VEAZIE – As the opening day of the Penobscot River’s first spring Atlantic salmon season since 1999 dawned, Beau Peavey was exactly where you’d expect him to be.

High water? Cold water? Slim chance to actually hook a fish?

No matter. Peavey was fishing. And if you said that he was born to do just that, you wouldn’t be too far off.

May 1 – the traditional season opener for salmon on the river – is his birthday, after all.

And his father, Victor, another longtime salmon fisherman, celebrated his own 62nd birthday on opening day.

“I came home from salmon fishing on the morning he was born and [my wife] said, ‘You better not go back up,'” Victor Peavey said Thursday, as he and his son stood on the porch of the Veazie Salmon Club, surveying the roiling river.

“I had to go to the hospital on the first day of salmon fishing,” he said, shaking his head.

If you’ve ever spent much time around avid salmon anglers, you might guess that the decision wasn’t universally popular among his equally salmon-addled pals.

“The guys I was fishing with were a little upset with me. They wanted to go back,” Victor Peavey said. “But I kind of had to go to the hospital and wait for [Beau]. So I guess it was worth it.”

Beau Peavey began fly-fishing for Atlantic salmon with his dad at age 3 and caught his first Penobscot salmon at age 4.

The past two years, during a limited fall season on the river, Beau Peavey caught the first fish each year.

On Thursday, the Peaveys were among the throng of area fishermen who headed to the Penobscot to celebrate the opening day of a new season.

Maine’s rivers were closed to Atlantic salmon fishing in 1999 after the number of returning adult fish dropped to unacceptable levels. The Penobscot was reopened for a month during the fall in both 2006 and 2007.

But spring is a special time for salmon anglers, and many successfully lobbied the Maine Atlantic Salmon Commission to hold a catch-and-release season to be held during a more traditional spring month.

On this opening day, there were plenty of fishermen on hand to talk about their sport, whether they actually grabbed a fly rod or not.

“I did not wet a line. The water was too dirty, too high and too cold,” Brewer’s Dick Ruhlin said later in the day, as he stood outside the Eddington Salmon Club. “There is still time ahead of us. We’ll have the whole month of May to fish for them.”

Beau Peavey, 24, admitted that Tuesday’s torrential rains had ruined any realistic plans to catch a fish, but he said there was no way he would have missed the opener.

“This is about [as bad as it could have been],” he said. “Thirty-nine degree [water], fast and cold.”

He even got permission from his University of Maine professor to miss class in favor of fishing.

“Entirely too much water,” Beau Peavey said. “That’s an understatement. But I had to get a fly in the water, just for fun.”

Down the steep riverbank in Veazie, the brown river churned angrily. Across the river in Eddington, a lean-to used by anglers as a shelter and gossip shack was dry – barely. A nearby rod rack wasn’t so lucky and rocked back and forth in the waves.

That didn’t stop Beau Peavey from fishing on both sides of the river. By 7 a.m., he already had put in an hour and a half in Eddington and had given Veazie a token try as well.

Upstream flooding washed all kinds of material into the water and made casting a fly an adventure.

“What did you catch, trees this morning, Beau?” his father asked, already knowing the answer.

“I got some grass. I got a couple of nice sticks. I got a piece of styrofoam. I almost caught a kid’s lawn chair. That was exciting,” Beau Peavey said with a grin. “I haven’t seen any houses float by yet. That’s next.”

Victor Peavey shrugged.

“You never know what you’ll get in this river now,” he said.

Victor Peavey was content to let his son fish on Thursday and saved his energy for another day, when the water will be lower and the fish, presumably, more plentiful.

“It’s way too high. I’ll wait ’til it drops and then I’ll fish,” Victor Peavey said.

That was a popular opinion among many anglers, as most celebrated opening day without actually fishing. Several showed up at clubhouses on both sides of the river to mark the event and socialize.

One morning angler launched a boat and fished the pools near the Eddington Salmon Club, but many others chose to stay ashore.

“I’ve got a big Grand Laker [canoe], but I was just afraid,” said Claude Westfall of Orono. “I decided I was going to hold off. There’s no sense taking a chance. I hope nobody goes on the river now and tries to put a boat in, because it’s just dangerous.”

Westfall, 79, caught the season’s first salmon back in 1992 and delivered it, as custom dictated, to the sitting president, George H.W. Bush.

Westfall began fishing the Penobscot back in the 1950s and has seen every sort of condition on the river. Almost.

“This is the highest I’ve seen it,” Westfall said.

Ruhlin, an officer of the Eddington Salmon Club as well as chair of the Maine Atlantic Salmon Commission, heralded the day as a significant one.

“I think it represents the restoration of a tradition, a tradition that I think runs quite deep with the people of Maine,” Ruhlin said.

Westfall expressed similar sentiments and said that despite the subpar fishing conditions, he arrived at the river hoping for an angler’s favorite kind of surprise on opening morning.

“I won’t bother with it anymore,” he said after hooking a submerged tree branch and snapping off a fly. “But it would have been fun to go down there and hook a salmon right off. I have to admit that.”

Beau Peavey would surely have loved to catch a salmon on opening day as well, but he also arrived with modest goals.

“I was anticipating drinking some coffee and getting my fly wet,” he said. “It’s my birthday, and I like to get out [on opening day]. It’s been what, nine years?”

And even after his efforts netted no tangible success early Thursday, he was able to look down at his home river and smile.

“Oh, whatever,” he said. “It’s better than sleeping.”

jholyoke@bangordailynews.net

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