Maine: Summer New England Coastal Tour

I've fished a place or two on the East Coast. South Florida. New Jersey. Cape Cod. Been by few other that I didn't get to fish. The Chesapeake. Georgia. I had never been any place quite like the Maine shoreline. It was a pretty foreign environment for this anger. The mixture of excessively clear and deep water filled with yellow and green weeds, dark metamorphic rock ledges, pine trees, and even views that included both lighthouses, sailboats, and mountains... it was a lot to take in.

We found access to be less than common. Good launches far between. But we got to fish basically all the water we wanted. What I wasn't prepared for was how minimal the biomass seemed overall. There were large areas where there simply weren't fish. Small bait was, for the most part, as limited as I'd ever seen anywhere. Finding fish was a legitimate task. Not super difficult, but more so than I expected. The first takers we found on Saturday morning were residing on a point on the down tide side of a dock. They were bergals. The takes were numerous but my hookup percentage was downright lousy.

Bergals weren't the only fish in the neighborhood. There were menhaden and stripers, but the stripers were far too spread out to be much worth our effort. We continued north and east to Boothbay. 

There, we found a couple of upside down seals, immense bunker schools, and something we were actually looking for.

Atlantic mackerel. A feisty little fish, much like a snapper bluefish in behavior and the water the occupy, Atlantic mackerel are a baitfish of importance for striped bass in bluefish from the Cape well into Canada. To Noah and I both, the were another species on the list. This one topped me off at 79. I didn't realize at the time that I was so close to topping 80. Seeing as I am writing about this trip, I already know the answer to whether I would get to within 20 of triple digits, but I'll leave it up to you, dear reader, to guess if I did and what my 80th species or hybrid may be.

By late afternoon we had found ourselves in Rockland, fishing a long breakwater that would give use a good ol' fashioned skunking. There were other anglers there and we did see fish caught. The only angler we saw catch fish was using a float for mackerel. That was a method I had heard of but never seen used in saltwater.

Later, with the sun setting fast, I hunted for stripers on the bay while Noah took a nap. I found one that engaged with my fly but didn't eat. Later, after I got back to the dock, Noah got a fish that surprised both of us: a river herring. Which species it was is uncertain, but for him either way it would be a new species.

Surprising though that herring was, it was far from the most unusual thing this coastal tour would throw our way.