March 26, 2008

At Least We Think It Was a Fish
Hesperia Lake’s 268-pound
sturgeon and photojournalism

     My friend Ed Rister and I were talking just this week about what geniuses we were.
     Ed is the manager of little Hesperia Lake in the high desert. Before he took over the job, I bet you couldn’t find one in 1,000 fishermen in Southern California who had ever heard of the place. Today, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find one in 1,000 who hasn’t heard of the lake.
     That’s because of Ed. He’s positioned the lake to compete directly with the long-running programs at Santa Ana River Lakes and Irvine Lake, planting the lake with tanker-truck loads of trout in the cool months and then putting in catfish when the water gets warm. He’s stocked the lake with really big trout and huge catfish to entice anglers. Last year, he bought a load of monstrous sturgeon to 200 pounds to give fishermen something even bigger and different. Anglers came in droves. The big fish played their role well. In fact, some of those sturgeon put on amazing shows. The small ones – the 25 to 40 pounders – would tailwalk and jump like tarpon when they were hooked. The big ones were more methodical: They were simply jerking complete rods and reels into the lake, sometimes dragging rod holders and lawn chairs with the rods holders attached to them right into the water, too – gone. More than one angler was pulled into the water, cluthing his rod and reel for dear life, before he remembered to loosen the drag.
     Then on Tuesday this week, there were sturgeon at 268 and 215 pounds caught and released on the same day [see my newspaper column from this week for the complete story]. A pretty amazing story: the two biggest freshwater fish ever landed in Southern California were caught on the same day from the same lake. That would make headlines.
     Maybe Ed really was a genius.
     Ed said he had pictures taken with his new Cannon SLR digital camera. This was during the same conversation where we were spouting off to each other about how smart we were.
     Apparently Ed’s genius does not extend to camera operation, however.
     When the photos arrived via e-mail, I shouted for my son to come and see the images. I opened the file while he peered over my shoulder.
     “What’s that?” he asked.
     We looked harder. Every rule of “hero” photography had been broken. The image was underexposed, sun was at the fisherman’s back, he had on sunglasses, and the huge fish was covered with dirt. You really couldn’t see any of this in the original photo. It was only because I knew what was supposed to be in the photo, and was able to do magic with the image in Photoshop that I can tell you this. What Ed sent could have been a silhouette of a sandstone formation at Lake Powell for all we could tell at first. As proof:
     “Really, what’s that supposed to be?” My son asked again.
     I shooed him off, assuming I could salvage the image in Photoshop. You can see the “fixed” photo with my column. At least you can tell it was a really big fish and a happy angler. But I fixed up another version that I sent back to Ed. While I know everyone was far more concerned about releasing this fish back into the lake alive than getting a good photo, I couldn’t resist picking on Ed.
     I yelled for my son again so he could see the efforts of my Photoshop work and know – once and for all – what was in the photo. Even Bo, who doesn’t ever think I’m funny, about fell on the floor laughing. The doctored photo is below, but I find it odd that I haven’t heard back from Ed. Yet.