Rangeley

Noah and I woke up on our finale morning in Deboullie exhausted, beaten up, hungry, and bug bitten. We packed up and headed back down the same dusty roads we came in on. I was a little sad to be leaving the most remote place I had ever been, but I was also excited to see what the next days would bring. 

We stopped in Portage for food, coffee, and cell service. Having been days without a shower or shave, covered in grime and bug bites, we probably looked and smelled like feral humans. But we had to do what we had to do.... 

Morning necessities after coming out of the woods... coffee and Hook Shots

And apple fritters

We basically back tracked, leaving the way we came, until Bangor.

Katahdin

At Bangor, we made a hard turn west.

We were headed to Rangeley.

It had been a while since I'd been to the brook trout mecca of the Northeast. The last time I'd been here I'd broken my personal best wild brook trout twice, but those weren't big fish, really. What I wanted from Rangeley this time were some proper huge brook trout. Brook trout that weren't just big brook trout big big fish. Brook trout that you couldn't aptly call "brookies". This wasn't the ideal time of year, a lot of waters that I'd have liked to have fished had warmed up substantially, but I knew if we did the legwork we'd likely find what we were looking for.

After stopping in at Rangeley Region Sport Shop to get some intel, we spent the first afternoon touring around places I was already familiar with, just to get a handle on things early and decide what moves to make. I didn't expect to get much of size and didn't get much of size. We did, however, get a good idea of water levels and temperatures in a few places and found a place to camp. We also caught a metric crap load of 5-8 inch brook trout, some perch, some fallfish, and a couple small landlocked salmon.

A dry dropper provided most of the action on the larger water, producing a near equal amount of fish on both the dry and the nymph. When a dry dropper is producing like that it is worth keeping on in spite of worsened tangles and increased fly and tippet losses to trees. I was fully expecting to double at some point, and more than once I had a pair of fish hooked only to have one or both free themselves.

In the smaller water, all that was needed was a dry fly and fast feet. I covered a lot of water on one of my favorite Rangeley streams, hopping from boulder to boulder and plying the plunge pools. So many fish came to hand this day that I may well have been a little into the triple digits.

This dark specimen is definitely one of the most unique looking brookies I've ever seen.

 I caught so many small brook trout on the first day in Rangeley that I was pretty well ready to focus on big fish on the second day. We headed out early in the morning to fish a river I'd heard some good things about but had never been to. My friend Mike Andrews, in particular, had been talking it up for a while. I was excited, because I knew the big fish potential this river held, but I was also a bit intimidated. I had never fished a brook trout stream this large, and had also never fished any trout stream that was so high gradient, with serious whitewater all over.

 I had been told to nymph it... it just wasn't the kind of situation I excel at nymphing... put me on a riffle loaded, relatively shallow river with wild brown trout, or a small stream with deep buckets and plunge pools, and I'll pound fish tightline nymphing. But this river... I wasn't geared for it, I wasn't confident, and I didn't think it would work. I seriously regret the amount of time I spent trying to nymph that river because it just flat out wasn't working for me. I caught one brook trout on a nymph.

I started to see a rise hear and there though, and that coaxed me to fish a dry. I don't know why, but for some reason I thought the wild brook trout in this water would for some reason act differently from brook trout anywhere else. Mere casts after putting a Parmachenee Wulff on and I was proven wrong. These fish were still brook trout. They were still perfectly willing to come up and slam a skated dry fly. After a bit I changed to a Hornberg, hoping I'd get better hookups and could fish it subsurface as well as skated. That did the trick. Numerous fish exploded on that Hornburg and many more got pinned than on the Wulff. But I was still struggling to catch anything of personal best smashing caliber. 

Then, after making the daring wade out to reach over a wicked fast current tongue into the seem on the other side, just as the fly started to drag downstream I felt the line come tight. I set, and the deep bow in my line forced by the current tongue made the massive weight on the other end deceptive. But when the fish started marching upstream confidently, working against that bow, I knew this was the largest brook trout I'd ever set a hook into. I looked around me, wondering where I could possibly safely land this fish. Downstream from me on my side of the river was a calm, shallow bit of grassy bank. If I could get there that would be perfect. I slowly shuffled back, pulling against the massive char. I barely budged, despite being in the fasted part of the run. I shuffled back and down a little more and put on side pressure. Now the fish started to slide slowly out of the run and downstream. then, abruptly, it made a hard turn and charged off down river. No shuffling now, I had to get back in front of this best before it dumped into the next set of rapids. I booked it down and across, almost falling repeatedly and trying to make for the bank where I hoped to land the fish. I had almost made it there when the fish stopped in stalemate and just wouldn't yield me any ground. I could see it now, it was a proper monster, looking almost bronze as it flashed in the sunlight. Then, slack. I swore loudly. that was the one I had wanted. 

Feeling I had at least started to get a hang of things, I continued upstream, catching a bunch of fish but nothing really substantially. I did hook a number of foot long landlocked salmon which put up a hell of a tussle, including one that jumped right up onto a patch of grass just after I set the hook. But I didn't encounter another large brookie that morning.

We left there and spent the rest of the day tooling around, not really finding a good pattern. We caught fish and saw some really great places, but I was antsy. 

A fallfish mound.

I was eager to go back to that river the next morning, having come to believe, given the aggression of the fish that I had encountered, that I could probably get a giant to take a mouse in daylight.

Until next time.
Fish for the love of fish.
Fish for the love of places fish live.
Fish for you.



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