Whither Maine Char?

The work of Dr. Kinnison and his students provides additional evidence, if more were needed, that Maine’s Arctic char are priceless, national treasures that we need to get serious about protecting and restoring. And, as the most southerly Arctic char on the planet, they’re poster children for the threat of climate change.

Yet with the exception of Trout Unlimited, the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine (SAM) and a few native-fish advocates, the general public and even the angling community at large seem singularly unmoved and unconcerned about Maine’s char. Tragic lessons of the past go unheeded.

The most graphic of these lessons occurred in the Rangeley Lakes of western Maine, where superabundant dwarf char had provided forage for the race of giant, hump-backed brook trout, now largely extirpated. In the summer of 1863 Wall Street broker and Rangeley angler George Page—born before John Voelker’s admonition that “any fisherman who will tell on the trout waters that are revealed to him possesses the stature of a man who will tell on the woman he’s dallied with”—spilled his guts to the world.

On his return to New York with eight char-fattened Rangeley brook trout, which together weighed 52 pounds, Page made a big show of presenting the three largest to editors of The Evening Post, The New York Times and The Spirit of the Times, all of which ran effusions about the fish bonanza to the north.

But that kind of fishing wasn’t good enough for Maine. In an effort to improve on nature, the state stocked smelt, which chowed down on the fry of the native brook trout and Arctic char and then competed with the surviving char for zooplankton and other small invertebrates. Introductions of landlocked salmon hastened the char’s decline.

The large, piscivorous char of Lake Sunapee (known as goldens or white trout) suffered a similar demise at the hands of unsatisfied meddlers. Dr. John Quackenbos, a distinguished 19th Century angler and writer, held that “white trout” were twice as sporting as brook trout and judged the ultimate angling experience to be trolling for them “from a sailboat with a greenheart tarpon rod, 300 feet of copper wire of the smallest caliber on a heavy tarpon reel, and attached to this a 6-foot braided leader with a Buell’s spinner, or a live minnow on a stiff gang.”  In 1885 his friend Col. Elliott Hodge, the state fish and game commissioner, wrote him about seeing “hundreds of which will weigh from 3 to 8 pounds each” hovering over the spawning reef at the entrance of Sunapee Harbor.

In an effort to improve on nature, the New Hampshire Fish Commission stocked landlocked salmon in 1867, smallmouth bass in 1868, smelt in 1870, whitefish in 1871, walleyes in 1876, Arctic char from the Rangeleys in 1878 (some of the fish caught by Quackenbos and observed by Hodge were probably these), round whitefish in 1881, brown and rainbow trout in 1888, Chinook salmon in 1904, Montana grayling in 1906 and coho salmon in 1909. It’s not known when lake trout were introduced to Sunapee, but they began showing up in the 1930s and promptly converted the remaining char to mongrels.

Fast forward to the late 1980s when, incredibly, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife still allowed angling with live smelt and other baitfish in Arctic char water. Big Reed Pond—never stocked, embraced by one of the last old-growth forests in the East and whose watershed is almost entirely protected by The Nature Conservancy—had provided superb native brook trout and Arctic char angling. The nearest road is a mile away. At least three times a week, Gary Corson—then a fishing guide, now representing the Kennebec Valley Chapter of Trout Unlimited and serving on SAM’s Fishing Initiative Committee—would fly his clients into Big Reed.

“We’d get the occasional two- or three-pound brookie; and the shoreline was full of smaller fish,” he says. “And we’d catch char on Woolly Buggers and deep-trolled streamers.”

In the spring of 1991, Corson got a nasty shock when he discovered smelt in Big Reed. Someone had stocked them, presumably in an effort to improve on nature or perhaps just by releasing unused bait. “The thing I learned,” Corson says, “is how fast a fishery can change. From what I’d call a class A fishery it went to a class E or worse in just a few years.”