John Chapman is one of the few holdouts dotting the lake's shore on a cold, gray afternoon before Christmas. His line drifts with the current, this way and that, lazily cutting the murky green, its hook baited with a concoction of top designer baits: a yellow Crave Amino Egg and a Power Worm, doused with White Lightning Crave Nitro Grease.
Then, in a flutter, the line flies from his spool. Chapman closes the bail, setting the hook, and the rod doubles over.
For 20 minutes, he pumps gently and reels quickly, trying to coax into his net a monster created in a Northern California lab.
A few days earlier, Phil Mackey had left in Santa Ana River Lakes his calling cards -- gargantuan rainbow trout hatched from eggs manipulated to produce fish with three sets of chromosomes instead of two, enabling faster and greater growth. In the tricky business of triploids, Mackey raises the biggest of the unnaturally big, a skill both highly prized and scrutinized.
When he finally gets a look at his catch, Chapman, an ultralight fisherman who uses only 2-pound-test monofilament, figures he has both a new state record and a line-class world record. "You never know until you see them," he says.
But it's easy to tell how extraordinary such fish are after visiting their birthplace near Red Bluff, Calif., about a two-hour drive north of Sacramento. Mt. Lassen Trout Farms is a network of spring-fed hatcheries swarming with fish. Some are pushing 30 pounds. One of its trout, stocked recently at Santa Ana River Lakes in Orange County, weighed 28 pounds upon entry, nearly 2 pounds bigger than the state-record rainbow -- another Mt. Lassen product caught there last year.
Although some call them freaks, with bodies too big for their fins and tails, that no self-respecting angler would touch, the trout have a following at Santa Ana River Lakes and nearby Corona Lake. The lakes' concessionaire has a lock on the Mt. Lassen monsters. Other nearby lake managers compete with stock from other private hatcheries, but when it comes to size, none can match Mackey's trout.
"I wouldn't place him in the category of mad scientist," says Bob Hulbrook, chief aquaculture coordinator for the California Department of Fish and Game. "But he's a very sharp guy with a good background in genetics and, obviously, in rearing and raising fish."
Triploid phenomenon
On a fall morning the sun begins to poke over 10,457-foot Mt. Lassen as Mackey, a reddish-haired man of 50, tours by truck some of the trout farm's dozen facilities.
The hatcheries, mostly low-slung wooden buildings with inside raceways and outside pens, harness springs emerging from fissures in the otherwise dry countryside.
Mackey got his start here in 1971, after graduating from high school in Red Bluff. "I don't have any formal education," he says, "but that doesn't mean that you can't continue to learn from some of the top researchers in the world." Mackey worked for more than a decade alongside the trout farm's original owner and his staff, read extensively and conducted research.
At the farm's headquarters, still on its original site established in 1946 along Highway 36, the operations manager taps at the computer keyboard, arranging delivery schedules. Outside, four employees grade fish according to size in long, rubber-lined concrete pens. Inside, smaller pens teem with newborn rainbows less than an inch long, some of them triploids.
Achieving triploid eggs is tricky. Thermo-shocking with hot water must occur precisely between the two-cell and four-cell stage of miotic cellular division, about 10 minutes post-fertilization, which results in the fish retaining an extra set of chromosomes. The extra set renders the trout sterile, allowing them to conserve energy that otherwise would be spent on the development of sexual organs or mating. "It does occur fairly frequently in nature -- we're just making it happen more frequently by manipulating the spawning cycle," Mackey says.
The use of triploidy technology is only now becoming widespread as state fisheries agencies seek guarantees against genetic contamination of wild stocks. Because triploid trout are sterile, they can share lakes and streams with wild brown or steelhead trout. And because they continue to grow after diploid trout slow down to begin sexual development -- at about 2 years -- triploids are attractive as trophy fish.
Purists who prefer to catch wild trout cringe at the thought of these or any hatchery-raised mammoths in waters they like to fish. Fly-fishing legend Ralph Cutter labels it "blasphemy."
"The angler who proudly boasts his conquest over a 'Frankenfish' is the wet equivalent of the great white hunter who shoots a Siberian tiger from the back of a pickup on a Texas game farm," he says of Chapman's record catch.
