Echo Lake

MY NEW angling pals at Echo Park Lake had never seen a trout fly until I pulled a box from my fishing vest and opened it. My ties look good, and they seduce wily native trout. The boys peer in, "Are they real flies?" We're at the old boathouse this summer day as I share my 45 years of experience on this small lake. I give Eduardo Balldovenos, 13, and Kevin Ramirez, 12, each a woolly bugger, a deadly subsurface pattern, and tie the flies with a simple clinch knot.

A search for a missing little girl last year in the murky waters of Echo Park Lake may pay off in unintended dividends with cleaner water for the popular spot. The lake cleanup is part of an ambitious $1-million plan that will also target Machado, MacArthur Park, Debs and Reseda Park lakes. Officials said that plans were in place last summer but were accelerated, in part, by Jessica Cortez's disappearance Aug. 4 at Echo Park, just west of downtown Los Angeles.

In less self-conscious times, Los Angeles was the epicenter of American exoticism. And if the spirit of uninhibited fantasy that gave rise to apartments that resemble Moorish villas, shaped restaurants like hats and combined crocodile farms with beer gardens has a surviving visual symbol, it is the water lotuses of Echo Park.

Gathering on a breezy afternoon overlooking a sprawling bed of pink lotus flowers adrift on Echo Park Lake, thousands gathered Saturday to celebrate the 20th annual Lotus Festival. The event, promoted as a cultural exchange between Asian and Pacific Islander communities, took its name from the flowers, which in some Asian cultures symbolize growth, purity and rebirth.

Fourteen-year-old Choem Ngiam felt a tug on his fishing pole as he reeled in his line. "I got one! I got one!" he shouted to his friends standing beside him. He quickly drew in the line so the fish couldn't escape. When his friends saw Choem's catch, they laughed. It was only a baby trout, a measly 3 inches long. Choem tossed the fish back into the calm waters of the lake and then quickly cast his line again, hoping for better luck.

One thousand pounds of live trout are scheduled to be dumped into the Echo Park lake for the third annual Becky Thatcher / Tom Sawyer Fishing Derby and Easter Egg Contest this weekend. The event, sponsored by Concerned Citizens of Echo Park, Friends of Echo Park Lake, the Los Angeles Police Department's Rampart Division and local merchants, is scheduled for Saturday at Echo Park and is free and open to the public.

The small tank truck with its strange cargo rumbled through downtown Los Angeles late last Friday night, arriving at Echo Park Lake shortly before midnight. There it discharged 900 pounds of catfish into the historic pond, which has become the crown jewel of the California Department of Fish and Game's urban fishing program. The next day was the second of California's two annual free fishing days, when no license is required.

Echo Park Lake was stocked with hundreds of rainbow trout last week as part of a California Department of Fish and Game program to provide trout fishing opportunities to city dwellers. Echo Park, one of five urban lakes in the program, received about 400 pounds of trout (between 700 to 800 half-pound fish) from the Fillmore Hatchery in Ventura County, according to hatchery manager Jim Adams. He said that this is the first time the lake has been planted with fish in six years.