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.

A fish's brain is pretty small, but it must be gigantic compared to the brain of the moron who put northern pike into Sebago Lake. The introduction of pike into the country's premier landlocked salmon lake (the species is named Salmo Sebago) was, of course, a criminal act, but it was also an act of towering, Everest-like stupidity. From the time the pike were discovered in Sebago five years ago, they have established a breeding population. This past week a Casco man hauled a 17-pound pike out of Sebago. In the fish's belly was a salmon.

Pike breed like rats, grow like weeds and eat just about anything, including young salmon. The presence of pike in the lake may signal the beginning of the end of Sebago as a salmon lake, and the beginning of the end of Sebago as a destination for anglers. The tourism industry based on Sebago's world-famed salmon will suffer, and a once-great Maine fishery will be reduced to a trash fishery. Sebago falling to the pike is like seeing a picture-postcard New England town taken over by violent gangs. Fisheries biologists say there's no way to get the pike out of the lake, now that they are well established. And more than likely, the crime of introducing pike to the lake was carried out by one or two people. Extremely stupid people. The exact same sort of people who put smallmouth bass into Umbagog Lake, threatening the premier wild brook trout fishery in the lower 48 states, the Rapid River.

The good news is that the Maine Supreme Court overturned a lower court decision and ruled that yes, the state can indeed ban the foul "personal watercraft" from certain Maine lakes, including Lake St. George in Liberty. The voters of Liberty followed the lead of dozens of Maine towns that have banned the obnoxious machines, and the state legislature followed up by making the bans state law.

In July of 2005 a Camden man decided to test the ban, flouting the law and riding his PWC on the lake. He was ticketed, and he fought the ticket. He won at the superior court level, but the Supreme Judicial Court overturned the lower court and upheld the ban. Bravo!

The so-called personal watercraft are, along with ATVs and snowmobiles, one of the worst applications of useful technology in all recorded history, the useful technology being the internal combustion engine. In the interest of one individual having "fun" a hundred or a thousand other users of the lake suffer. When operated as intended, they are fast, noisy, and dangerous. That's correct: when operated as intended. They are built to be operated exactly in the manner that has caused so many places to ban them. Do you think anyone would buy a PWC in order to operate it slowly, quietly and safely? Not a chance. So, how much "fun" can we stand? Why should the majority suffer so that one fool on a PWC can destroy what they came to the lake to enjoy?

I know there have been some radical, extreme proposals for dealing with PWCs (and ATVs, and snowmobiles, which fall into the same general category) but I take what I believe is a more moderate approach. All such machines should be seized, by force if necessary, trucked to a remote place, such as the Nevada desert, and dumped into a very deep hole, there to be vaporized by a thermonuclear device. As I say, I think this is a moderate solution which just about everyone except a few extremists could agree to.

The Virginia countryside was glorious in the bright green shades of Spring , the May sun coming out of a clear blue sky pushed the morning temperatures up through the seventies, and the Rose River, still cold after its tumble out of the Blue Ridge Mountains, was full of fat rainbow trout waiting to be caught, some of them by young Joe Devan. But Joe, in the words of one observer at the 2nd Annual Two-Fly Tournament hosted by Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing, Inc., was "kinda glum."

Mind you, Joe's glumness did have some legitimacy, even if he had barely missed a one-way trip to one paradise in exchange for a day at this more earthly paradise on Doug Dear's Rose River Farm. Joe is a kid from Baltimore who learned the hard way about war and about a particular type of roadside bomb that the military, with its penchant for acronyms, calls an EFP, which stands for Explosively Formed Projectile. All you need to know about EFPs is that one took Joe's right leg off below the knee during his fifth month in Iraq with the 101st Airborne. The shrapnel from the blast also "sliced one ass cheek right in two," Joe said, which has made sitting very uncomfortable ever since he arrived at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in February to be sewed up and made as whole as possible again. Now Joe is nineteen years old and has a cute wife named Stephanie who is even younger and has a prosthesis where his right calf, ankle and foot used to be. He's new to the prosthesis so he walks with crutches when he's not in his wheelchair.

So you might excuse Joe for a touch of glumness now and then, even standing there on the banks of the Rose River about to go flyfishing for the first time in his young life under the tutelage of Kiki, a bamboo rod of a woman who will be his volunteer guide today.

Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing, Inc., was created by a retired Navy captain named Ed Nicholson, who was also present, managing by walking around and occasionally speaking into a walkie-talkie or a TV station's camera. Ed was like a comet, trailed by a tail of people wanting to ask him something or tell him something or just say hello. A couple of years ago Ed had gone to Walter Reed for, as he says, "issues of my own," and saw for the first time all the young wounded warriors coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, and he thought, as a fly-fisherman will do, "These people need to go fishing." With support from Trout Unlimited and the Federation of Fly Fishers and virtually everyone else he asked, he started PHWFF, Inc. and began to take the wounded warriors on fishing trips. In 2007 the organization pulled off the First Annual Two-Fly Tournament, and it was such a hit that for this second annual event Doug Dear's streamside fields looked like the parking lot of a Wal-Mart. Two white tents, a big one for eating and socializing and a smaller one for a seven-piece bluegrass band, flapped in the May breeze. Men (and Women) in Waders clomped around, waving flyrods and discussing which two flies to use ("Lose 'em and you're done," they were warned) while in the streamside gazebo that served as tourney headquarters people like Sandy Pappaianni and Toni Duchi and Lloyd Williams handled the admin stuff, checking off rosters and assigning stream beats to the two-angler teams.

Joe Devan was assigned the beat just above the bridge where Doug's road comes in from the state road. Joe and Kiki and Stephanie and Joe's chair and crutches were driven upstream to the beat by a kid at the wheel of an ATV big enough to have a backseat.

"I'm thinking it would be okay to get this leg wet," Joe said, looking down at the stainless steel and carbon fiber device below his right knee. "It's a temporary leg anyway."

"No, Joe," Stephanie said. "It's not a water leg. Remember?"

"That's right," Joe agreed. "It's not a water leg." No wading.

With the help of crutches and Stephanie, Joe made it down over a little embankment and onto a strand of freestones which would be his casting platform. Kiki coached him on where to cast, and Joe put lots of energy into it, false-casting four or five times then dropping his line across the current, which took his fly and strike indicator down to where the rainbows were holding. Kiki was full of positive reinforcement. "Good, Joe! Good one," she cried after nearly every cast, good or not. But there was a cloudless sky, and a bright sun high overhead, and the rainbows seemed happy to work on their tans, or maybe they were on diets, or, as one angler put it, had "temporary lockjaw." But finally one fish forgot not to strike, and Joe Devan had hooked his first trout on a fly.

When the air horn signaled the end of fishing, Joe and Kiki clambered up the bank and the ATV came back to pick them up. Stephanie had already walked back to the tent on her own, and Joe was anxious. "Where's my wife?" he wanted to know. When Joe and Kiki reached the tent, Joe saw Stephanie and brightened. Someone asked Joe, "How'd you do up there?"

Joe tried to nonchalant it, but he couldn't pull it off. "I landed a 15-inch trout!" he said, not without amazement. Joe Devan was not glum now. He sat down with Stephanie and told her what she'd missed: her husband catching a rainbow -- in more ways than one.