Low water to greet anglers on opening day

CHESUNCOOK VILLAGE – Despite the Monday start of open water fishing season, one of the state’s great wilderness lakes remains 25 feet below its normal water levels.

Chesuncook Lake, a sprawling body of water on the West Branch of the Penobscot River, has one of the largest self-sustaining landlocked salmon fisheries in Maine.

The lake also had one of the state’s most dramatic water reductions as a result of this summer’s drought. The loss of water exposed yards of rocky shoreline and even the slimy stumps of old trees, remnants of the time before Ripogenus Dam expanded the lake.

But schools of salmon and other fish swimming beneath the ice that still rings Chesuncook should be healthy and available for anglers come spring, local biologists said Friday.

“You’ve always got to be concerned, but there’s no need to panic yet,” said Paul Johnson, a fisheries biologist with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife in Greenville. “There will be less water to fish, but the fish will be there.”

A repeat of last summer’s baking heat would be disastrous for many of Maine’s waterways, but a combination of predicted spring rains and the annual snow melt will likely raise Chesuncook enough to protect the fishery.

“By the time the ice goes out, it will probably be a lot fuller,” Johnson said.

The biologist’s assessment should allay the concerns of local outfitters who cater to fishermen.

“They [anglers] are my bread and butter,” Red McNaughton said Friday, when reached at his Chesuncook Village business, Katahdin View Lodge and Camps.

Fishermen who came to his lodge last summer had to carry their boats over yards of mud flats to reach the water. The sandy shores also were exposed as the water retreated, causing frequent sandstorms that muddied the shallows, McNaughton said.

But once in the water, the anglers were generally successful, both last summer and throughout the ice fishing season, so the businessman couldn’t predict what effect the drought may have on this year’s season.

“The fishing has been good all winter,” McNaughton said. “They [fish] are still doing their thing; they’ve just got less space to do it in.”

Some biologists have questioned whether cold-water fish such as salmon and trout, which travel to shallow streams to spawn each fall, were able to reproduce normally under drought conditions. If streams were too low, the fish might not have been able to reach their preferred gravelly spawning grounds.

Streams were low in the Chesuncook and Moosehead lake regions, but none dried up so much that they restricted spawning, Johnson said.

Brook trout and young salmon in the streams could have faced higher than normal rates of predation, however, because they were forced to congregate in deeper pools and became more visible to otters, birds and other animals. In some small streams, this same congregation effect could actually improve an angler’s chance of success, he said.

If the predicted rains do not come, however, fish living in these streams and even some shallow ponds might suffer even higher mortality rates as temperatures rise in the shallow water. Water temperatures in the 70-degree range can be fatal for brook trout and juvenile salmon, Johnson said.

“Sorry, beach-goers, we’re fisheries biologists. We’re hoping for a lot of rain and a cool summer,” he said.

Scattered streams did run dry last fall, but many fish were able to migrate into larger water bodies or gather in deep pools, so biologists don’t predict a major impact on fisheries statewide, Steven Timpano, environmental coordinator for DIF&W said Friday. Timpano represents the department on the governor’s drought task force.

“Some level of the fisheries population will be there, so there’s no crisis mode,” he said. “A lot of the streams still had adequate flow to support the fisheries.”

Game fish do not often reach a legal fishing size in their first year of life, so if there was a widespread mortality of young last summer, biologists’ research would not notice a population shift until at least 2003.

DIF&W has not made any regulatory changes in response to the drought, because biologists believe that any harm done to Maine fisheries last year can rebound with normal rains this summer.

“It’s not a straight line,” Timpano said. “A good summer could mask the effects of whatever was lost in the previous year.”