Maine Outdoor Journal

I am reminded of Roderick Haig-Brown’s angling classic, To Know a River. When I was a boy I knew one river pretty well. The Alder Stream was not exactly a river, but it was then a pretty trout stream, especially in early June when the water, and the nights, were still cold. The trout were small -- the biggest I ever caught there was a measured twelve inches -- but I was young and the Alder Stream was where I learned to flyfish and I had not yet learned about big trout, so every feisty little brookie was a gift of nature. During the days the Old Man and the Bro and I fished that stream, I covered a lot of it in my blue-jean “waders” and old sneakers and became intimate with its pools, riffles and runs. I knew where to land a dry fly to get an almost-guaranteed take, and each day -- sometimes twice a day, truth be told -- I would come back to camp with my limit, which would be either that day’s supper or next day’s breakfast. Today I fish in places where big trout have stolen little fish like the Alder Stream trout right off my line. But I feel that I don’t really know a river anymore, and that feeling was heightened on the Magalloway a few days back.

The Magalloway, from where it comes frothing out of the tall dam holding back Aziscohos Lake, is a rip-roaring, writhing whitewater snake for a couple of miles until it flattens out and calms down after passing under the Route 16 bridge in Wilson’s Mills. The river is all plunge pools and pockets, with a few classic deep pools, notably Mailbox Pool (so called because Bennett’s mailbox is planted at the trailhead beside the road) which has been known to produce big brookies and landlocked salmon. Here I must confess that neither Mailbox nor any Magalloway pool has given up a big fish to me. Yet I keep trying, spurred on by the tales of other anglers, some of whom I know and whose stories I mostly believe. The other morning I parked by the hydro station, where the whiteboard noted the flow that day at 350 cfs, a very fishable level, making wading possible in many areas of the river, and walked the trail downriver. I stopped and fished every good-looking pool, run, and reachable pocket, and as usual got skunked. Now, I am an angler of amateur standing, to be certain, but I have caught a good many trout over the years including my share of what are considered in Maine to be big fish. So to go fishless on the Magalloway, reputedly one of western Maine’s best trout rivers, is a deep wound to what’s left of my pride. I left the river and went back to camp and sulked.

But about 4 o’clock a knock came on the door and there stood my pal Doug and his black dog Chester. “I’m going to the Magalloway,” Doug said. “Wanna come?”

If there’s anyone you’d want to fish the Magalloway with, it’s Doug Mawhinney, master fly tyer and angler of consummate skills. I was in desperate need of a lesson, so I grabbed my still-wet waders and boots and the rest of the kit and kaboodle and off we went, parking this time at the mailbox. Doug cuts to the chase. The sky was thick with thunderstorms, and lightning flashed here and there followed by booms of thunder, but that was not a deterrent. After all, the place to be during a lightning storm is hip-deep in water while waving a graphite antenna, right?

There were two anglers in Mailbox Pool so we headed downriver a bit to a place where a broad riffle divided around a small island and spilled into two distinct runs and pools below. I had been there in the morning and had come up empty. Doug pointed twenty yards downstream to an innocent-looking little patch of water that I had passed up. “Got a four-and-a-half pound salmon there the other day,” he said. I believed him because Doug actually weighs his fish before releasing them. “Took me a hundred yards downstream. I had to cross the river, which I wasn’t too sure I could manage because of the current, but I made it. Landed him way down there.” He indicated a distant stretch of relatively quiet water downriver.

“Okay, then. Show me how,” I said.

Doug positioned me between the two riffles, suggested a fly and a method. Then he went upstream a few yards to fish above me in water I would not have looked at twice. I fished the riffles, starting in close and lengthening my casts. Then I hooked a trout. It was not a Magalloway monster -- more like the little brookies I used to catch long ago on the Alder Stream -- but as I hauled him in to release him, a very big salmon swirled right up to my legs, drawn by the struggles of the trout and hoping for an easy meal. Why didn’t the big salmon, rather than the small trout, take my fly? I switched to a streamer, but the result was the same -- another small fish, another flash and swirl of a big fish checking out the action.

Between casts I watched Doug fishing upstream. There lay the lesson, or lessons: he was fishing very patiently in small holes and shallow riffles I would have waded right past, or through. And he didn’t give up on a piece of water after a cast or two. He worked every likely spot carefully and repeatedly because he knew that fish didn’t always see a fly, or decide to take it, on the first drift. He fished a small dry with a nymph dropper. He fished a woolly bugger. He didn’t give up on a spot until he was convinced it was either unoccupied or, if a fish was there, it was not interested.

We endured a fire-hose downpour, and with more thunderstorms heading our way I left Doug on the river by himself. I hadn’t caught a decent-sized fish, but I was taking from the river something more important: a lesson in how to fish, from an angler who does know a river.