Fishing trip planning perfect remedy for winter blues

Saturday, March 12, 2005

Official spring lies eight days away, but winter 2005 lingers with freezing rain, snowstorms and unseasonable cold, giving most of us a bad case of the shack-nasty blues.

A great cure for this malady begins with "DeLorme's The Maine Atlas and Gazetteer," a computer and a telephone. As wind soughs under the eaves, folks can peruse this book of maps. After finding new places, they can check nearby sporting camps on the internet and then call up a fishing buddy or sporting camps, or both, to set a date for the big trip when blue waters sparkle under clear skies.

Where to go is the perennial question in the Pine Tree State because we have literally thousands of destinations. We can fish a lifetime and not hit every one of them. In fact, "DeLorme's Maine Fishing Depth Maps Lakes and Ponds by County" includes about 960 still waters statewide, and that figure does not count thousands of rivers, streams and brooks. Also, DeLorme's depth-maps book leaves out uncharted ponds, which can be little honey holes.

For central Maine anglers, one hot spot that can be a day trip from Augusta or Waterville pops to mind -- Pierce Pond northwest of Bingham. Pierce must rank as one of the top five brook-trout destinations in the entire state, and stocked salmon add a bonus to the indigenous brookies. At Pierce, a 14- to 16-inch brook trout or a three-pound salmon will not draw gawkers.

I have not been to Pierce for three years and plan to renew my love affair with it this spring. If you have never been there, make the trip this year.

Two sporting camps by the pond insure crowds, but Pierce covers 1,650 acres with coves galore, where an angler can feel alone. The bottom basin gets most of the traffic, but Upper Pierce may offer solitude on weekdays.

A few years ago, Jon Lund, of Augusta, and I stayed at Harrison's Pierce Pond Camps on the outlet stream, and it was one of the most beautiful places I have stayed in Maine. Rustic log cabins dotted the hillside beneath towering, ancient conifers, and the stream below has calendar-photo scenes everywhere.

The highlight of the trip was dining with Ted Williams, the award-winning environmental writer. Williams is one of my heroes, so eating each meal with the man would be the same as a rabid baseball fan spending time with the other Ted Williams, before he passed away.

Williams likes to fish small ponds for wild trout, so he and his companion had a grand time every day, fishing small trout ponds that dot the hills around Pierce. You could spend a spring, summer and fall there and never learn all these small, classic trout ponds, a great array of waters for planning trips after ice-out.

DeLorme's book of maps really helps to negotiate the network of roads between Bingham and Otter Cove, where a hand-carry boat launch offers access to Pierce Pond. The gravel tote road to the cove has one deep water hole with a hard bottom, but it makes for tough sledding in a low car.

Another approach has better roads and a trailer-able boat launch. Starting in North New Portland (Map 30, E-2), the Long Falls Dam Road goes north to a gravel road on the right (right on Map 30, coordinate B) that leads to Lindsay Cove on Pierce. Travelers must pay a nominal fee to use the road.

Another great destination lies in a rather, remote section of Maine -- Munsungan Lake on Map 56, C-4 directly north of Baxter State Park. All the tiny brook-trout ponds around this water will make anglers drool with anticipation. In fact, this area was attractive enough to generate coverage by PBS television (Made in Maine).

Munsungan itself lies at the foot of steep, wooded hills, one of the most gorgeous spots that I have fished in Maine. One cherished memory was fishing on a flat-calm, cloudy evening in the cove, where the inlet from Chase Pond runs into the lake. Such a remote-looking spot.

Blue-ribbon trout ponds such as the Currier ponds lie northwest of the inlet, perfect float-tube spots, and Big and Little Reed ponds to the south are worth investigating. A quick call to any DIF&W fisheries biologist at the Region G office in Ashland (207-435-3231) can give you an idea of what to expect in any of these ponds.

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In this era of catch-and-release fishing, lots of well-meaning anglers have little clue as to how much fish weigh. That thought was driven home this past week while dealing with a fellow who claimed that last summer, 18-inch landlocked salmon in a particular lake weighed four pounds.

A quick call to David Boucher, a fisheries biologist with the Region D office in Strong, put that claim to rest. Boucher, the landlocked-salmon expert for the department, said that last summer, the average 18-inch salmon in this water weighed 2.4-pounds -- nearly half the weight of the claim. An average landlock must measure 22 inches before hitting the 4-pound range, and the same is basically true for brown trout.

Even an 18-inch brookie, a fish with a chunky profile, would not weigh four pounds. On First Currier Pond near Munsungan Lake, I remember a morning with Bob Cram, of Medway, when I caught three, ultra-fat brookies, running from 18 to 18 1/4 inches. These football-shaped beauties tipped the scales at three pounds and a little over.

To reach Ken Allen

E-mail: kallyn800@aol.com