Kokanee fishing banned on Lake Coeur d'Alene

Kokanee fishing was permanently banned on Lake Pend Oreille in 2000. The fish began to decline in the mid-1960s when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dropped the winter lake level. Combined with a boom in lake trout, which eat kokanee, the species tanked.

Today commercial fishermen are netting lake trout and the state is paying a $10 bounty for every lake trout or rainbow trout longer than 12 inches that an angler catches. The goal is to revive kokanee by getting the predator-prey ratio in balance.

The kokanee population in Priest Lake also crashed, mostly because in the 1960s the Fish and Game Department introduced mysis shrimp in an effort to increase the kokanee size, Corsi said. The kokanee did grow but so did the survival rate of the lake trout, which ate the kokanee.

"You couldn't scare up a kokanee if you tried," Corsi said about Priest Lake.

This is the exact situation the department is trying to avoid in Coeur d'Alene.

"We aren't in danger of losing them, but we are in danger of the population taking a big dip and we would lose a lot of fishing activity and opportunity for folks to go fishing," Corsi said.

Last week the department asked the public whether they would prefer a complete closure or just shutting down kokanee fishing on the north end, where the fish congregate to spawn.

Of the 50 respondents, 66 percent supported a complete closure on the lake.

"Although I enjoy fishing for them very much I do not want to see the population dwindle," Diane Howard of Rathdrum wrote in an e-mail to the department. "Good regulations and early determination of possible problems is what the Fish and Game is all about."

Mickey Sigars, 77, of Coeur d'Alene, was devastated to hear about the closure.

"I'm almost 80 years old and that's the only thing I can do is go fishing," said Sigars, who enjoys eating his catch. "I don't have much time left."