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Cast a prayer for fishing at Moon Lake TOM VENESKY OUTDOORS

Sunday March 07, 2010 | 12:00 AM

This year’s trout stocking schedule for Luzerne County contains a little bit of wishful thinking.

Of the 17 waterways scheduled to receive preseason and/or in-season stockings of trout, one is a bit tentative – Moon Lake.

The 65-acre lake located on county-owned property in Plymouth Township is still listed on the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission’s stocking list. Five times in fact, even though the county commissioners shut down the park, effective Jan. 28, because they deemed the facility “non-essential” and didn’t want to spend less than three-tenths of 1 percent of their 2010 budget to keep the park open.

Still, the lake is scheduled to get rainbow trout and the first stocking is set for April 7, 10 days before the season opener. But don’t get your hopes up.

According to PFBC official Walt Dietz, the agency placed Moon Lake on the stocking schedule just in case the county commissioners had a change of heart and decided to allow people in the park to fish. If the lake wasn’t on the schedule, it would be difficult to add it later on, he said.

“Moon Lake is closed and as far as we know there’s no possibility of it being open for fishing,” Dietz said. “It’s still on the stocking schedule, but we don’t anticipate it happening.”

The trout allotted for Moon Lake, Dietz said, will be redistributed to other waterways if the park doesn’t open.

Each year when I cover the first day of trout season, I always made a trip to Moon Lake Park because I knew the banks of the lake would be lined with children. I enjoyed writing about a child catching his first trout, and there were plenty of them doing that at Moon Lake each year.

Heck, there were plenty of people at the park, period, for each trout season opener.

According to former Luzerne County chief of environment and recreation Andy Gegaris, more than 1,500 vehicles passed through the Moon Lake Park entrance on the opening day of trout season last year. If the park doesn’t open for the April 17 opener of trout season, there’s going to be a lot of people – a lot of families – looking for another place to fish.

“The first day of trout season was probably our biggest day of the year as far as number of visitors,” Gegaris said.

As of now, the trout season opener will look like any other day inside the park – empty.

But just because the county won’t allow anglers inside the park to fish on opening day doesn’t mean the commissioners don’t want some people to use the facility.

The commissioners have made no secret of their attempt to obtain a lease with a drilling company to open the park for natural gas drilling.

And while anglers young and old are, as of now, prohibited from casting lines into the lake, the commissioners are open to the idea of allowing gas companies to suck water out of the lake to be used for their drilling operations.

It’s a slap in the face to everyone who used the park.

That the PFBC still has Moon Lake listed on its stocking schedule shows that the agency is still holding a sliver of hope that the park will be opened for the first day. So am I.

And while it might be wishful thinking, let’s hope that the first truck that drives through the park’s gate is loaded with trout and not a gas drilling rig.