Here we are at last, teetering on the brink of fishing season, the time of year when the first hint of a soft warm breeze makes fools of us and sends us tramping through the mud and rotting snow to reach open water, as though we were lost in the desert and crawling toward the mirage of an oasis. It's been a long winter. We can tie only so many flies. We can inventory our gear only so many times. It's all there. It's ready. It's waiting.

Outside of Keeley's Banquet Center, in the parking lot, the license plates of the vehicles were a giveaway: FLYFSH2, TROUT, FLYCST, BOG NO5, MOXIE. Inside, members of the Sebago Chapter of Trout Unlimited hovered over tables holding a banquet of angling delights -- Winston, Orvis, Sage and Bean flyrods, Battenkill and Abel and SA reels, boxes of flies, a float trip on the Kennebec, framed works of angling art -- all of it to leave the hall that night with the winners of the bucket raffles, silent auctions and live auctions. Oh, yes, we ate and drank, too, but the real feast was on display on the auction tables. The venerable David Footer (Visit Dave's website) contributed several pieces of his highly-prized angling art to the auctions. Dave is all about catch-and-release now and would rather carve and paint your trophy than skin it and mount it. So too Gene Bahr (Visit Gene's website), who displayed several of his astonishingly beautiful trout and salmon carvings, exquisite in detail and vivid in color.

A century ago a magnificent eleven-pound Atlantic salmon left the famed Bangor Pool at the end of an angler's line, and the angler turned the fish over to Nash of Maine, as the Norway, Maine taxidermist billed himself and his patented mezzo process, in which he mounted the skin of the fish over a bas-relief wood carving. Several examples of Nash's work, now highly prized by collectors, are on display at L.L. Bean in Freeport. As the mezzo is not a full-bodied mount, and there are two sides to every fish, this process allowed Nash to make two mezzos from each fish, one heading right and the other going left. And just as there are two sides to every fish, there are often two sides to every fishing tale. Some time back, David Footer acquired the right-facing mezzo of the aforementioned eleven-pound salmon and applied his painstaking restoration talents to it, resulting in a like-new Nash of Maine mezzo. He kept searching for the other side of the fish, and when he finally located it he was tickled to see that the angler who labeled his eleven-pound fish might have exaggerated just a wee bit: the other half was identified as a ten-and-a-half-pound salmon.