Lake Hodges lost its ranger station and its perimeter took a major hit from both the Witch Creek and Guejito fires that raged through much of its watershed, which includes the San Dieguito River and San Pasqual Valley. It closed to recreation 10 days before its scheduled closure Oct. 31.
City officials were concerned about the lake's water quality before the fire, so now those worries have been ramped up to another level.
“We're expecting a fish kill of some kind at Hodges. How much, we just don't know,” said Nelson Manville, program supervisor for the San Diego City Lakes.
Manville said erosion and debris will be a problem, and so will the ash for a lake that has had fish die-offs before because of low oxygen in the water.
“The ash acts like a fertilizer and it causes a big algae bloom,” Manville said. “It adds phosphorous to the water and will change the pH balance in the water and cause some problems there.”
At 57 percent full, Hodges' nutrient-rich water was said to be overloaded with contaminants that had invaded the lake's 248-square-mile watershed even before the fire.
Experts are working on a plan to clean up Hodges before the reservoir is linked to the region's emergency aqueduct system, which could happen next year. That would stabilize Hodges' water level and lead to some good fishing. With San Vicente set to close July 4 and stay closed until possibly 2017 as its dam is raised, Hodges will be looked to as a recreation replacement by many.
Back in the mid-1990s, following a severe seven-year drought and after the lake refilled, the lake's bass benefited greatly from a 15-inch minimum size limit that took effect in 1991.
The revitalized bass population (over 10 inches) went from 12,828 in 1991 to an estimated 59,587 in 1995, and from 4,678 bass over 15 inches to 14,939 over 15 inches in the same period, according to figures by then-City Lakes fisheries biologist Larry Bottroff.
When Metropolitan Water Department officials were planning Diamond Valley Reservoir, they went searching for California's purest form of Florida-strain largemouth bass. They found them in Lake Hodges.
That should be no surprise considering what happened at Hodges on May 30, 1985. That's when Gene Dupras of Lakeside caught a 20-pound, 4-ounce largemouth bass.
Though it was 2 pounds off George W. Perry's world-record 22-pound, 4-ounce bass caught in 1932 out of Montgomery Lake in Georgia, Dupras' catch remains one of only three bass of more than 20 pounds that have been caught from a lake not stocked with trout.
More than 22 years later, Dupras' bass still ranks as the 10th-heaviest of all-time.
When Dupras caught that bass, Hodges had gone from being a puddle of a lake in the 1960s to one that grew to its maximum size in the '80s. High, stable water levels, combined with an original plant of pure-strain Florida bass from Upper Otay, transformed the lake into the premier big-bass lake in the nation.
Dupras' catch represents the lake's zenith as a fishery, a great moment for a lake that faces a challenging recovery.
This is the 16th in a Saturday series on San Diego County's lakes. To see previous stories, and a map of area lakes, go to uniontrib.com/sports/outdoors.
