This part of Maine feels timeless, as if it’s looked, smelled and fished exactly like this forever, and plans to continue doing so until the planet finally spins off its axis.
West Grand Lake, Maine
That’s a stark contrast to my neck of the world, where everything looks raw and new, and — geologically speaking — actually is.
West Grand Lake’s water level doesn’t vary more than a foot or so over the course of the year, and granite rocks that ring the lake offer a sense of absolute permanence.
Fueling that perception are the cabins in the camp; most of the half-dozen buildings feature roots going back at least half a century and they’re decorated with the kind of “rustic kitch” you simply can’t fake (pictures cut from 1950s outdoor magazines, deer-antler coat hooks, etc).
There’s even the pennant flag from a steam-powered boat that plied the area’s lakes way back when steam-powered boats were considered high tech.
In one building I found a B&W photograph of the L&T’s remarkable mother sitting in a Grand Laker canoe and reading a magazine — somewhere around the age of eight.
The world has changed around the camp and the place is hardly frozen in time (they’ve now got running water, electricity and even wi-fi), but the atmosphere runs at a rural, turn-of-the-century pace, which can find you sitting on a rock-strewn shore, napping and tossing pebbles into the water without noticing a couple hours have passed.
Exactly the kind of thing, it seems, that could go on forever.
West Grand swimming hole...
The Fishing Report
I already related my first-cast heroics in another post, but did manage to get two full days in on the water.
This is the trip where — hearing the stream was dead — I didn’t bother with the fly fishing gear, so naturally, there were fish rising in the evenings, and few fishermen around to hound the fish.
It’s too bad (or par for the course when you rely on the Internet to shape your reality), but only a wretched ass would have regrets about catching smallies with lightweight spinning and casting gear.
My first day on the water was with Registered Maine Guide Steve Schaefer (note the caps). We fished Big Lake, and while we got hammered by one rain squall after another (Steve’s canoe-borne rain gage showed 1.5″ of rain for the day), the fishing was steady.
One of several squalls that hit us like the water was being dumped from a bucket
At times the rain hit us like sheets, as if there simply wasn’t room between the raindrops, so the whole mess fell at once.
Want to test rain gear? I’ve got the place.
Grand Laker Canoe (they fill up fast)
Two fish in the 16″-17″ range came to the boat, and because Big Lake is weedy and shallow and rich, a steady stream of 12″-14″ smallies ate my plastic jerkbait and drop shot rig, and because we’re talking about smallmouth, I was never really sure how big the fish were until they were in the net.
One of the rare sunny moments -- so we went for a shore lunch.
Catch a smallmouth and he’ll run you around the canoe a half-dozen times, and unlike trout or largemouth bass — which kind of give up after a while and flop over on their side — smallmouth bass fight to the net, and then glare at you out of those demonic red eyes, as if to say “I’ll see you in hell.”
Day Two (or, Really?!)
Day Two dawned clear, and the morning’s fishing on West Grand Lake was tough; one here, one there — even getting enough for a shore lunch was a challenge.
You can almost taste it (I actually did)
After The Big Shore Lunch (something created by guides to make clients sleepy and compliant so they go home earlier), Steve Schaefer and I pulled up on an island that looked like all the other islands, and Steve said “I’ve always wanted to try this, but never have.”
- First cast = 14″ smallmouth
- Second cast = 13″ smallmouth
- Third cast = 14″ smallmouth
- (repeat for the next twenty minutes)
It was — literally — a fish every cast.
After 20 minutes we started to feel guilty and slowly moved around to the other side of this tiny island (we’d been anchored), and the action slowed immediately to a fish… every third or fourth cast.
As near as we could figure, a school of smelt had been backed up against a steep dropoff bordered by two cabin-sized boulders, and every smallmouth bass within cellphone range (who knew?) had hurried over for lunch.
By the time we’d circled the tiny island, we were back in the fish-every-cast routine, and I was out of (apparently) smelt-colored baits.
I even told Steve that nobody at camp was going to believe what sounded a hell of a lot like a fish story. They were, I said, all going to say ‘Really??’ with that disbelieving roll of their eyes.
You don’t try to top a performance like that, so with the sun still bright, we headed back to camp.
Where, it turns out… everyone said “Really??” — even the L&T.
Et, Tu, L&T?
Fishermen are portrayed as a shifty lot; we lie to other fishermen about the number of fish we catch (we say we caught more if we caught fewer, and less if we caught a lot), the places we fish, and the kind of day we had (“It was just great to be out there“), but when we stumble onto the kind of fishing that most people don’t believe actually exists — a fish every cast — then we pay the price for all the prevarication.
The Wrapup
It’s hard to summarize an experience like Maine; the cloudscapes and landscapes differ so much from this part of the world that my mind gets stuck in reset mode; the experience isn’t quite alien, but it’s different.
I fished a pair of days from a Grand Laker canoe that turned out to be the last built by Pop Moore, and if you’re into Grand Lakers, that name drops very loudly indeed.
The sum total of the experience outweighs the hassles getting from the middle of nowhere to the middle of nowhere, though that may not be true in coming years.
See you back in the mountains, Tom Chandler.
And so, as sun sets slowly in the west...
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