On my way into Rangeley Wednesday to pick up some hardware for my new camp shower, I stopped in to have a squint at Quimby Pond. This nice little trout pond, once off the beaten track and home to the late, lamented Quimby Pond Camps, an old-style Maine sporting camp, now is the beaten track. A suburban subdivision has mushroomed three quarters of the way around the pond. Despite that, it remains a nice trout pond, with abundant food and a healthy brook trout population, which winters over and grows fat.

Healthy except for the lice.

When I stopped by, the winds were calm and there was a good deal of slick black water to scan. This was around noon, on a fine day in May. Lo and behold, a rise! And another. Trout were cruising just under the surface picking off nymphs as the bugs were trying to emerge. No splashy takes, just quiet rise rings and now and again the glimpse of a dorsal fin. I continued on my errand, returned to camp and retrieved my fishing gear and headed back to Quimby.

By then, naturally, a breeze had come up, the pond's surface was rough and rippled, and no rises were to be seen. I toured the pond, alone on a weekday afternoon, dropping the hook here and there to practice my casting. At around five o'clock I heard the sounds of someone launching a tin boat, and watched as a gent slowly rowed (it's a no-motors pond, may their numbers increase!) along the shoreline and dropped anchor maybe fifty yards from shore. He commenced to cast and retrieve, in the manner of a nympher. He caught a fish, and a nice one. He whacked it and kept it. He caught another, and released it. Hmmm.

I anchored a discreet fifty yards from him, and began my own exploration of the waters with a Maple Syrup fly. Strike! Battle. Fish in the net. It was a hefty brookie, handsome save for the fact that he had a severe case of blackheads. A second trout was similarly afflicted.

I am told these black spots are a kind of lice. A couple of days later at another pond I mentioned these lice-infested trout to another angler, who told me he had recently read about the condition and learned that it is strictly cosmetic -- it doesn't look good, but it is not harmful to the trout or to a trout consumer, such as the gent in the tin boat who was obviously going to broil his catch for dinner.

Can anyone enlighten me further on this subject? The state fisheries website talks about sea lice, an apparently unrelated phenomenon.