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OUTDOOR JOURNAL Howard Prairie is ready for its first March fishing season in decades Ice-free Howard Prairie has boat access for new March fishery Comment By Mark Freeman Mail Tribune Follow @@MTwriterFreeman MailTribune.com By Mark Freeman Mail Tribune Follow @@MTwriterFreeman Posted Mar. 25, 2016 at 12:01 AM By Mark Freeman Mail Tribune Follow @@MTwriterFreeman Posted Mar. 25, 2016 at 12:01 AM » Social News ASHLAND — Howard Prairie Lake is more than half-full and ice-free. A new crop of rainbow trout are finning around the shallows, and the roads up the Dead Indian Plateau are free of snow. For more than 30 years, these late-March conditions in the High Cascades typically get trout anglers anxious for opening day. This time, however, they are invitations to float your boat at Howard Prairie, and Jackson County Parks Manager Steve Lambert is doing his part to get the lake's coming-out party going. Parks officials Wednesday opened the new-look Willow Point boat ramp at Howard Prairie, and last year's rule change that turned Howard Prairie into a year-round fishing lake means trollers will see their first legal March on the water since the Reagan years. "The lake's open, and the water's up to the ramp, so it didn't make any sense not to give people access," Lambert says. "That way, we can get more people out on the lake. It'll be nice to see people use it again, finally." Because of persistent drought and a short strip of cement, Willow Point's boat ramp hasn't actually reached the water since early July 2014. Howard Prairie bottomed out last year at 15 percent full, and county parks officials seized the low-water opportunity to lengthen the Willow Point ramp, which is one of four public ramps on the high-mountain reservoir east of Ashland. With the help of an Oregon State Marine Board grant, crews added 56 feet of concrete to the ramp, dropping it seven feet in elevation so it now matches the reach of the popular Klum Landing ramp at the lake's southeast corner. "We took advantage of the low water to extend the ramp," Lambert says. "You couldn't float a boat here for almost two years. Now you can." The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife is continuing an experimental fish-stocking program at the lake to figure out how best to use its trout-stocking dollars. The lake has been thrown out of whack by illegal bass stocking. The agency used to pump Howard Prairie and nearby Hyatt full of fingerling trout in May, and the lake's productive insect population used to fatten them up to the eight-inch legal size by fall and then turned them into 13- or 14-inchers by the following opening day. But those fingerling turned primarily into bass food. The agency tried stocking fish grown to legal size to avoid predation by bass, but that move has proven costly. Fall stocking of larger fingerling has proven successful, but ODFW is taking that one step farther this year by trying to figure out if one strain of rainbows is better suited to Howard Prairie. Last fall ODFW stocked 102,600 fingerling from the Roaring River strain from Roaring River Hatchery and 15,700 rainbows from the Trout Lodge stock from Washington. The Roaring River fish have a clipped adipose fin so anglers and biologists can tell the difference. The idea is to see which strain grows larger and faster, which appear to be in better shape, which ones perhaps survive at greater numbers or get caught at higher rates. "We're trying to get the best catch per pound of fish we can," says Dan VanDyke, ODFW's Rogue District fish biologist and a trout-troller himself. "We keep trying to improve that fishery all we can." These fish should be around eight to 10 inches long, based on Howard Prairie's history, VanDyke says. The data about these fish might get a little murkier later in the season after the lake's legal and trophy trout get stocked. "That's why I want to get as much information about these fish as possible before those fish are stocked," he says. That sure is a lot going on for a lake that was so low last fall that VanDyke feared that no trout stocking could be done because the truck couldn't reach the water. But county road crews helped cobble in a gravel road over the lake bed near the dam shortly after the Willow Point ramp extension occurred. Now anglers will see the first season of what could become a new tradition of trolling for Howard Prairie trout in March. "It's feasible, so we figured let's open it now to get fishermen boat access to the lake again," Lambert says. Reach Mail Tribune reporter Mark Freeman at 541-776-4470 or [email protected] . Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/MTwriterFreeman . By Mark Freeman Mail Tribune Follow @@MTwriterFreeman MailTribune.com By Mark Freeman Mail Tribune Follow @@MTwriterFreeman Posted Mar. 25, 2016 at 12:01 AM » Comment or view comments Reader Reaction » STAY INFORMED Email NewsLetter Sign Up Today Sign up for our newsletter and have the top headlines from your community delivered right to your inbox. Southern Oregon Directory Featured Businesses Loading... 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