Diamonde_SSRqs on ice.

Byline: Mike Stahlberg The Register-Guard

DIAMOND LAKE - If you think "ice fishing" means anglers in fur-lined parkas huddling around warming fires, you should have been at Diamond Lake on Saturday morning.

Ice fishing here on opening day of trout season was a picture of sunshine, tank tops, glorious blue skies and fat fish pulled up through slush-filled holes in the ice.

About 50 anglers ignored the news that the Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife had postponed last week's scheduled release of 6,600 legal-size hatchery rainbow because the lake was under a sheet of snow and ice.

They opted to take advantage of a rare opportunity to fish Diamond Lake through the ice, targeting trout left over from last summer's fishery.

Most of the anglers used ice augers borrowed from the lodge to drill through the 5-foot-thick layer of snow and ice covering the lake. Large cans on sticks served to dip chunks of slush and ice from the holes.

At 6:24 a.m., Howard Rice of La Pine pulled the first trout of the season up through the hole he'd dug the night before.

Rice's trout measured 18.5 inches long and set the tone for a day on which big fish - generally 16 to 18 inches in length - would easily outnumber smaller ones on anglers' stringers.

By mid-morning, Chuck Boecher of Springfield had checked in with the first five-fish limit of the season. A resort spokesman said Boecher reported fishing one of the small patches of open water around an inlet stream at the south end of the lake, rather than through a hole in the ice.

Trout appeared to be biting on just about anything. Anglers reported catching them on salmon eggs, night crawlers and various colors of Power Bait.

Several anglers reported breaking off fish "too big to get through the hole," although it's likely those fish were simply knocked off the hook when they thrashed against the ice.

While the fish were as big as one could hope for out of a Cascade lake, there were long lulls between bites.

Which meant plenty of time to savor the unseasonably mild weather.

"You can't beat this," said Annette Hays of La Pine, sunning herself in a lawn chair while keeping an eye on a fishing rod. "It's not even that bad that we're not catching more fish."

By 10 a.m., some men were shedding their shirts. In fact, squint in the bright light reflecting off the surface, and that shirtless guy reclining on the snow over there could easily be lying on a white sand beach.

"I'm regretting putting on my long johns," said Steve Hodyl after landing his first trout.

Jeremy Tracer of Junction City and three of his friends left their lawn chairs by their holes and trudged back to their cabin to change into something cooler shortly before 11 a.m.

"We over-dressed," Tracer said. "We didn't expect it to be this hot out here."

The group also found one of the hottest bites out in the middle of the lake.

Tracer dragged eight hefty trout on a stringer behind him. The trout were the fruits of the group's first try at ice fishing.

"On a day like this, it's great," he said.

Ron Cross of Sutherlin said he'd been coming to Diamond Lake for more than 30 years, but "this is the first time we've ever done this" (fished through the ice).

"I said, `I'm not getting on the lake on ice - I don't do that,'" Cross said. "Then I saw how thick this stuff was and I go, `I guess I can walk on that.' ''

There should be a several more days of good ice fishing at Diamond Lake this spring, with the snow pack as thick as it is. There's about 10 inches of solid ice beneath about four feet of hard-packed snow, and snowmobilers are still driving on the lake.

"If the weather holds, we will be ice fishing for at least two more weeks," said Rick Rockholt, marketing manager at Diamond Lake Resort.

Rockholt said the size and condition of the trout caught Saturday "shows how well the fish maintained underneath the ice - there's a lot of food out there."

There had been some question about how quickly the aquatic insects would return to Diamond Lake after it was chemically treated to remove an infestation of tui chub.

The food chain in the lake still hasn't fully recovered (a survey last fall found 125 pounds of aquatic insect per acre of lake bottom, Rockholt said, compared to a historic level of around 300 pounds per acre).

But the trout are obviously finding plenty to eat.

While ice fishing is a fun novelty, the lake can't clear fast enough for resort owner Steve Cox, who invested in a fleet of new boats and motors for anglers to use while fishing the lake in more traditional fashion. Cox had hoped to see several hundred fishermen on opening day, not a few dozen.

Actually, some of the best fishing in any Cascade Lake can be found in the transition between ice-fishing season and open water, according to ODFW fish biologist Jeff Ziller.

"My joy as a kid was to hit a lake right when the edges were starting to melt," Ziller said.

"If you could hit it at `ice-off' like that, it was great fishing in the open-water area. If there were any bugs, that's where they'd be."

Fish like to use the remaining ice for cover, then dart out into the open water to feed, Ziller said.

Cox and Rockholt say the ice-off phenomena will occur at Diamond Lake sometime in the next few weeks.

"In the years we've been here, the ice has always melted around the edges first and we've taken boats out," Cox said. "You could use a small aluminum boat, or rubber raft or float tube" to get fish feeding the narrow bands of open water.

For updates of ice conditions at Diamond Lake, log on to www.diamondlake.net.