cycle of apparent destruction brings with it certain collateral benefits. The surging waters push all of the debris and detritus downstream thus cleansing the river. They also push fish that have been sequestered far back in the quiet pools of the upper tributaries downstream to replenish the more accessible reaches and thus (hopefully) to the flies attached to the end of our lines.
So next year, while the world has its attention turned toward the flowers and footballs of Pasadena, you now know that their will be some urban anglers up in those picture perfect San Gabriel mountains pulling out ‘bows and browns to get the year started off right.
I love this addiction called urban fly fishin’.
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