Assuming that duffel bags, tackle boxes, and pack baskets are your preferred luggage, you know fish grow longer and bucks get bigger when sportsmen sit by campfires. On the other hand, though, you’re aware that campfires – no matter if they crackle in the fireplaces of comfortable camps or flutter in front of lean-tos and tents – also rekindle memories of people, places, and times so special they can’t be recaptured.

Read on, then, and smell the wood smoke while I stir a few stories from the coals of campfires recalled from near and far. Burned indelibly into my mind are the dream-like days of salmon fishing at Brandy Brook camp on Canada’s Restigouche River. Thanks to Herschel Smith of Westfield, who leased the camp, Drew Holl and I rigged our rods there during the 1970s. On his first trip, Drew, an avid angler who hadn’t had the opportunity to fish for Atlantic salmon, hooked a heavyweight at Chain o’ Rocks pool.

During the give-and-take contest that lasted nearly half an hour, my usually vociferous fishing partner was as silent as a sexton. Eventually, however, the pressure of his two-handed Hardy rod and the vom Hofe reel’s line-begrudging drag took their toll, leaving the king of freshwater game fish spent and sculling in the shallows.

Now picture this: Drew was standing at the edge of the water, his rod bent sickle-shaped and the breeze humming along the stretched line and leader. Our guide, Harold Coffin, had waded into the water and was holding the landing net partially submerged. Slowly, with only its wake showing, the salmon was led toward the net and at that climactic moment a parr popped into the air near the rim, causing Drew to release his pent-up excitement by shouting, “WAS THAT HIM?” I don’t think I ever laughed so hard or long. Even the usually stoic Harold laughed aloud. The salmon weighed 26 pounds. Suffice it to say, Drew’s smile was as wide and warm as the fireplace blazing in the camp’s main lodge that evening.

Another salmon-fishing story written at Brandy Brook involved the late Gene Hill. Beaming from ear to ear, the esteemed Field & Stream columnist came ashore one evening with a 34-pounder. It was the biggest salmon Gene had ever caught and the biggest one taken on that trip. Until, that is, a few minutes later I came in with one that weighed just shy of 40 pounds. During a round of congratulatory libations before the fireplace, Gene sidled alongside me and said smilingly, “I’ll never forgive you for that.”

Anyone who has shared a boat or a blind or a campfire with Gene Hill will tell you he was special. Likewise were the trips we took together. Among them: salmon fishing on the brawling George River in the Ungava Region of Arctic Quebec, casting flies to ill-tempered tarpon cruising the Florida Keys, trout fishing on Montana’s Big Horn River, gunning geese on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and shooting driven birds in Scotland’s heathery highlands. Especially memorable is a trout-fishing expedition to Arctic Quebec’s Caniapiscau River, which included flying to outlying ponds where we caught 5- to 8-pound togue – on dry flies, no less. Moreover, the meals featuring brook trout that our guide, Michel, cooked over campfires were ambrosial. Afterward, like bears with bellies full of fish, Gene and I dozed in the shade of stunted spruces and listened to the fire laughing at the jokes of the wind.

The brookies we caught on that trip ranged from 2 to 6 pounds, but they weren’t nearly as selective as the brown trout we fished for in Montana, along with Jim Rikhoff, Tim Crawford, and Roger Keckiessen. Simply put, the Big Horn River literally boiled with browns rising for seemingly endless hatches of small mayflies. According to a state fisheries biologist, the 13-mile stretch we fished held an estimated 8,000 trout per mile. With that many fish, you’d think any fly that came close to matching the hatch would work. Think again. The only fly that got a second look from those trout was a No. 16 Red Quill. And I didn’t have one. Not until Bill Flick came along and gave me a couple. Talk about fisherman’s luck. Sitting by the campfire that night, I allowed that the last time I released so many fish was on Alaska’s Alagnak River, fishing for silver salmon. Bill Flick, by the way, is the son of the legendary Catskill angler, entomologist and conservationist, the late Art Flick, who created the Red Quill.

Obviously, there’s more to fishing than catching fish, and I’ve found no better example of that than at Millbrook Camp on New Brunswick’s Upsalquitch River. Thanks to Millbrook’s owner, BDN publisher Rick Warren, who recently was appointed U.S. Director of the Atlantic Salmon Federation, the aforementioned Drew Holl and Jim Rikhoff, along with Lamar Underwood, Stan Bogdan, and I have been invited to fish for the better part of 10 years. That said, I can assure you that time will never extinguish the campfire memories created there, regardless of whether the fishing was fast or slow. To mend that cast, I’ll say the fishing at the Bar Pool is always productive in providing thoughts and theories about why the fish did or didn’t take and the ensuing discussions run way into the backing, especially at night. Eventually, with nothing resolved as usual, there comes a spate of stories and jokes that flow until the embers in the yawning fireplace have grown sleepy-eyed, signaling that the morning’s fishing is fast approaching.

Judging from trips to fishing and gunning grounds way to hell and gone, I’m willing to bet that Cro-Magnon cavemen sat around campfires for the same reasons we do. While shooting doves and ducks in Mexico, for example, John Payson and I watched the guides kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. By roasting unshucked corn on the coals of campfires they created smudges that warded off mosquitoes. Well, some of them anyway. John’s a good-time guy and a great sport. A year or so earlier we won third place in the Amateur Team Division of the Stuart Sailfish Tournament in Stuart, Fla.; and the quail and turkey hunting at the Payson camp handy to La Belle, Fla., was as good as it gets.

During a trout-fishing trip to Argentina, the aforementioned Jim Rikhoff and I “did lunch,” as they say nowadays, with a group of gauchos who had roasted a goat over their campfire. Suffice it to say, nothing was left but the bones. I can still see those gauchos: With their knee-high leather boots, wide-brimmed hats, and large knives carried behind their backs in colorful waist sashes, they struck me as men you’d want on your side.

Closer to home, I can still taste the fried-egg sandwiches the late Pug York and I stuck together while spring fishing at Green Lake a long time ago. Under an April sky as gray as a salmon’s back, we went ashore handy to Great Brook, built a fire and fried the eggs in a small pan sizzling with burned butter. Sprinkled with wood ash, spiced with slices of raw onion smeared with ketchup and sluiced down with scalding hobo coffee (a handful of grounds tossed into a pot of boiling water) those sandwiches were sinful.

As for warming fires, those built on the banks of the Penobscot River during decades-ago smelting soirees with my grandfather and others came to mind recently while dipping and dumping the flavorful fish in the company of Ed Lamb, Les Jameson, his brother, Chris, and my son, Jeff. Actually, the banter among the characters gathered around the fires was as warming as the flames. For instance, “You seen Brud lately?”

“Not since he took that job sellin’ fertilizer. He’s out of town a lot.”

“You kiddin’ me? He couldn’t sell beer at a company picnic.”

Better yet, “Has Hop been around? I haven’t seen him since huntin’ season.”

“Well if he was here, you’d see him.”

“Why’s that?”

“He had his teeth yarded out and I swear he’s got the biggest, whitest, shiniest false teeth ever made. I told him he looked like a piano. He said, ‘Good, I paid plenty for these choppers and I want them to show.'” So it went each spring when word got around that the smelts were running.

The way I see it, a campfire can be a cast-iron stove sweating wood smoke in a snug log cabin or a gas stove steaming an ice shack. One thing’s for sure, regardless of where a campfire is kindled, or for what purposes, its flames are magical and mesmerizing. That’s as close as I can come to explaining why sitting by a fire makes the world turn slowly and staring into it causes the faces of departed friends to glow amid the flames.

All told, I have to say the April 1 campfires that filled the Penobscot Salmon Club with the warmth of opening day breakfasts and the spirit of springtime and salmon fishing were extra special. As a young angler with more enthusiasm and optimism than anything else, I first attended those breakfasts as the guest of the late Guy Carroll, a club member and Bangor Salmon Pool stalwart who caught four presidential salmon. Small wonder that after years of fishing and wishing, landing the presidential salmon on the morning of May 1, 1986, remains my finest fish story.

Having dipped smelts, picked fiddleheads, listened to the woodcock singing and winging out behind Larry McCluskey’s place and, of course, having tied a few more flies, all I need now to assuage my spring fever is to cast over Atlantic salmon fresh from the sea. That, however, will depend on sojourns to Canadian rivers since fishing for Atlantic salmon in Maine is now prohibited. Granted, that ruling was necessary on the Down East rivers but, in my opinion, and I’m not alone, applying it to the Penobscot holds about as much water as a landing net.

Let’s face it, the Penobscot’s salmon runs have been hatchery dependent since the early 1900s. Accordingly, if the Penobscot’s current smolt-stocking program were discontinued today, four years from now there would be few, if any, salmon returning to the river. Therefore I see no scientific or conservation reasons for the closure of salmon fishing on the Penobscot. As for the discussion about a special fall fishing season, I think it’s absolute eyewash. It makes about as much sense as a special woodcock season in December.

Nevertheless, having supported Atlantic salmon restoration and conservation programs long enough for my hair to grow grayer than a guinea fowl hackle, I sincerely hope my mindset regarding the Penobscot’s program is proven wrong. After all, the river is my Home Pool. A fishing ground filled with memories of people and times so special they are easily rekindled by campfires but can never be recaptured.

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. Web site is www.tomhennessey.com.