The weather was lousy, the fishing was slow, and perhaps because of that the dining room crowd at Grant's Camps GrantsCamps.com conducted a symphony of fish tales at every meal. When the present is unproductive, anglers mine the depths of the past for table talk. At every adjacent table, after all, sits a new audience which is prepared to hear your stories and go you one better.

"I hooked something, I didn't know what but it was very heavy and it came to the boat like a big clump of seaweed. No fight whatsoever. But when I got it alongside I saw it was a huge northern pike, over four feet long -- really! -- and mister, when that thing saw the net he took off like a torpedo and never stopped. Took out all my line and then broke off clean."

There were tales of big trout, of hook-straightening salmon, of travels to distant fishing grounds ("I spent several weeks in New Zealand..." "The brown trout in Argentina...") and of the all-time best flies (Hornberg, Black Ghost). But for all the chatter, the assembled fraternity -- plus one female angler -- discussed local successes only in vague and guarded terms -- "Yes, there are some big fish in here...if you know where to find them" -- the words accompanied by a thousand-yard stare out the big windows to the darkening waters. The "where" remained, however, an unidentified quadrant of the lake.

Day after day we fished, the whole dining-room full of us, in pouring rain, in wind that spit a fly line back into your face, out on the lake and in the almost-unwadeably high waters of the Kennebago River. Night after night we reassembled in the warmth of the pine-paneled dining room to be served by a trio of adorable Russian girls (Russians! In the Maine woods! You figure it out.) and after getting some hot soup and perhaps a strong drink into our bellies, relaxation set in and the stories would begin again.

Talking about fishing is nearly as much fun as fishing, and, on those June evenings on the shore of Kennebago, it was a lot warmer and drier.