A grand time getting skunked Atlantic salmon anglers should get a chance to fish private water

Fishermen weren’t false casting when they described this spring’s weather as being worse than wet kindling. Save for a few mornings when the wind was out of breath, each time I planned to troll a smelt or a streamer for the species known as salmonids I awakened to gray skies and gales that called for small craft warnings.

Accordingly, while casting fly-rod poppers for smallmouth bass, I was forced to fish on lee shores. But, even at that, the baffling gusts blew the anchored canoe around so that the shallows, where bass spawned, often ended up astern. Assuming you’ve been there, done that, there’s no need to elaborate on how exasperating it is.

‘Course the fact that the bass were late spawning, at least where I fished, didn’t help matters any. Usually, the fish are on their beds come the first week in June and the guardian males are ready to fight at the drop of a popper, plug or fly. But this spring, thanks to steady servings of cold winds, rain, and nights with temperatures in the 30s, the water hadn’t warmed enough to make the smallmouths amorous. Consequently, there wasn’t a sign of a spawning bed along the stretch of gravelly shoreline where I hooked and released only one bass. Usually, that spawning ground is good for six or more.

Truth be told, though, it didn’t matter. The reason being that my thoughts were hooked to a forthcoming trip to an Atlantic salmon river that I had longed to fish. Thanks to friends also afflicted with the virus identified as salmo salar, I was able to reserve a place in the rod rack at Fraser Paper Company’s camp on Canada’s Kedgwick River. Located in New Brunswick, at the headwaters of the storied Restigouche River, the Kedgwick is a piscatorial arena in which heavyweight salmon test the tackle and skills of anglers from far and wide.

So it was that, while standing and casting from the fickle 17-foot canoe, I thought about fishing the Kedgwick from a 24- or 26-footer. Common to Gaspe area salmon rivers, the ruggedly ribbed-and-planked Sharpe canoes are as stable as a sidewalk. Saddled with 6-horsepower outboards, the sleek craft scoot through boiling rips and glassy slicks as easily as an otter. Likewise, counter to the fast rhythm of false casting the popper with the 6-weight, 81/2-foot fly rod, I imagined casting salmon flies with a 12-foot, two-handed salmon rod, using the slow, sweeping-cobwebs motion that lifts an 11-weight line from the water like it was a length of yarn and casts it 70 feet or more with energy to spare.

Small wonder, then, that while stripping slack from the line after letting the popper settle to the surface, I imagined mending a cast to remove the “belly” caused by the Kedgwick’s current. Thus straightened, fishing instead of floundering, the fly, leader and line would swing across the current like a second hand sweeping the face of a clock. And though appreciative of the silvery notes spilled into the pond by red-winged blackbirds, I could hear, not so appreciatively, the chatter of kingfishers brazenly poaching pools filled with parr.

With the lackluster smallmouth outing in my wake, I mustered my angler optimism and set a course for the Penobscot River’s striper strongholds. Usually, the sporty “schoolies” arrive handy to the first week in June. Usually. However, while an ebbing tide and a gusting northwest wind bullied the boat, I trolled for two hours or so without a tap or a tug. Granted, the river was murky from runoff and its temperature was below normal. Nevertheless, smelts had arrived in April, on schedule, and alewives swarmed into Souadabscook Stream in Hampden early in May. But this year the stripers didn’t show until June was middle-aged.

But there’s more to fishing than catching fish. While the outboard ticked away the time, I watched eagles swooping and ospreys plunging to snag eels and alewives with unerring strokes of gaff-like talons. Mother Nature’s matinee continued when, with startling abruptness, a seal thrashed only a few yards ahead of the boat. Seconds later, the “sea dog” surfaced with an alewive in its mouth.

Because it’s impossible for me to fish the Penobscot without thinking of salmon fishing, my mental castings again raised images of the Kedgwick. Glancing at the tackle box bristling with treble-hooked plugs and lures of all sizes, colors and descriptions, I thought of a tackle bag bulging with fly boxes arrayed with single- and double-hooked salmon flies ranging from size 5/0 to No. 10. Allowing that the bag contained enough flies to supply the Fraser camp, it would be frivolous to tie more. But I did. Proven patterns of my own creation, they were, named, Green Hornet, Silver Heron, Osprey. And, of course, a few classic Lady Amhersts for good measure.

So it went. Let’s just say that, thanks to the forthcoming Kedgwick trip and Albert Einstein’s observation, “Imagination is greater than knowledge,” I had a grand time getting skunked: Although, the ratchet-like sound of the Penn reel arresting a hit-and-run striper would have been music to my ears, I fancied the smooth purring of a Bogdan begrudging line to a salmon during a give-and-take tug of war. In watching the churning tide rips for the tell-tale slap of a striper, I imagined a swirl as big as a truck tire blossoming on a foam-flecked slick – and simultaneously felt the heart-stopping tap and weighty pull of a salmon taking. And as if hooking the fish and taking the edge off the every-cast anticipation known only to Atlantic salmon anglers wasn’t enough, I heard the guide say assuredly, “Big feller.”

The sky was as gray as a salmon’s back as the boat towed a wake toward the landing. “Here it is June,” I thought. “Prime time for salmon fishing on the Penobscot. Conditions are perfect: water’s up, temperature’s down and the fish are arriving. But because of a lot of political eyewash attendant to salmon in the Down East rivers being listed as endangered, salmon fishing in the Penobscot is prohibited. That’s caused a lot of backlashes hereabouts, and for good reason.”

The Penobscot River is a put-and-take salmon fishery and that’s all it will ever be. Fishermen know it and so do the salmon commission biologists. But the biologists can’t admit it. The river will never be restored with self-sustaining runs of salmon. There are too many dams on it, pure and simple. It took only a few dams, built in the 1800s, to begin the death knell of the Penobscot’s native salmon population. By the mid-1900s, the early spring runs that once numbered in the tens of thousands had been reduced to remnants.

“So what’s wrong with a put-and-take, catch-and-release salmon fishery?” I reasoned. “We had it here and fishermen came from everywhere; and I never saw one of them fall into a fit of depression because the 14-pounder he caught had a fin clipped. Aside from that, those fishermen cast a lot of money into the local economy – an estimated $1 million annually, according to a University of Maine study completed in the 1980s. And Down East communities would reap the same benefits if the rivers thereabouts had some fish in them, wild or otherwise. What a farce. From the start, fishermen have been the foundation of Maine’s salmon conservation-restoration programs. Now they can’t fish – even though the salmon commission is mandated to provide a recreational fishery.

“Forget it,” I thought while approaching the landing. “You’re wasting your time stewing about it. Nothing’s going to change. There’s too much money and politics involved.” Then, with the Kedgwick in mind, “Count your blessings.” Being no stranger to public salmon water I’ve always felt that every Atlantic salmon angler should have the pleasure of fishing on private water at least once. Simply put, it’s the epitome of piscatorial sport, even when it’s slow fishing. And slow it was on the Kedgwick from June 26-29. After whipping the Fraser water to a froth during that prime-time trip, the total catch for our party of eight fishermen was two salmon and three grilse. Again, I had a grand time getting skunked. Fact is, like several of my fishing partners, I never saw a salmon.

Likewise, reports of slow fishing flowed throughout the Restigouche River system, Gaspe rivers, Quebec North Shore streams and New Brunswick’s Miramichi watershed. But, being eternal optimists, fishermen, guides and camp managers are hoping and praying that salmon runs are late for the same reason the arrival of stripers was delayed: cold water temperatures. If not, the culprit could be the moon, tides, seals, subsistence fishing, cycles, an ice jam in the Davis Strait or satellites and cell phones interfering with the celestial navigation systems of salmon. Take your pick.

Closer to home, the Maine Atlantic Salmon Commission reports that, as of July 1, only two wild salmon had entered the trap situated in Stillwater Dam on Cherryfield’s Narraguagus River. Conversely, 439 hatchery-origin Penobscot River salmon were counted at the Veazie Dam trap. All things considered, it’s obvious that, if not for salmon fishing being prohibited on the Penobscot, it would be one of the most productive rivers in North America thus far this spring.

So, what’s wrong with a put-and-take, catch-and-release recreational fishery?

Tom Hennessey’s columns and artwork can be accessed on the BDN Internet page at www.bangornews.com. Tom’s e-mail address is: thennessey@bangordailynews.net