February accident leads to June fun

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If not for a single midwinter slip, Jim Rolph wouldn’t have been on the East Outlet of the Kennebec River on Sunday, learning to fly fish under the tutelage of one of Maine’s top guides.

That’s Rolph’s story, at least.

Rolph, this year’s winner of the BDN’s Win a Drift Boat Trip Contest, said he’d never spent time fly fishing in the past … he’s a spin-caster at heart.

Then came that day in February, when Rolph slipped on a patch of ice outside his Limestone home and severely broke his leg.

“I had to have surgery, and afterward I spent a lot of time lying around, reading the paper,” he said Sunday.

In order to kill a bit more time while on the mend, he started filling in the entry blanks he saw in the paper.

And he won.

On Sunday, a fully healed Rolph collected his winnings as he spent the day on the East Outlet with guide Dan Legere and me.

“This could be the day that this river goes nuts,” Legere told us as we sat in his Hyde drift boat and he began teaching Rolph the basics of casting a fly.

The caddis flies, he explained, hadn’t begun to hatch in earnest. Legere equated the first massive caddis hatch of the year to the day a farmer takes his first crop of sweet corn to market: Consumers – in this case, fish – would feed voraciously on the eagerly anticipated treat.

And as we looked across the first gleaming pool of the day, fish rose constantly, slurping those delicate caddis, finning on the surface and, on a few occasions, leaping completely out of the water.

“Today’s the day,” Legere told us. “It’s happening.”

Happen, it did. But before we could take advantage of that fact, Legere and Rolph had to do a bit of schoolwork designed to convert the spin-caster into a fly fisherman.

“Forget about the fish, Jim,” Legere told his student during the lesson, as fish rose all around the boat. “Don’t pay any attention to the fish.”

After a five-minute tutorial, Rolph had absorbed enough to offer up a snack to the feeding fish.

Spying a nearby rise, he waved the rod back and forth, feeding out a bit more line on each false cast, and gently dropped the fly just upstream of the feeding fish.

A few seconds later, he had hooked his first fish.

“That happens to be a chub,” Legere said with a chuckle after Rolph subdued the frisky fish. “A good starter fish.”

Rolph learned his lessons well, and progressed steadily from that humble “starter” fish.

Over the course of eight hours, he completed an East Outlet grand slam, adding a couple brook trout, a few salmon and a bass to the always plentiful chubs that kept showing up.

“The rule is, we don’t leave fish to find fish,” Legere told us after a couple hours of casting, during which we’d only moved downriver about 100 yards.

The fishing was that good. Or, potentially, it was that good.

During our leisurely lunch (grilled sirloin tips, steamed vegetables, an appetizer of shrimp, salsa and cream cheese, and a pineapple-coconut carrot cake concoction whipped up by Dan’s wife, Penny) Legere explained that fishing during a massive hatch can be frustrating.

Seeing so much surface activity excites fishermen, he told us, but there’s so much natural food in the water, our imitations were just a few of hundreds of possible snacks floating by at any one time.

The tradeoff, of course, is the excitement that comes when you’re able to make casts to fish you know are there, rather than ones you assume must be there.

And when we knew there were fish, Legere did everything possible to help Rolph catch them.

“These fish don’t know it yet, but we’re gonna dupe ’em before the day is through,” Legere said, just before switching flies and moving his boat to a new drop, where new, fresh fish awaited … maybe.

One cast later, Rolph was fighting another salmon.

“Persistence pays, doesn’t it?” Legere asked his beaming student.

“It does,” Rolph agreed. “That and the right fly.”

On the drive back from Greenville, as I catalogued another glorious day spent in the Maine woods, those words kept resonating.

Persistence. And the right fly.

Those are good enough words to live by for me, I guess.

Any-deer permit lottery opens

So you did everything you could to change your luck last week, and you didn’t get your moose permit … again.

That doesn’t mean the state doesn’t consider you a winner. In fact, in a few months the Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife will give you another chance to prove how lucky you are.

Though it’s not even officially summer yet, it’s time to start thinking about deer season, believe it or not.

The DIF&W has opened its application process for any-deer permits – known better in these parts as “doe permits” – and before you get busy with all your summer activities, it might be wise to sit down for a few minutes and apply.

The deadline for any-deer applications is 11:59 p.m. Aug. 3, but you can fill out your form any time before then.

To do so, go to the DIF&W Web site at www.mefishwildlife.com and follow the links.

Filling out the form on the Internet can have an added benefit as well: Everyone who buys a 2007 license or applies for a DIF&W lottery through the on-line MOSES system will be entered in a drawing for a classic Rangeley boat.

John Holyoke can be reached at jholyoke@bangordailynews.net or by calling 990-8214 or 1-800-310-8600.