The Roach River is one of those short and very sweet rivers, like the Rapid, that pack a lot of great angling into a very few miles of water. I love fishing the Roach, when I can find a spot where my elbows don't get bruised by knocking into the elbows of other anglers. I have some vivid memories of fishing the Roach, among them the time when a salmon darted right between the Bro's wader-clad legs to attack the fly I was retrieving. Another memory is of an angler from Bangor who picked my pocket, so to speak. He had been working his way downstream, and he asked if he could fish through the pool I was working. I appreciated his courtesy and told him, Be my guest. Then he proceeded to hook and land a beautiful brookie in water I had just fished without a nibble.

But today's memory involves a different kettle of fish, and a shallow riffle just below the abovementioned pool. I was bouncing a nymph down the riffle when the line went taut. Raising the rod tip I felt a weight, a slight pull, and although there was some give to it, unlike if I had been fast to a rock, whatever was on the line didn't fight back. I figured I had snagged a weed or a piece of waterlogged deadwood. As I retrieved the line, I could see that there was indeed something on the line, shaped roughly like a miniature football. It was a freshwater clam. My nymph had drifted right into the clam's open maw, and the clam had chomped down on it and wasn't letting go. It took a bit of effort to pry it open and retrieve my fly.

I entertained the notion that I was perhaps the first angler to land a clam on a flyrod, and thought the incident would make for a funny letter to one of the flyfishing magazines, wherein I would suggest that I had opened up a whole new area of angling.

I never wrote the letter, but a couple of seasons later I was camped by the Beach Pool on the East Outlet and got to yakking with an angler who had pitched his tent on the bluff above the pool. He said he had just come down from the Roach, where he had enjoyed some good salmon fishing. I told him how, on the Roach, I had landed a clam on a gold-ribbed hare's ear nymph, expecting him to be both amused and amazed.

"Oh, that happens to me all the time," he said dismissively.