Category: Rivers & Streams

Fishing for L.A. River fans

Ansel Trevino, 12, recently reeled in a 10 pound carp on the L.A. River. Photo/Roland Trevino

It may not rival TV’s Bassmasters, but Los Angeles is about to get a small taste of fishing glory.

This Saturday, advocacy group Friends of the L.A. River will host the river’s first-ever fishing competition. Anglers will test their skills at traditional and fly fishing at 9 a.m. before handing things over for a family fishing session at 10 a.m. Rods and reels will be provided. All fish will be released, but not before conservation biologist Rosi Dagit categorizes, weighs and measures each one.

“I have no idea what these folks are going to pull out,” said Dagit, who works for the Resource Conservation District of the Santa Monica Mountains. “Not much biological study has been done since the river was concrete-lined.”

The competition offers a chance to expand on a 2008 study that took the first look at the river’s aquatic life in decades, Dagit said. She expects to see species including carp, tilapia, black bullhead catfish and largemouth bass. Almost all are invasive, she said—native trout living upstream in tributaries haven’t been found in the waterway since the 1940s.

Fishing in the river was prohibited before 2011, when changes in state law opened up the activity to people with a fishing license. Saturday, however, is a “free fishing day”—meaning no license will be required to fish.

Jim Burns, a local fisherman who runs an L.A. River fly fishing blog, remembers being chased out by law enforcement when he first started dropping his lines. He said things have come a long way in the past four years. “When I started, it took me like an hour to actually find the river and find a way to get access to it,” Burns said.

These days, Burns sees more fish and more people. Plastic bag bans and cleanup efforts have made the water cleaner, and that’s been good for all species. He’s recently found reptiles, crayfish and plenty of fish, including an increasing number of white-sided bass, the exact identity of which remain a mystery to him.

That’s where Dagit comes in. As the river’s health continues to improve, she said there’s a good chance that what’s hooked Saturday will be different from what she found in 2008.

“It’s an enormous watershed and it has the potential to support a large population of all kinds of native fishes if we clean up things, restore banks and improve water quality,” Dagit said. “Fish are a touchstone to see how we are doing. They need cool, clean, oxygenated water. We’ve done a masterful job, but we’ve got a long way to go.”

More than anything, Dagit and Burns hope the competition gets people out to enjoy the river with their families. That, they said, is critical to the waterway’s future.

“People take care of things that they love, and they tend to love places that are special to them for one reason or another,” Dagit said. “It doesn’t get much more special than catching a fish with your kid on a Saturday morning in a beautiful place on the river.”

To join the fun, head to North Atwater Park, 3900 West Chevy Chase Drive, at 8:30 a.m. this Saturday, September 6.

Our new social club—the L.A. River

Once banned from most of the L.A. River, kayakers are now a regular summer sight. Photo/StreetsblogLA

Most Angelenos know that the Los Angeles River is making a comeback. Still, the hipsters hawking free breakfast on its banks were a surprise.

Waving their arms and proffering scrambled egg sandwiches and muffins they’d cooked on a camp stove, the group of about a dozen young people were on the bike path near Rattlesnake Park on Saturday morning, flagging down cyclists for no apparent reason beyond community building.

“They said they had done it before, and had just decided to do it again,” said one passing cyclist, a 24-year-old from Eagle Rock who’s been riding along the river near Griffith Park for years. “It seemed like they were just, like, ‘Let’s just get together and do something nice.’”

Gathering at the river to do something nice has become a trend this summer, as momentum has built around the restoration and revitalization of L.A.’s long-suffering namesake waterway.

With scores of projects already complete and a $1 billion Army Corps of Engineers plan expected to dramatically improve an 11-mile stretch between downtown and Griffith Park, a nascent but notable scene has taken hold along the once-maligned L.A. River, particularly where it has been spruced up with pocket parks, hiking trails and bikeways.

This summer, for instance, kayaking tours are being offered in public recreation areas in the Sepulveda Basin and in Elysian Valley; later this month, about 100 stand-up-paddlers and rowers will gather in the Glendale Narrows for a first-ever L.A. River Boat Race.

The Los Angeles River Corp. is offering outdoor bike-in movies along the riverbanks later this month and has its second annual Greenway 2020 10k race scheduled for early November. Meanwhile, the Elysian Valley Arts Collective will host its annual Frogtown Art Walk again next month by the river. Nearby, Elysian, an underground restaurant that materialized two years ago on the river near Atwater Village, will be up and running, legally and officially.

Along the L.A. River’s concrete banks, The Frog spot offers food, concerts and more. Photo/Franklin Avenue Blog

Elysian is also the home of Clockshop, a non-profit arts and cultural organization, and the site for more than a few weddings during the past year. And speaking of art, be on the lookout for the L.A. Mud People, a performance art group that frequents the river both as a medium and a backdrop.

“It’s really kind of miraculous,” marveled Lewis MacAdams, president of Friends of the L.A. River, which has itself drawn thousands of passersby over the past six weeks by staging free weekend concerts at The Frog Spot, an informal venue it set up this summer on Benedict Street along the Elysian Valley bike path.

“We’ve been surprised at how many people have showed up—probably 500 or so every Saturday and Sunday,” said MacAdams, adding that FOLAR will also be sponsoring a catch-and-release fishing event next month. “People are getting interested, and looking for community.”

MacAdams sees the interest as an outgrowth of the long political fight to restore the river, which was paved in the 1930s in an attempt to tame periodic but lethal floods. Nearly 4,000 people participated this year in FOLAR’s long-running annual river cleanup, he said—a record turnout—and each cleanup has helped spread the news of the river’s revitalization and potential.

So far, MacAdams said, most of the community activities have centered around FOLAR and the Elysian Valley arts community near Frogtown.  “But a lot of it also is the bicycle population,” he said. “There are more bicyclists than we imagined, and they keep coming back.”

Julia Meltzer, executive director of Clockshop and the wife of David Thorne, who runs Elysian restaurant, agreed that the riverfront has become exponentially more active.

“There’s a lot more recreation and sporting,” she said, acknowledging that the various improvements, from friendlier landscaping to paved bikeways, have created occasional conflicts among walkers, cyclists, locals and other constituencies.

Nonetheless, a first-ever, free community campout along the river that Meltzer said she helped organize over Memorial Day weekend—along with California State Parks, the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority, the Natural History Museum and others—was fully booked within an hour of its announcement.

“I think it’s the big buzz, and the opportunity to come down to the river’s edge legally now,” said MRCA Chief Ranger Fernando Gomez, adding that some 200 campers showed up on Memorial Day and that hundreds more have shown up this summer for MRCA river programs, ranging from free community paddles to evening weenie roasts in Marsh Park.

“It used to be that people weren’t allowed in the river without a special use permit—it wasn’t meant for recreation,” Gomez said. “People would look at the river and think it was disgusting.

“But now, they can go down in, say, a kayak, and they see that the water is actually pretty clean, and there’s a heron right over there taking off with a fish in its mouth. They see that it’s not just all about concrete anymore,” Gomez said. “It’s a river—a real live river—now and people want to be part of it.”

A first-ever L.A. River campout over Memorial Day weekend was fully booked in an hour.

Posted 8/6/14

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