It’s not exactly “Rohnert Park by the Seashore,” but the city has its own man-made lake. This watery gem is Roberts Lake, of course, up there just below northern city limits, on, what else? Roberts Lake Road. Thirty years ago neither the lake nor the road existed.

The annual fishing derby will be held here Saturday morning, an RP event attracting lots of anglers (mostly kids) eager to win a prize or two with their piscatorial skills. The derby almost had to be cancelled this year due to a species of rare red-legged frogs on the endangered list.

It’s quite a story and we’ll get around to it later, but let’s start at the beginning and talk about how the lake was built. For this part of the saga, we talked with first mayor and first city manager Pete Callinan, the father of current city councilman Joe Callinan.

“We had the South Course built with father-son Bill and Dan Ross and Sam Singh managing it, but north of that there was nothing except a few trees,” said Callinan. “The city bought the land from the Rohnert family years earlier and then the developers Crocker Homes and Art Condiotti Homes, bought it with an idea for another golf course with single family homes around it.”

‘Times were different then’
“This was back in the mid- and late-1970s and times were different back then. We got in touch with golf course architect Robert Trent Jones and he assigned Gary Baird to do the work. Baird had just left the Jones company and set up his own office,” Callinan said while lunching at Latitude restaurant on the shores of Roberts Lake.

“The contractors said if Baird wanted elevated tees and greens they needed a lot more dirt. City Engineer back then was Ron Brust and he suggested digging a big hole on the west side of the course and the city would find a way to fill it.

“This was back in the days when no one heard of anything like environmental impact reports, use permits, rezoning and all that paperwork process. The contractors dug up the dirt and built the elevated tees and greens Baird wanted. There wasn’t even a Roberts Lake Road back then.”

The lake was named after former RP mayor and councilman Avram “Art” Roberts, whose given first name is on the street where the new city hall’s located.

“It started out as a nine-hole layout designed by Guillermo Lehman but the developers wanted an 18-hole course,” said Callinan.

Roberts Lake is 5-6 acres and 10-12 feet in depth at its center. The city reinforced some of the bottom to make it somewhat permeable to slow leakage, but the clay-like adobe soil and the rain did the rest.

It’s regularly stocked with trout and bass from the California Fish and Game Dept. But it also has a thriving population of catfish, carp, suckers and other prolific fish who always seem to find hospitable waters. Bass are some of the biggest (in size) dwellers and lunker bass up to eight pounds and more are often pulled from here.

Fishing derby’s 27th year
Let’s fast forward to 2010 and the second part of the story. Ken Zschach organized the Fishing Derby and has been doing so for the past six years and the city ran it before that. The DFG’s been restocking the lake with catchable trout to boost the population every year.

But this year, a snag developed and it wasn’t merely a lure snagged in a tree branch. Because the endangered red-legged frog might be dwelling in Roberts Lake, the DFG required a habitat survey by a certified biologist before any re-stocking of the lake could be done.

Zschach was told the DFG has only two biologists for all of California’s lakes and neither was available before the derby.
Zschach could hire a private biologist but would cost more than $20,000, and he couldn’t afford that. As it is, community businesses and private sponsors pony up about $5,000 to conduct the derby. (A story about this written appeared in the April 2 issue of The Community Voice).

Enter Brian Pittman.
He’s a certified biologist and lives in RP with his family within walking distance of the lake. Pittman read the Community Voice article and volunteered to do the survey. He works out of a suite of environmental offices on North McDowdell near Applebee’s restaurant in Petaluma.

“I did eight surveys, six of them at night,” said Pitttman. “The technique involves walking the shoreline with a spotlight, looking for the distinctive eyes of the red-legged frog. There are plenty of bullfrogs in the lake, but I couldn’t find any red-legged frogs. They have distinctive eyes and a different style of croaking compared to the bullfrog.” He spent about 40 to 50 hours doing the survey over an eight-day span.

Pittman, 40, said his wife, Beth, suggested he should volunteer to do the survey. They have two sons, Rowan, 5, and Quinn, 3. Pittman is a graduate of UC Santa Cruz with a Master’s degree in environmental studies from San Jose State.

The DFG accepted Pittman’s survey and went ahead with the re-stocking of trout. Zschach said because of the lateness of the survey he could only get about two-thirds of the normal number of fish.

But this merely adds to the competitive edge for the anglers May 22.