Bednesti Lake will likely get even more fishers than ever with the reopening of the Bednesti Lake Resort, so neighbours of the lake are angling for provincial restocking support.
Science is working against those hopes, according to the provincial Fish and Wildlife branch.
The resort's new owner, Bernie Hildebrant, has been hearing the fishing stories from people dropping lines in the lake.
Hildrebrant said Saik'uz friends familiar with the area (he purchased the resort from the Saik'uz local government) told him that the word Bednesti "comes from a priest who was here in the early 1900s and they talked about this priest always having his belly full of char - there is char in this lake - and the word means 'full of char.'"
The most common recreational fishing at Bednesti Lake is done for rainbow trout. He said there have been stories of "people pulling 8-pounders or 10-pounders out of the lake" but most are in the two or three pound range these days, and "we would like to see that develop."
The provincial government's restocking program has tried to do so but the results were such a failure, according to the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations local manager for fish and wildlife, that it likely won't be attempted again.
Bednesti got stocked in 2001 with 10,000 marked fish, said Ted Zimmer. Anglers were surveyed in 2003 to see what the catch results were and of the 62 fishers who were checked, only a single marked trout was in the combined crop. This puzzled the researchers so they conducted their own dedicated fishing campaign the same year and of all the fish they caught, not one was from the restocking program.
"When we dropped in stocked fish, they aren't able to compete," said Zimmer. "That was the case with Bednesti; Cluculz Lake was exactly the same situation; West Lake, same thing; Graveyard Lake, same thing."
There was a common profile for all these bodies of water. "They are all large, multi-species lakes with a natural trout population and a diverse underwater ecosystem. So we just stopped stocking those lakes. Stocking efforts take government resources, and some lakes don't pay off so our priority becomes the lakes where we see solid success."
The province has two kinds of stocking programs, and most of it is trout. One kind is introducing fish to lakes that have never had them before, the other kind is adding trout to supplement natural trout populations. This has been happening since about 1930. The government scientists and outdoors staff design the programs and monitor the outcomes, but the rearing of young fish and setting them free in the appropriate ways is the work of an independent not-for-profit group, the Freshwater Fisheries Society of BC (FFSBC), which also does a lot to market recreational fishing in the province.
In the Prince George-Omineca area during 2012, according to FFSBC statistics, a large number of lakes shared about 79,000 brook trout. Ness Lake received 20,300 kokanee fry and Camp Lake got 5,200 kokanee. More than 300,000 rainbow trout were distributed among 47 waterways in the region, including Shane Lake and Ferguson Lake within Prince George city limits.
"Shane Lake is an example of a very successful program in what was an absolutely barren lake," Zimmer said.
According to their regular surveys of local lakes, Bednesti's natural trout population is healthy and it is "a viable fishing opportunity right now." Zimmer also added that the new resort was well situated for fishers to base themselves for visiting many other lakes in the local region.
.png;w=120;h=80;mode=crop)
