Mainers ring in New Year’s Day outdoors

DEXTER – The new snowshoes Taylor Knight of Hartland received for Christmas were put to use Tuesday on an ice fishing trip with her father.

Knight, 9, said she hadn’t asked for the snowshoes but was glad Santa left them beneath her Christmas tree.

“They kind of feel like you’re wearing big, huge boots,” Knight remarked. They were just the thing, though, to wade through the snow on big Lake Wassookeag, where the young girl and her father, Gerald Knight, were fishing Tuesday.

The Knights joined Bob Choiniere of Dexter, who had arrived to ice fish at 5 a.m. on opening day. By noon, Choiniere wasn’t overly confident there were any fish left in the lake.

“I’m fishing, that’s all I can say; either you catch them or you don’t,” Choiniere said before heading for a fishing shack he had made from scraps of wood.

Elsewhere on the lake, Robbie Langley of Clinton was grumbling about the slow fishing. Langley said he had been the first to arrive on the lake on opening day but had no luck as of midday. “This place used to be awesome fishing,” he said.

On little Lake Wassookeag, a group of 12 friends from the Newport area were having a blast. “‘Together day,’ we call it,” Matthew Fraser of Plymouth said.

While others fished, Jenny Hawkes of Newport used a snowmobile to tow a boat containing Kate Pomeroy of Etna and Ashley Foss of Newport around the lake.

When their bumpy ride was finished, the women tumbled out and remarked the ride was a “little cold.”

In Greenville, Brad Woodbury and Matt Knowlton, both local carpenters, enjoyed the day cruising the snowmobile trails in the Moosehead Lake region on their fairly new Arctic Cats.

“We’re just riding around, playing around, checking out the trails,” Woodbury said during a break for lunch at the Black Frog Restaurant.

The pair found the trails in good shape, especially five miles out of town. The in-town trails had received heavy use over the weekend, according to the pair.

Knowlton, who purchased his new snowmobile two weeks ago, said the trails were “awesome” on Sunday.

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