Saving the North Woods

The next morning we were scheduled to fish smallmouths on Big Lake at 8 o'clock. This banker's schedule, I explained to Tim Storrow and Duck Unlimited's Ray Whittemore (on hand to check out the project's enormous potential to waterfowl), left us with almost three hours to go fish Grand Lake Stream, which flows three miles from West Grand to Big Lake. We got on the river at 5 AM, wading out into the fast flow and bouncing little dry flies over the riffles. Fat brook trout hovered under the overhung bank, but this really isn't brook trout habitat. It is simply the best and most consistent dryfly water for landlocks in the US. June had seen spectacular hatches and spectacular catches, with persistent anglers hooking as many as 40 fish a day. West Grand (annually stocked with 10,000 salmon) is one of just four lakes in Maine where landlocks are native. About five percent of the fish you'll catch in the stream and lake are wild; you can tell because they aren't fin clipped.

I had the first landlock-a sleek 17-incher that snatched a fast-moving Elkhair Caddis and, though she never showed herself, fought like a fish twice her size. Soon I was into another that came unbuttoned as I slid it into an eddy. Whittemore landed a decent smallmouth. But Storrow had the fish of the morning-a stream-bred, golden-hued salmon of at least 18 inches that ascended three times to absurd altitudes. It's enormous pectoral and ventral fins reminded me why, in fast water, Atlantics have the advantage over all other fish, native and alien.

A misty rain was blowing across the valley when the guides pulled up in their trucks, Grand Lakers in tow. "You look like you want to go fishing," declared Chris Wheaton as I bit off my 6X tippet and tied on a yellow balsawood popper. I told him he'd figured me right, so off we drove to the landing at Big Lake in Princeton. Big Lake is shallower than West Grand, with more structure along the shore. There isn't finer smallmouth water on the planet. It's not a big deal to catch 50 bass a day. And the slot limit, which spares bass between 12 and 16 inches, has created a trophy fishery.

Big Lake, too, was just as wild as I remembered it, and its south and southwestern shore are in the project area. As I eased my first bass toward Chris's outstretched net something big and black and checkered with white spots shot under the canoe, missing the mesh by inches. It was the "obnoxious loon." He surfaced four feet away, watching the bass. Pin feathers protruding from the back of his neck gave the manic air of Woody Woodpecker. To my delight and Wheaton's pique, he followed us for two miles, eyeballing my rod and surging to the boat each time it bent. An immature eagle sculled over spruce spires. Kingfishers dipped and rattled. There is nothing like fly-fishing out of a cedar-and-ash canoe for North Woods smallmouths, especially when you're being poled within an easy cast of sunken boulders. That's the way bass fishing used to be. Chris Wheaton, one of two people who still build Grand Lakers, has strong opinions about what has befallen bass fishing. If he's guiding you and you want to liven up the conversation (not that you're likely to encounter the need), just ask him what he thinks of all the fancy bass boats they have on the TV shows. Or better still, ask him if he is planning to get one. And as you're fishing keep looking around you. That's the way it can be in Maine and everywhere in the North Woods.

Editor's note: If you would like to help make this project happen, call the New England Forestry Foundation at 978-448-8380, extension 101. NEFF's website: www.newenglandforestry.org.