Fish moved as E.E. Wilson Pond drains

CORVALLIS – A life ring in a box on a pole is positioned incongruously along the south bank of what used to be E.E. Wilson Pond.

The "pond" is little more than a big puddle on the eastern side of the former 8-acre body of water, the exposed bottom of which is turning from squishy mud and a spongy thick mat of dead plants into a baked and cracked plain under the summer sun.

The popular fishing pond on the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife's E.E. Wilson Wildlife Area that is stocked with trout during the late winter and early spring is being drained and deepened to prevent the chronic problem of choking aquatic weed growth.

Almost as incongruous as a life ring next to a mud flat was the presence of an aluminum jon boat on the remains of the pond with two Fish and Wildlife employees tending a seine net bulging with some of the remaining fish — mostly bluegill and sunfish along with some bass — that had been trapped by the disappearing water.

"We've taken 6,000, and I figure there's probably that many more left in this net," said Karen Hans, a Salmon Trout Enhancement Program biologist with the department's South Willamette Watershed District office on the southern edge of the wildlife area. "And that represented about half of this pond."

Hans and Ahren Ramirez, a junior in the Oregon State University Fisheries and Wildlife Department who is working for Fish and Wildlife, were waiting for the return of a hatchery truck to pick up the next load of fish.

Because of the surprisingly large number of fish, though, the seining efforts were halted and are scheduled to resume on Wednesday when a larger truck can be procured and drop sites for the fish can be scheduled, said Gary Galovich, the department's warm-water fish biologist at the Corvallis office.

Most of the fish that were seined are tiny, Hans said, but there were a few surprises.

"Many of the fish of course are only a couple of inches. But there were some nice-sized ones, too," she said. "We had two 2- to 3-pound bass, and there's probably a couple more in here (the net).

"And at one point one of them jumped out. It was pretty funny to watch that. They were just swimming around and all of a sudden it just sailed over the top of the net and took off."

About a minute later, there was another flash and splash as another respectible-sized bass high-jumped out of the net.

"Did you see that?" Hans asked with a laugh.

The plan is to deepen E.E. Wilson Pond to a depth at which the weeds can't grow into the thick mats that make all but a small section unfishable by mid-summer.

"We hope that by the end of August it will dry out enough so we can get some heavy equipment in here and make it deeper so that the weeds don't grow," Hans said. "This area right in here of the pond with water in it, as you can see there aren't any weeds in it because it was deep enough.

"So if we can get a significant part of the rest of the pond that deep, then the weeds won't grow there."

The plan is to dig the main body of the pond to a weed-resistant depth, but then slope the banks to allow for angler safety and to keep digging rodents at bay.

"If you make the bank too vertical, then the nutria really like that, and so you need to leave enough of a slope first for safety so people don't take a step and go in over their head, but also to prevent the nutria from burrowing into the bank all around it," Hans said.

"And then we're looking at possibly laying down weed mats along the bank to prevent the weeds from growing up in the space between where the lake is deep enough and the bank where people fish from."

If everything goes as hoped, the fish and the water will be back in time for the regular Feb. 1 opener.