At L.L. Bean's great new hunting and fishing store the other day I climbed the stairs to the fishing department and paused on the cozy mezzanine to watch a woodcarver at work on a scaup. We chatted about the habits of the duck, and about the beauty of his woodworking tools, but I kept glancing over his shoulder at the flatscreen monitor behind him, where an angler was landing a huge trout in the shallows of a spectacularly beautiful stream. Finally I wondered aloud where the guy was fishing. The carver glanced at the video and said it was New Zealand.

By this time a friend of the carver had joined us. When I said that New Zealand was very high on my wish-list of places to fish, the friend said, "Well, it's not high on my list." I was taken aback. What serious flycaster would not trade an offspring or two for the opportunity to fish New Zealand's famous trout waters, in their almost mystical Lord of the Rings setting? The fellow explained that the New Zealand rivers were sort of boring. The water is gin clear, you can see every fish you cast to, and it may take dozens of casts perfectly presented to get a fish to strike. What's more, the terrain is difficult and few rivers have streamside trails, so an angler has to bushwhack from pool to pool. I then remembered that I had heard the same thing from my friend Charlie Tryon, who has also fished there.

So where would this chap prefer to fish? "Kamchatka," he said decisively. The rivers of Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, he said, provide the last great died-and-gone-to-angler-heaven experience on the planet. He said he had been once, and was saving his nickels, dimes and dollars for a second trip, which he would arrange through the same outfitter, the Fly Shop in Redding, California.
FlyShop.com.

That encounter touched off another of my frequent bouts of winter daydreaming. I'm not financially sound enough to swan off to the Kamchatka Peninsula -- the trip runs about $7,500, I believe he said, and that doesn't include the cost of getting there -- so instead I picked up Kevin Tracewski's fine book, A Fisherman's Guide to Maine, and began to plot a course for the coming summer's angling adventures a bit closer to home. Tracewski is a very credible source, as he he not only an angler but a biologist who has paid closer attention than most anglers to the habitats and habits of Maine's gamefish. With his book as a guide I began tracing my imagined route in the pages of DeLorme's Atlas. A perennial New Year's resolution of mine is to fish new water during the upcoming season, and thanks to Tracewski and DeLorme I have not only a dream, but a plan.