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School of fish

The Air Force Academy will spend $228,000 over the next five years on fish, and they aren’t even the flying variety.

Rainbow trout from Crowther’s Freshwater Trout of La Jara, Colo., will be delivered on trucks to the academy’s manmade lakes every three weeks from March to Labor Day during the next five fishing seasons, based on a contract issued Feb. 4 by the Air Force. The cost is $3.33 per pound of fish.

Each trout is paid for by the fishing permits sold at the academy, said Brian Mihlbachler, the academy’s natural resources manager. In 2007, the academy sold 4,225 daily and annual fishing permits to active-duty airmen, cadets, reservists, retirees and base civilians who fish the lakes.

The academy is one of a handful of Air Force bases that stock their lakes or ponds with fish that are funded by the sale of permits. Last year, the Air Force sold more than $1 million worth of hunting and fishing permits, said Kevin Portek, an Air Force natural resources official.

Some bases don’t even bother with a lake. Altus Air Force Base, Okla., dumped 650 pounds of rainbow trout into their base pool last March for the 14th annual Outdoor Recreation Trout Derby.

The price to stock Air Force bases has risen with the cost of gas and fish food, Mihlbachler said. Since he arrived at the academy nine years ago, he said he has seen the price increase from $2.35 per pound to $3.33.

Academy lakes have been stocked since opening in 1954. The lakes will have only rainbow trout the next five years, but in the past they have had catfish, German brown trout and even Snake River fine-spotted cutthroat trout. There are no plans yet for stocking Exocoetidae — or “flying fish” — found in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans.

— Michael Hoffman