Fishing is big at my camp.

Not big in the sense of fish that are brought in. But big in the sense that it is my ongoing obsession to catch some decent fish.

The cabin is on the Sandy River, a 69-mile-long tributary in Franklin County. (It eventually flows into the Kennebec).

Our land includes about 300 feet of shoreline.

In the early days, we would fish from the bank and wouldn’t catch anything.

In the past couple years, we’ve pulled in sunfish, yellow perch and a white, tasteless fish that looks like a sucker.

No trout.

And for me, a diminishing amount of fun.

Your Scribe has finally figured out the problem: the water in which we are fishing is not a likely place for brook or brown trout.

It is deep (over 10 feet), and slow moving.

However, there is shallow, fast-moving water about 400 yards downstream.

I haven’t ignored it. Last summer I paddled with my son, Drew, to that area.

But we both leaned over the canoe at the same time, and you know the rest – we went into the water.

So this spring I will head for the fast water, cautiously, and hope to get some trout.

If news reports are to be believed, there are many trout somewhere in the Sandy.

Each year state biologists report stocking the river with between 4,000 and 6,000 young trout.

These fish have got to be somewhere, and this spring Your Scribe is heading toward the fast water to pull in lunkers.

I use night crawlers, and sometimes small plugs.

I have not graduated to flies.

If I start catching real fish, I might switch to the tougher sport of fly-fishing.

But I haven’t reached that point yet.

I have yet to catch as much as one trout in the Sandy.

Until that happens, the weapon of choice will continue to be a spinning rod with a dozen fat worms as inducement.

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