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.
