Dorado caught in freshwater lake
April 4, 1998
You must have seen this one on TV this week, but if not, I’ll give you the scoop. It’s right out of the “How Bizarre” files…I about fell off the couch when I saw it on the news. It even tops that big 18-pound largemouth I wrote about last week. After the news, I called information and got the guy in the story’s number, and interviewed him over the phone. Here’s what I found out:
The guy in the news story was Rodney McKorkel of North Bloomfield. He was fishing in Bullards Bar Reservoir near the mouth of Willow Creek last Friday afternoon when the extraordinary happened.
“I was trolling in my 17-foot Gregor Sea Hawk just down from Willow Creek,” McKorkel told me. “I had picked up two nice rainbows and a small kokanee when I got a screamin’ hit. It was like nothing I’d ever seen. Figured I had the biggest rainbow I’d ever seen on the line.”
Wrong. The fish that inhaled McKorkel’s silver and orange No. 1 Needlefish was definitely not a trout, though. It fought like a demon and McKorkel, who was fishing alone, had to turn the boat around with one hand while he held on to the wildly-bucking rod with the other.
“That fish was runnin’ so fast I had to crank up my big motor and start chasin’ it,” he said. “Which wasn’t real easy. I had to let off the wheel every so often so I could crank up some of the slack I was gaining on the reel. I kinda veered back and forth and probably looked a little drunk to other boats watchin’, but I didn’t care.”
The fight lasted for about 20 minutes, McKorkel said. There were a few moments where he thought he might loose the strange creature — one when a houseboat passed between he and the fish.
“I thought that ol’ boy was gonna cut my line with his prop,” he said. “Guy had no idea I was playin’ a fish. Luckily, I was able to drop my rod tip way under water until the boat passed. I wanted that fish. Real bad!”
When he was finally able to draw his net under the fish, McKorkel was a little disappointed that the fish was so small. After such a fight, McKorkel figured it was a monster, but the fish would later weigh in at only 4 pounds, 3.2 ounces on the certified scale at Emerald Cove Marina. As he swung the net into the boat, the fish started to thrash wildly and it took several solid blows to the noggin with McKorkel’s wooden bat, “Ol’ Hickory,” before it submitted.
“That was the weirdest fish I ever saw,” he said. “I had no clue what it was, but I sure never seen nothin’ like that around here before. It was real yellow with a green back and blue spots and blue fins. Crazy. And the way its forehead looked all flat and all, I figured he maybe had been running into the backs of too many parked boats or something.”
I asked McKorkel if he was sure that the flat forehead wasn’t just a product of being smacked several times over the head with a bat, but he assured me that wasn’t the case.
“The only damage, aside from brain damage, that Ol’ Hickory did to that fish was make one of his eyeballs look kinda funny,” he said. “That feller had a flat head long before he met me.”
So, after nobody at the marina could identity the creature, McKorkel called up the University of the Pacific. The folks at UOP referred him to a fisheries professor at U.C. Davis, who asked him to bring the fish in for identification. Dr. Joseph Pescadoro, a noted ichthyologist, immediately determined the fish was a dorado — otherwise known as mahi mahi or dolphin fish. A pelagic fish, normally found in tropical waters off Mexico and Hawaii and never before found anywhere near California, it was a mystery how a dorado would get into a freshwater reservoir. After making some phone calls to some of his associates, Dr. Pescadoro had no leads.
It took until mid-week before the professor made any headway. Finally, he found an obscure news item on the internet regarding a train derailment up stream of Bullards Bar a year prior that proved to be the vital clue. After some in-depth research and internet surfing, he discovered that the Southern Pacific train that had come off the tracks while crossing a bridge over the North Fork Yuba had been carrying fresh dorado eggs from the Japanese fish markets in San Francisco for delivery to the sushi markets in New York. Apparently, some of the eggs were fertilized prior to shipment and at least one got washed into the river. Scales samples from McKorkel’s fish revealed that it was almost exactly one year old.
By the way, just wanted to wish you all a belated happy April Fool’s Day!
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