For the first time in my flyfishing life, I have purchased something from Cabela's. L.L. Bean had better watch out.

I needed a flyrod rack, something to hold my various rods, in their tubes. The old lean-'em-in-the-corner method of rod storage looked a bit sloppy and disorganized. Time to spruce up my image, make the place look a bit less like a bachelor flyfisherman's pad. I don't know why my office at home should be any neater than my professorial office at the university, but it was just one of those urges for yet another piece of fishing equipment -- or in this case, non-fishing but fishing-related equipment.

Each week of this past semester as I have driven north on the Maine Turnpike on my weekly peregrination from classroom to home I have cast glances at the humongous new Cabela's store taking shape in Scarborough. In the past I have thought of Cabela's as a southern basser's store, a place to buy another jar of DayGlo orange pork rinds or a Hula Popper. Then I received Cabela's flyfishing catalog in the mail.

Not only did the Cabela's catalog outweigh the L.L. Bean Spring Fishing catalog by nearly a hundred pages, they have a wider range of options on rods, reels and other gear. And they had something L.L. Bean did not offer in their catalog or in their store: a flyrod rack. Just what I'd been looking for! I went to the Cabela's website, where the rack was even cheaper than in the catalog, and bought one. It arrived within a few days. I unpacked it, assembled it using only a Phillips-head screwdriver, and it now stands in a corner of my office where all of the rods that used to lean in various corners are now standing in neat ranks in the rod holder.

Needless to say I am not a shill for Cabela's and I have been a faithful customer of Bean's for forty years; I still feel like I'm sneaking off to the No-Tell Motel with a floozy when I buy cut-rate flies online. But as I said, L.L. Bean had better keep its corporate head up. The Scarborough Cabela's opens in May.

The weather hasn't warmed up quite enough for a trip to the river yet, and the pond is still covered with ice. My boss, Louie, and I were reminiscing about the Opening Days of our youth when we would crash through the crust of the remnant snowbanks to reach open water and dangle a fly or a worm into the frigid waters in anticipation of the first trout of the season. Often, in those years, my first serious fishing would not occur until school was out and the Old Man and the Bro and I would head north to the Alder Stream to spend a few days in Norman Field's little camp. In the still-frosty June mornings we headed through the woods to the stream, which in those days abounded with little brookies. I fished alone, usually, while the Bro and the Old Man would fish together. We would come back to camp in the late afternoon with bulging creels, having each taken our ten-fish limits. On the little gas range, the Old Man would fry some bacon, and then in the hot bacon fat he would fry the trout, rolled in corn meal, and we would gorge on the crisp, unforgettably delicious little fish.

It was not until I caught the 20-inch brook trout that David Footer mounted and which now beautifies my home office that I stopped killing trout. In the past couple of seasons at the Dam it has pained me to see anglers catch big brookies and kill them -- though of course, given my personal history, I couldn't fault the anglers. This season's Open Water Fishing Regulations thus bear good tidings for me: all brook trout caught in the Dam pool must be released alive at once. As compensation, it would appear, the size limit on landlocked salmon has been lowered from 18 to 16 inches, with a bag limit of one per day.

One other change in the regulations cheered me: from the New Hampshire border to the Gilead bridge, fishing in the Androscoggin is catch-and-release, artificial lures only. Of course, an artificial lure may have as many as six hooks, which can do a lot of damage to a fish and can render the catch-and-release regulation less meaningful. I think artificial lures in such waters should be limited to a single hook.

As I write, it's Opening Day on real grass: Fenway Park, where the World Series Champion Red Sox played their home opener against the Detroit Tigers. What happier conjunction of events exists, than Opening Days on Maine waters and at Fenway Park? Springtime is here, and we rejoice.