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.

While we've been warning about the proposed folly of rebuilding the Scribner's Mill dam on the Crooked River, the Penobscot River Restoration Project (Go to the Project's website) has reached a milestone in its efforts to remove the Veazie Dam and the Great Works Dam and to decommission the Howland Dam many miles upstream and build a fish passageway around it. The Project, which involves the combined efforts of conservation groups, the Penobscot Indian Nation and various state and federal agencies, has succeeded in raising $25 million from a very wide pool of sources including governmental and private donors to purchase the dams from PPL Maine, the energy company. The feds kicked in $10 million in December, putting the fundraising effort over the top and setting the stage for the transfer of ownership. Additional funds are being raised from the same sources (and more, it is hoped) to perform the actual work of removing the two lower dams and bypassing the Howland Dam.

When completed, the project will return many miles of the Penobscot to the fish that once spawned there in great numbers, and go a long way toward bringing back the river that the ancestors of today's Penobscot Indian Nation knew. Perhaps the freeing of the river will at least partially restore the great spawning runs of the Atlantic salmon, striped bass, American shad and other anadromous species that called the river home for millennia until we humans took it over for short-term commercial gain.

The list of the project's supporters is long, and includes many conservation groups, sporting camps, outfitters, Trout Unlimited, the Penobscot Salmon Club and scores of other groups, associations, businesses and individuals who yearn for the sight of a free-running river and free-swimming populations of fish. Orvis promotes the project in its catalogs and website (Go to the Orvis website) promises to triple an individual's contribution with matching funds from Orvis and the National Fish and Wildlife Federation.

I know the economy is in the tank and gas prices are high and the specter of recession is threatening to rear its head. But the mighty Penobscot has been in not just a recession but a deep depression for a couple hundred years, and brother, if you can spare a dime (or a hundred bucks or a million) you might wish to toss it at the Penobscot River Restoration Project.

We all know about the Grinch who stole Christmas, but, let's face it. Christmas comes but once a year (to coin a phrase) but the New Year is with us 24/7, 365. Sorry: 366. This is a Leap Year. And the Grinch may be poised to steal the whole dang thing. I speak, of course, of rock snot.

Rock snot is an alga of almost unspeakable loathsomeness. Didymosphenia geminata, or "didymo" for short, is a single-cell life form that reproduces with abandon, carpeting the beds of freestone streams with a thick, mucusy yellowish blanket of gooey, slimy -- snot. It chokes off all insect life, thus eliminating whatever fishery existed before.

Didymo may have originated in Vancouver. But the bizarre thing is, it was not an invasive species that was unwittingly introduced by some blundering angler. It had been there all along, apparently, but at this moment in history it chose to mutate and proliferate. The result has been catastrophic, and the catastrophe has spread. Rock snot has invaded New Zealand streams, probably on the wading shoes of a globetrotting angler. And it has also arrived in New England, fouling stretches of the Connecticut River.

If we anglers make one New Year's resolution, it should be to decontaminate our wading shoes after every outing, to prevent the spread of this menace to our prized trout streams. A bleach solution seems to do the job. Perhaps at places with somewhat controlled access, such as Upper Dam, visiting anglers could be required to dip their wading boots in a bleach solution before being allowed access to the pool.

Rock snot blooms have no natural enemy. Once in a stream, it takes over. There are reports that New Zealand scientists have found a way to kill the alga, but details are sketchy. Meanwhile, the only way to ensure additional happy new years seems to be prevention via voluntary decontamination. It's a little extra work, but the alternative is unacceptable. I have to note that anglers don't have a great track record in this area -- witness the knucklehead introduction of smallmouth bass into the Rapid River, and the spread of milfoil on boat hulls and props -- but let's resolve to keep rock snot out of trout streams. If we can do that, there will be many happy years of angling ahead.