Maine Outdoor Journal

It is more like whale-watching than fishing. Keep your eyes on the water and every so often the rippling river surface erupts and a large animal bursts into the air, its gravity-defying hang-time rivaling Michael Jordan’s, then crashes back into its element with a booming splash: the extravagant acrobatics of the Atlantic salmon, performed for no reason known to humans, momentarily stopping the hearts of the anglers pursuing it. We in our waders, waving our 9-foot fly rods in endless supplication to the river gods, infer meaning. Here I am, the fish says, and there you are, and that is as intimate as we will be today.

The Margaree River in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia is a thing of beauty, a wild river tumbling through forested hills, snaking through tranquil farmland and pouring its cold sweet water through the narrow gap between the manmade breakwaters of little Margaree Harbor into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The salmon once returned to the Margaree in countless number, tens of thousands of silvery submariners, fat from the bounty of the open sea, swollen with eggs or milt, flashing like lighting in the clear waters, surging upriver to their natal pools to produce a new generation of their species. But man was offended by all that wealth swimming free, and set gillnets on either side of the harbor mouth. Over the years of the 19th century and well into the 20th those nets killed nearly every returning fish; the wealth of nature was gutted, cooked and canned and sold at market to make a few men rich. Not until the Margaree salmon were virtually extinct did man turn his efforts to its protection, and looked for profit not in the death of the fish but in its life, as a quarry of freespending anglers who would come to the river from all over the world hoping to experience the thunder and lightning of this magnificent creature through the medium of a fishing line.

More to come.