Angler seeks protection for Kennebec Mallard believes peers need to change ways to preserve river’s fishery

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SOLON – From the middle of his ClackaCraft drift boat, Bob Mallard leans into the oars and points out likely fishing hotspots.

There’s an undercut bank just ahead, he tells you. There’s a pool coming up that looks particularly “trouty.” And there are plenty of fish here, he assures, even as your arm begins to burn after hurling hundreds of futile streamer flies toward the bank.

Mallard rows. You cast. And cast. And cast.

“Keep banging,” he says, offering a quick casting tip from time to time. “Keep banging.”

Welcome to the Kennebec River. This is Bob Mallard’s adopted backyard. As you’ll soon find out, he’s got a few opinions on how this piece of the waterway – the section that stretches from Bingham to Skowhegan – ought to be managed.

And if you sit still for a second or two, he’ll be glad to share them with you.

Just be aware of something: If you’re a tried-and-true, Maine-bred worm-dunker, you may not like what you hear.

“The anglers have to embrace some more modern, less consumptive angling practices,” Mallard says, just getting warmed up.

“Maybe it’s tackle restrictions. Maybe the elimination of live bait, or creel restrictions, or slot limits,” he says, referring to practices that have met with staunch and vocal opposition in years past.

“If the state would actually take some action to give a higher level of protection to that section of water, we’d really have something.”

No rules translates to bad rules

Mallard, who abandoned a 20-year career as a software engineer so that he could open up Kennebec River Outfitters, has been fishing in Maine for a long time.

For that matter, he’s been fishing everywhere for a long time. Look at the walls of his fly shop and you’ll find pictures of him in Arizona and New Mexico. Montana and Wyoming and Idaho. If there’s a top-notch fishery somewhere in the U.S., chances are that Mallard has drifted it or waded it.

And the status of the portion of the Kennebec that he sends most of his clients onto is important to him.

Some people, he’ll tell you, look at the Bingham section of the Kennebec and see a river half full of native rainbow trout.

Mallard, you may have guessed, sees it as half empty.

Not that the fishing is bad, mind you. It’s just that Mallard looks at the river and chooses to focus on an opportunity that he says is being missed.

“As a fisherman, back 20 years ago the Bingham stretch of the Kennebec was known as the finest wild rainbow fishery on the East Coast,” Mallard says. “One of the best in the country, but clearly the best in the east.

“Now, people who didn’t know about it and are discovering it today think it’s great. I say, ‘You know what? It is great. But it’s nowhere near as great as it once was.”

The reasons, Mallard will tell you, are many.

He says there are smallmouth bass, along with state-raised splake, coming through the Wyman Dam turbines and working their way into the top mile of the Bingham section – a key cool-water summer holding area for wild rainbows, brook trout and salmon.

At least one spawning tributary was damaged by a flood-control dredging, he points out.

And the fishing rules – which, he points out, could give the wild rainbow fishery a real break – do nothing of the sort.

“It’s general law, consumption-based fishing,” Mallard says. “Put-and-take fishing, in itself, isn’t wrong. But when it’s no-put-and-take, it doesn’t work well. So what we’ve got to do is recognize the waters that can produce wild fish and mange them accordingly.”

That, you may have guessed, has proven easier said than done. While some sections of the Kennebec – which Mallard maintains don’t have the potential upside of the Bingham section – are governed by special regulations, the stretch he’s focusing on is unprotected.

“We have an amazingly high human-induced mortality,” he said, referring to both the catch-and-release ethic that most fly-fishermen embrace, along with past research that has shown hooked fish survive more often when released if they’re not hooked while gobbling live bait.

Mallard is looking to organize a group of fishing enthusiasts – both fly-fishing and others – to undertake projects that will improve fishing on the Bingham stretch of the Kennebec.

But as he’s well aware, there are plenty of vocal people who won’t stand idly by if their traditional means of catching fish – or keeping them – is threatened.

Citizens made themselves heard

A few years ago – Peter Bourque thinks it may have happened during the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife’s Quality Fishing Initiative in 1995 – rules changes on the Bingham section of the Kennebec were proposed.

Public hearings were held, and few people turned out. Then, when the new state fishing law book was released, things got interesting.

“All hell broke loose,” says Bourque, longtime director of the fisheries and hatcheries division for the DIF&W. “We received a huge petition from people in the Bingham area [looking to get the rule revoked].”

The state, reacting to the public outcry, decided to hold another public hearing.

“I didn’t attend that particular meeting, but apparently there was a huge crowd,” Bourque says. “And they were ugly.”

The end result: The state responded to the public’s emphatic statement and changed regulations back to “general law.”

That result, Mallard says, was unfortunate.

Mallard thinks that there are times that the state should act more independently.

“My opinion is that the [DIF&W] are as responsible for implementing rules that necessarily aren’t well-received by the public but are for the benefit of the fishery as the police department is for implementing rules on the highway that aren’t popular to me because I like to speed,” he says.

The problem, Mallards says, is that many people won’t change their practices unless they’re forced to change.

And he says Maine isn’t on the forefront when it comes to progressive fishing attitudes.

“We’re consumptive anglers in New England,” he says. “We always have been. I’ve spent over a hundred days in Montana, and I’ve never seen a trout killed.”

Mallard’s message is quite simple.

“Just because it’s always been, it doesn’t mean that it’s right,” Mallard says. “I deal with that every day, with friends and customers. I say to anybody that calls me a hypocrite or an elitist, I’ll bring them the biggest stack of dead fish pictures that they’ll ever see.

“I was born and raised the same way all of us were. But the difference is, at some point, if all of us say, ‘I did it, so I’m going to continue,’ we’re taking the problem and we’re dumping it in the laps of the next generation.”

DIFW’s Bourque points out that increased regulation for the Bingham stretch is something that the state may consider again in the future.

Like Mallard, he draws a distinction between the regulatory treatment of a self-sustaining native population – such as the rainbow trout in the Bingham section – and other fish that are purely stocked and which can be more easily replaced.

“You ask, ‘is the [current] regulation interfering with a wild fishery?’ And if it is, you step in and make a regulation proposal,” Bourque said.

The anecdotal data suggests that rainbow trout are faring quite well. There are, after all, plenty of people who look forward to the times when they can spend time on the river and try to entice the frisky fish to take a fly … or a worm.

But Mallard worries that if the DIFW doesn’t act soon, it will be left reacting to a future problem that it could have avoided, and may be faced with a major reclamation effort that would take years.

“If today’s fishermen in Maine don’t embrace change, the legacy we leave is one of radically deteriorating fisheries,” Mallard says.

“We can’t keep putting off the problem to the next generation. There comes a point where you damage your fishery so badly it doesn’t come back.”