It was a place I had dreamed about, thought about, and always wanted to fish -- the fabled Miramichi in New Brunswick. This was the Atlantic salmon river, the river where my boyhood baseball idol Ted Williams fished. Holy water! Sure, it was right next to Maine, a mere eight-hour drive away, but somehow the opportunity had eluded me. Finally, along about mid-March, after attending the L.L. Bean Fishing Expo and meeting a gorgeous Alabama girl named Katherine Hughes, manager of Westervelt's Black Rapids Lodge, I thought, What am I waiting for? I booked three days of fishing for myself and the Bro, and on May 11 we headed north.

The long-range forecast was neither promising nor accurate. Expecting rain, we instead got four days of sunshine, although with morning frosts and an east wind that kept us hunkered down under layers of sweaters and jackets. The spring salmon were in the river and each morning we set off with our guides in little homemade skiffs powered by 10-12 horsepower outboards. The scooped bow and flat bottom of the skiff lets it skim rapidly over the river while drawing almost no water. Now, in mid-May, the water was high enough that the Miramichi was a broad band of rushing water, from shore to shore unbroken by the rocks and rapids which will appear later when the water drops to summer levels.

My guide, Allison, a good-natured Blackville fellow with decades of guiding behind him, started every morning with a chaw of Red Man, to which he would add a pinch now and then, and directed frequent streams of brown tobacco juice into the river as we trolled. Alison punctuated every sentence with the Canadian period, eh. Rough as a corncob but ever-ready to laugh, Alison liked to talk to the fish as we trolled. "Here, boy. Come on, fish."

In May the river is full of smelts. In a vain effort to avoid detection by the ravenous spring salmon they hug the shore, forming a solid black band, smelts so thick you can literally scoop them out of the water by hand. We saw a woman wading up to her knees raking smelts onto the bank. With that feast available, the salmon are often too gorged to even look at a streamer fly or too focused on the real thing to be fooled by one.

In spring, the Miramichi angler uses big flies, #2 hooks, in patterns that range from the classic Black Ghost to a gaudy pattern called the Christmas Tree ("I think I need more lights on mine," the Bro's guide said after a fishless stretch). The streamers are trolled exceedingly slowly, which puzzled me until I saw the band of smelts hugging the shore: they hung there in the current barely moving. In my home pool the landlocks like a fast-moving streamer, and now on the Miramichi I could hardly resist the urge to keep my fly moving, but I soon discovered that letting it hang in the current all but motionless was the more productive method.

The action was not fast, but even hooking an Atlantic salmon is thrill enough for a morning's angling, and we did hook, lose, and catch a number of them, my personal best in the final hour of the trip, sending me home happy.