Region A- Southwestern Maine

Warm, sunny weather with plenty of bugs, like we have been having since the beginning of the week, invariably reminds me of some of my earliest and thus most exciting fishing memories.

It was always great to see my grandfather get out the old seven-foot bamboo fly rod. It had just a few yards of line running through the eyes and was tied at the butt. Long past its fly-casting prime, this contraption became a deadly worming weapon in the hands of my grandfather. After digging some worms out of our garden, we would walk for what seemed a very long distance to the brook where my grandfather would catch his limit. He’d watch with amusement while I splashed in the shallows trying to beach the fat brookie that had fallen off my hook. And he would always catch fish in the places I had thought I had fished out or had bypassed altogether. These are the kind of memories that kids treasure all their lives, the kind of memories that make for lifetime anglers and the kind that may encourage a youngster to maybe even pursue a career in fisheries management.

As we progress through spring and approach early summer, some fish habits change, requiring us to change tactics accordingly. From all reports, the Sebago Lake smelt run is over. The smelt that were so highly concentrated in the tributaries and near the mouths of tributaries have dispersed once again. This just means fishermen will have to cover a slightly larger area to find salmon and they’ll need to pay a little more attention to their fish finder. One angler has already reported a catch of three salmon of more than three pounds each on Jordan Bay.

I was amused earlier today to hear the woes of a salmon angler who had spent one morning on Thompson Lake trying to get away from the togue for just long enough to present his smelt to a salmon. He never did see a salmon, but he did land 10 togue of average size. Not bad for Thompson Lake.

Stocking season is still in full swing and this year there are bonuses to be had. The hatcheries came up with some extra “un-scheduled” brook trout, several thousand of which have been stocked in Region A waters. Un-scheduled fish are those that are not part of an ongoing management program, but have been raised as a hedge against unforeseeable losses in the hatchery.

Check out the following waters for your shot at 8- to 10-inch un-scheduled brook trout: Halls Pond in Paris, Songo River in Naples, Little River in Gorham, and Otter Pond numbers 2 and 4 in Standish, among others.