Category Archives: Brook trout

The opening month of fishing season: Fishing Report

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It has been a cold and rainy April.  But day after day of fog and drizzle and above freezing temperatures at night melted the snow quickly, even in the high country where snow was head high. Over the last week or so, ice has gone out in much of New England, although the ice is still quite solid in northern Maine and the mountains.

Stocking in Maine has been late this year with only a few locations stocked, although stocking has continued normally in the rest of New England. States try not to stock in rivers and streams when the water temperatures are below 45 degrees because the newly stocked fish tend to move downstream looking for warmer water. Rivers range from bankfull to “into the trees” because of the rain and melted snow.

I got out fishing even though I was fishing to stocked fish.. The Exeter River in New Hampshire is a small, beautiful stream and it was fun pulling brook trout out from under logs and in tiny side currents. The Merriland River in Wells is another pretty stream running over rocky ledges and through mature forest without any development (at least in the part I fish.} I also briefly fished the Saco River where it hits brackish water just downstream from Kennebunk. Interestingly enough, a gentlemen streamside told me that fishing slowed down in April while the snow was melting, but in January, February, and March, a number of anglers enjoyed consistent fishing for  searun browns and brookies. I will have to try this next winter.

The first trout of the year is noteworthy even if it is a stocker

The first trout of the year is noteworthy even if it is a stocker


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A foam eddy at the base of a small falls on the Merriland River. I always look for noses poking through the foam.

A foam eddy at the base of a small falls on the Merriland River. I always look for noses poking through the foam.

For those of you looking for my new book, “In Pursuit of Trophy Brook Trout”, they can be found in the following locations: In Massachusetts, The Evening Sun Fly Shop; In New Hampshire, Kittery Trading Post and North Country Fly Shop; In Maine, Royal River Book Store, Rangeley Sport Shop, Matagamon Campground

Reminder….follow me on Instagram @mainelyflyfishing

Late Winter means Sportsmen’s (and Women’s) Shows

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Coming up are two Shows that I will be giving presentations at and selling books:

On Saturday, March 16th the Western Maine Fly Fishing Expo returns to the Gould Academy Field House in Bethel Maine from 9am – 3 pm with more exhibitors, new seminars and presentations, and a casting area to test drive new rods. There will be guides, outfitters, sporting camps, authors, artists, equipment manufacturers, retailers, a silent auction, and a raffle.

On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, March 29th, March 30th, and April 1 is the Maine Sportsman Show in Augusta, Maine. see https://www.mainesportsman.com/sportsmans-show/ for more details. I will be at the Maine Sportsman Booth Friday afternoon from 4 pm on, and I am giving a presentation: 12 Best Flies for Trophy Brook Trout and How to Fish Them, each day. I don’t have the exact times yet.

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My New Book: In Pursuit of Trophy Brook Trout – The Ultimate Handbook of Tactics, Timing, and Territory is now available. You can order from me off my website. Just email me your address. You can send me a check at 35 Crystal Lane, Cumberland, Me. 04021 or can now pay with PayPal. Look for the tab and link on my site. You can also purchase from the Rangeley Sport Shop and Royal River Books in Yarmouth, Maine. As the books become more widely available, I will list other outlets.

September Update

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First, the bad news…. It seems that for the next five years Middle Dam on the Rapid River is going to be replaced. Here is the information:

On August 15, 2018, Brookfield Renewable Energy Partners (the owner of a number of Maine dams) filed an application with the Maine Land Use Planning Commission (LUPC) to rebuild Rapid River’s Middle Dam (the river’s start from Richardson Lake). Work is already underway by upgrading roads. Actual dam work will start in 2019 and not be completed until 2023 – five years later.

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This project is similar to the replacement of the famous Upper Dam (on
Mooselookmeguntic Lake) over the last five years. This is not good news for fly fishers. Those who fish Upper Dam know that during the replacement phase, changing water channels, loud noise from construction efforts, and having to evade construction vehicles really diminished the fishing experience. The completed Upper Dam has eliminated prime fishing spots on or near the dam, concentrating anglers at the tail of the pool and reducing angler capacity. The fear is that we are in for the same situation with Middle Dam.
The plans for Middle Dam completely change the current dam configuration, including
elimination of the three fishing piers. The dam proposal has a spot on the dam labeled “Fishing Platform”, but the actual area for anglers is small and may not allow effective flycasting. It is critical that anglers make their desires known to (1) minimize fishing disruption during construction (2) not uniformly riprap the entire pool, (3) to construct usable fishing platforms so that the finished dam doesn’t eliminate fishing opportunities at what is arguably one of the best trout and salmon fishing spots in all of Maine.
Interested fly-fishing groups and individuals wrote to LUPC during the month of August
requesting a hearing. For the lasts up to date information,contact Trout Unlimited, the Native Trout Coalition, Rangeley Heritage Trust, or Friends of Richardson Lake for the latest information and how best to get involved.
Fishing during the first ten days of September was slow. Water was still warm and river and stream flows were also modest due to lack of recent rain. As a result, the fish weren’t moving into rivers or feeding on the surface. In fact, fishing was so dead in the Rangeley area that it was like a chemical spill had killed all of the fish.
But recent cold nights and over an inch of rain last night are livening things up considerably. Salmon and trout are starting to be caught. I got a report that the upper Mags is getting hot.

Of course, being out fishing is always worth while even if the fish aren’t cooperating, Check out this sunset from a few nights ago over Little Kennebago Lake.

Sunset too beautiful to focus on the fly

Sunset too beautiful to focus on the fly

IMG_0352

Finally, for those of you who are interested in reading more of my stuff, a reminder: I write a freshwater column  approximately every other month for the Maine Sportsman magazine/newspaper. Look for it in the September Issue available at news stands now, and also in November and December. I will also have several articles in upcoming issues of Eastern Fly Fishing Magazine.

Odds and Ends

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Hello friends,

This entry is going to contain a whole bunch of unrelated little items. Should be fun to read but maybe a little all over the place!

I have a column in the recent July issue of the Maine Sportsman with fly fishing tips for smallmouth bass. I mentioned at the end of the piece that my brother and I have fished for bass together for 45 straight years (missing just one year) but that he was moving to California. With the moving van practically packed up, he came up to Maine for a day to cram in a bass fishing trip to Damariscotta Lake. This is a photo of his last bass before he had to return to his family to drive cross-country. It may have been the largest bass he has ever caught. What a way to send him off to the west coast!IMG-0505

In other news…Wilderness Adventure Press is releasing in early July a new edition of my first book, “Flyfishing Northern New England Seasons” with a new additional section that contains tactics and tips for catching large (trophy-sized) wild brook trout and landlocked salmon. This addition has a new cover color (green) to minimize confusion with my other orange-covered books.

Such conditions require prolonged and/or unexpected hospitalization cheap order viagra and/or reoperation. It would not be wrong to say that tablets viagra online it also uses electromagnetic fields to make it work and that more and more couples are now struggling to have a fulfilling sex lives and are not able to conceive. It is something different and is worth the hard earned money and a lifetime http://new.castillodeprincesas.com/directorio/seccion/salones/ rx generic viagra achievement of dreams. They are now thankful to the medicine for make a night http://new.castillodeprincesas.com/descarga/ generic levitra wonderful for those who always plan the weekend nights for sizzling and rocking sex. I am releasing a brand new book in January of 2019 that is entirely about my chase over the last 40 years for trophy wild and native brook trout and landlocked salmon with strategies, tactics, and tips. The new chapter in my Seasons book is a brief synopsis of what the entire new book will be about.

Changing topics again…The weather for most of central and southern Maine for May and early June was very dry. Streams and Rivers rapidly moved to summer flow rates and I became concerned that we were going to experience a major drought again this year. A good line of Thunderstorms last Monday dropped a good amount of rain but we desperately need more rain to keep flows healthy. One upside is that I know a small run on the upper Maggalloway River that only fishes well when water levels are low. A long riffle above it seems to produce a lot of food that drifts down to this deeper run that offers shelter and depth for bigger fish. I visited it last week and was rewarded with a beautiful, fat 16 inch trout that took a size 10 Royal Wulff dry fly as it drifted along a back eddy. Big trout love to sit in back eddies facing downstream.

IMG_0079

Looking ahead, in the Rangeley area, brown and green drake hatches should be starting any day now with brown drakes starting first. I will be heading up on the 24th hopefully to intercept them.
Continue reading →

Memorial Day Weekend

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How things have changed since Ice -0ut. In only three short weeks, western Maine Mountain waters have warmed substantially and rivers have dropped precipitously. Believe it or not, we need rain, or we will have a repeat of last spring and summer, when the fishing in rivers and streams became difficult very quickly. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much in the forecast for the next ten days.

The waters are still cold and the hatches just starting but the fish are looking up in the shallower and warmer waters in most lakes and ponds. My family and I found a concentration of fish in just one section of a local river and caught fish from 8 to 17 inches on a variety of flies including Soft-Hackle streamers, small dark hendricksons, and Prince nymphs.

My favorite fish caught was a very fat 17-incher that was rising just off an overhanging alder branch. From downstream, I high-stick nymphed him, saw the line straighten slightly, and tightened up to set the hook. The fish was confused at first but then figured it out and tried to run under the overhanging alder branches and tree roots before I finally crossed the stream and was able to clear the line. No photo unfortunately, but a real beautiful, fat, in-prime-of-health fish.

kennebago

Part of the family fishing this weekend
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Earlier in the week, I was at the Damariscotta River watching the alewives run up the fish ladder at Damariscotta Mills. The run looks to be over a million fish this year. Quite an increase from a number of years ago, all due to conservation efforts. See my video below.

 

 

April Update

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Well folks, it doesn’t look like ice out is going to come anytime soon in western or northern Maine. The weather continues to be seasonally cold. In southern Maine night time temps continue to be in the low 20’s and last night temps at Kennebago bottomed out at 10 degrees. These temps refreeze the lakes each night. Weather is supposed to warm up at the end of the week and with most of the snow gone, things should start really thawing.

Here is another video from last fall showing photos and underwater videos of native brook trout being trapped in streams that they started to ascend to spawn. With no rain, they were trapped in pools and couldn’t move up or down stream for a month before rains in early October raised water levels.
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https://youtu.be/QrJc4m8nO2A

July Rains Keep Fishing Productive

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What a difference a year makes. Last year, July marked the continuation of a deepening drought with low and warming water. This year, almost continuous thundershowers have kept rivers so high as to be unfishable at times. This in turn has  brought landlocked salmon into many rivers from the lakes where they usually spend their summers. These salmon will  now stay in the rivers all summer. Some anglers believe that salmon only run up rivers in the spring and the fall, but during high water, salmon will enter and move up the rivers regardless of the calendar.For example, fresh salmon moved into both the Magalloway and the Kennebago Rivers in early July, and anglers who intercepted these fresh salmon did well.

My wife and I actually had a LLS double, both fighting leaping salmon at the same time, but not in the river. We were dry-fly fishing Kennebago Lake during the evening around July Fourth. We saw no sign of any of the drake hatch from the week before, but trout and salmon must have memories that last at least a week because for several nights, they were coming up and nailing a Quigley’s green drake cripple (emerger). The best trout was a fat 16 incher that gave quite a fight on my 3-weight rod.

Today’s India offers World Class Medical Facilities, comparable with any of foea.org order cheap viagra the western countries. Erectile dysfunction is a common sexual problem that is experienced mostly by men aged 40 and above. cheap cialis professional Again, virtually everyone making big money on the internet, and their response might be “sending out those darn cialis 40 mg emails!” But it is possible because hypnotherapy provides a tool that can access the deep subconscious beliefs and motivations. Skin thins and becomes transparent, glossy, with areas of hyperpigmentation with reduced pilosity and very sensitive to trauma, even low intensity. viagra on line purchase foea.org I reluctantly left Kennebago because I wanted to try some striper fishing. The striper fishing  this year on the southern coast of Maine has been the best it has been in at least a decade, according to those that keep track of such things. Particularly plentiful are schoolies in the 10 to 16 inch range that can put up quite a fight on a 6-weight fly rod. My kids and wife wanted to striper fish as well so we had several family outtings and caught stripers in the New Meadows River while kayaking, the Scarborough Marsh (in a friends boat) and off Higgins Beach (wading). A green and white Clouser seemed to be the ticket, but then again, that seems to be all that I ever use, so  how would I know any different. I have caught a few larger fish on a fly-fishing type popper. Boy, do they slam that thing.

Here is a few photos with various family members holding up typical schoolie stripers. I highly recommend getting out there and giving it a try even if the water is warming up and the fish are getting a bit more difficult to come by.IMG_4469IMG_0996 (2)IMG_0965

Fishing Action Everywhere

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Hello everyone,

Sorry for the length of time between posts. How time flies when one is balancing fishing and work.

Late June was a month of weather contrasts, and how good the fishing was depended on what hour you were on the water on any particular day. It could be hot and humid part of the day, then pouring rain,  followed by a cold night and the next day. It led to frequent closet rummaging: Shorts to fleece, back to shorts, and then complete bug- coverage apparel as the little beasties swarmed. Often streams and rivers were too high to fish and ponds or lakes were the best or only options

The brown drake and green drake hatches on Kennebago Lake commenced on the east side of the lake on June 23rd and commenced up the lake until on the 27th bugs were popping opposite Grants on the north shore. It was very windy and rainy at times and fishing was tough under those conditions but those that were out during the lulls caught 12-16 inch trout and salmon on drake imitations. This author, alas, was otherwise occupied with guiding away and familial responsibilities, and didn’t get a chance to partake of above-mentioned hatch.
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A couple of interesting fishing stories….I was fishing a favorite stretch of the Magalloway River way down below Wilson’s Mills and on successive casts caught a good brook trout, a large fallfish, and a monster yellow perch. Where else can you do that? The water was almost too high to fish.

My favorite fish caught so far this year: I was high-stick nymphing on the Kennebago right at dark. Couldn’t really even see my line at all – certainly couldn’t see the sighter that I use for reference. I felt a sluggish resistance, set the hook, and eventually landed a very strong and fat 20-inch brook trout. I handed my 10-foot, 4-weight nymphing rod to my son-in-law and he hooked and landed another brook trout that seemed almost identical out of the same lie. We worked our way back to the car by flashlight, both with wide smiles on  our faces.

Authors Note: It is gratifying that my Flyfisher’s Guide to New England is selling so well and that readers are telling me that it is proving a good resource for them. For those of you that have found this book useful, I would like to remind everyone that my first book, Flyfishing Northern New England’s Seasons, is a “how-to” book that complements the Guide. It is written in a different style with instruction for sure, but also stories, observations, and anecdotes. It is available from myself, Amazon, and some fly shops. Finding new water to fish is only half the battle, one still needs to know what to do.

Hatches, Hatches, Hatches

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Despite all of the continuing clouds and rain, over Memorial Day weekend, hatches commenced in the Rangeley area: midges, a blizzard of blue-winged olives, and a few medium-sized mayflies in the Hendrickson, march brown, and Quill Gordon families. And yet, large trout were being caught on streamers in shallow water literally stuffed with smelts – spitting them out as they were brought to net. The smelt must have still been running even into Memorial Day, or at least were moving back into their deeper water haunts and being intercepted as they passed through the lake shallows.

My son and I encountered an epic blue-winged olive hatch (size 18) on the upper Kennebago River. With a strong current downstream, and high-winds blowing upstream, the bugs were blown into a quiet side channel eddy that was all of 2 or 3 feet deep, and there were hundreds sitting on the surface. Somewhere between 12 and 20 trout were rising regularly. It was tough to get the trout to pick your fly amongst all of naturals but every once and awhile we would be successful. It was cool just to see the event and catch some fish. A happy young angler just upstream from us landed what looked to be a 20 inch plus trout on a dry fly.

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We have also been experimenting with a fly we don’t fish often but are intrigued with its success with very large trout. Maybe you can tell what it is from this mediocre close-up photo took last night.KIMG0053 (2)

End of Season

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For what seems like the 3rd autumn in a row, September in the Rangeley area was dry and hot, and the trout and salmon didn’t begin to move into shallow water or run up the rivers until the last week of the season. Global climate change really seems to be impacting Maine. I remember that 20 years ago in the western Maine Mountains, by the last few days of the season all of the leaves would be off the trees, and sometimes it would spit snow and sleet. The end of September now arrives with the leaves still green and this year there wasn’t even a frost until mid-October.

I think that Maine’s Inland Fish and Wildlife Department should consider extending the regular fishing season to the first week in October. I know more water is being kept open later but prime waters are not. I don’t think extending the season by one week would negatively impact the wild fish and it would minimize the crowding during the last week in the season.

Although another “official” fly fishing season has come and gone, lots of water is still open. I guided two anglers in early October to upper Dam – still lots of heavy machinery working – but everyone there (up to 14  anglers in the late afternoon) seemed to catch a few fish. Most were 10-12 inches and very thin – I assume that they were resident to that area and that during this hot summer, the water had warmed too much for them to feed actively. A few fresh larger salmon and trout were caught – some in the 20 inch range, but I got the sense that the real movement of fish hadn’t started yet.
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I have some interesting photos and videos from the end of September that I will post as time allows.

In other news, I was able to stop into a new fly shop in Lincoln, NH – right at the end of the Kancamagus Highway. This new fly shop is good news for anglers in that part of NH who did not have a fly shop anywhere close by. The name of the shop is Mountain High Fly (www.mountainhighfly.com) and the owner, Sara, seemed quite competent and enthusiastic. They are on-line only during the winter, but the shop itself will be open again in the spring. Good luck with your new endeavor, Sara!