THE OUTDOORS : When Irrigation Causes Irritation : Farmers, Fishermen Reach Tentative Accord in Their Battle Over East Walker River Fishery

BRIDGEPORT, Calif.--A fisherman walked toward the edge of the East Walker River a few yards below the Bridgeport Reservoir dam 2 1/2 weeks ago and muttered what sounded like an apology.

“It’s a pretty sad opening day when you’re reduced to catching carp, isn’t it?” he asked rhetorically.

Dozens of the fish lay on the rocks, some stiff, others gasping their last breaths--evidence of the lack of respect many have for the species, and of the status to which one of California’s finest trout streams has dropped.

The big brown trout are gone, killed by silt clogging their gills last September when the Walker River Irrigation District--a.k.a. “the Nevada farmers”--drained the reservoir and destroyed the fishery.

The farmers and the Department of Fish and Game now seem to have struck a tentative, unsigned, interim agreement to avoid a similar catastrophe this year, but Darrell Wong, a DFG biologist, said: “That fishery is not going to come back for several years to any kind of a quality fishery.”

The farmers across the nearby state border built the dam in the 1920s, when water rights and fisheries were less of a concern, but subsequent laws and environmental sentiment landed them in the public wringer when they exercised those rights near the end of the Eastern Sierra’s second consecutive dry year last summer.

First, California Trout, a conservationist organization, filed an administrative complaint with the California Water Resources Control Board. Later, Mono County, of which tiny Bridgeport is the seat, filed criminal complaints against the irrigation district, citing three sections of the DFG code.

The district, which had seemed indifferent to the problem, suddenly was suggesting they all sit down to iron out their differences.

“I think they’re tired of being called fish killers,” said Stan Eller, the Mono County district attorney who filed the latter action.

Eller’s small office in the two-story Edwardian courthouse has blow-ups of Babe Ruth and Willie McCovey on one wall. He favors flannel shirts and jeans when he isn’t expected in court, but don’t write him off as a laid-back country D.A. It was Eller who five years ago discovered an old, forgotten section of the DFG code--5937--that requires the owner of a dam “to allow sufficient water to pass through a fishway . . . to keep in good condition any fish that may exist below the dam.”

At the time, he was researching the DFG code, trying to figure out how to prevent the L.A. Department of Water and Power from diverting water from Rush Creek away from Mono Lake. The section, Eller said, had existed in some form since 1933.

“When I first read it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God.’ I thought, ‘This could be a very useful section, a powerful section’--not only for fisheries but Mono Lake, depending on how far the court wants to go in interpreting it.”

Section 5937 could be the motherlode of any future dispute involving dams and fisheries. It couldn’t save the East Walker but it gave the Mono Lake Committee a back-door victory in its long, separate battle with the DWP.

Last month, the State Supreme Court ruled that L.A. could no longer divert water from the lake--not because of any direct effects on the saline lake, which has no fish, but because of harm to the fish-filled tributaries that feed it.

With relations in the East Walker dispute more amicable, Eller said, “I’ve got to think that 5937 was part and parcel of that.”

But he isn’t sure he’ll ever follow through on prosecuting the complaint.

“Frankly, I think my criminal complaint takes a back seat to (the talks) going on over in Sacramento. All I can do is punish these guys, and that’s not what we’re looking for. We’re looking for a long-term solution. I’m fairly optimistic that a disposition satisfactory to all parties should be reached on May 30.”

Besides, any penalties would be slaps on the wrists to the farmers.

John Turner, the DFG’s Environmental Services supervisor in Sacramento, said: “Fine-wise, they’re misdemeanors, so you’re looking at $500 a throw. But we’d like to leave those as pending violations. There are PR benefits.

“I think the pressure that CalTrout and different people have put on ‘em and the need to do something for the resource to be good neighbors (was productive).”

Whatever the motivation, the farmers have agreed to leave 2,000 of the anticipated 14,000 acre feet--an acre of water a foot deep--in the reservoir until mid-summer, then, in cooperation with the DFG, closely monitor any further withdrawals until harm to the fishery is perceived.

That won’t help the East Walker River, but even Rick Rockel, who runs a tackle store next door to the courthouse and is the appointed East Walker streamkeeper for the California Trout conservation organization, said it’s a positive step.

“Oh, absolutely,” he said. “I spend half of my day every day explaining to people how this East Walker-Bridgeport Reservoir disaster was able to occur last year. I’m on the hot seat, not the DFG. I’m doing all the PR work, not the DFG.”

CalTrout has somewhat withdrawn to observe the proceedings of the official agencies.

“The State Water Resources Board is . . . paid to administer the law, so they now have their opportunity,” Rockel said.

Walter Pettit, chief of the Division of Water Rights for that agency, said: “Getting a long-term solution may be difficult because that’s going to start running into money.”

Jim Weishaupt is general manager of the Walker River Irrigation District, which represents 560 farmers with 79,000 acres of land. It was Weishaupt who turned the wheel that released the water last September, explaining then as he does now that when the farmers want their water, “I have to operate according to a federal operating decree.”

This year, he said, the 2,000 acre feet agreement becomes a significant sacrifice, considering that the normal irrigation need is 340,000 acre feet, that the estimate from snowpacks in the Eastern Sierra’s third dry year is 65% of normal, leaving 221,000.

But the farmers’ willingness to cooperate for one year isn’t enough.

The DFG’s Turner said: “Once we’ve determined (an acceptable) minimum pool, then we need to shop around to find a long-term water source.”

One possibility he mentioned is the Water Heritage Trust, a private organization based in Sausalito. It buys old water rights to establish in-stream flows across the United States.

Another problem is the old Bridgeport dam.

“Whenever they need to do maintenance on the upper end of the discharge pipe, they have to drain the reservoir down to nothing,” Turner said.

The solution is a change in the construction of the dam, but, Turner added: “At some time, they’ll have to drain down one more time to put that retrofit in place.”

Meanwhile, all is not lost on the East Walker. Sixteen miles downstream is the Conway Ranch, where fly anglers pay $1,050 a year to fish on property leased from a Nevada cattle rancher.

One, Bob Kerr of Canoga Park calls it “the poor man’s Montana,” the fishing for browns and rainbows is so good.

John Pelichowski, a guide for the concessionaire, said: “I do see silt, but I think we’re going to be OK. We haven’t lost any fish.”

Upstream, there are now so many carp in the stretch just below the dam that anglers seem to be catching them for practice.

“They weren’t there before the de-watering,” said the DFG’s Wong. “When they pulled the plug, a lot of them came right through the dam.”

And they have proliferated since--thousands, many up to two feet, some up to 25 pounds, according to Pelichowski.

“Springtime is their spawning period, also,” Wong said.

They are so thick that for someone with a bow and arrow, it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. In fact, that’s exactly what the DFG is suggesting.

“There’s been great sport down there,” Wong said.

But Rockel said: “Because of the regulations on the East Walker, it is technically a violation to bow hunt. The regulations say--and this is what the warden up here is going to enforce--that the only approved method for fishing in the East Walker River is with flies and lures only, with a single, barbless hook.”

Rockel said he hoped that before the DFG tries to restore the fishery, it will try to remove the carp.

“That would be the intelligent thing to do,” Rockel said. “I think we can come up with some emergency measures if the DFG is incapable of taking care of the problem.”

Wong said: “There have been some thoughts to removing them, but policy is not to do that type of salvage operation. We’re stocking (brown trout) fingerlings in the river and the reservoir, and those carp are not creating that much of a problem, biologically, from the standpoint of competing with the trout. I’d much rather see people take ‘em legally and utilize it as a resource rather than treating ‘em like they’re just junk fish.

“If that fishery existed in Europe in a lot of places, it would be a trophy carp fishery. And yet in this fishery they’re kind of a trash thing.”