Rewards for hardwork plenty

Wednesday, June 1, 2005

When I flip through the Maine Atlas and Gazetteer, my eyes drift to the places where black lines are single-dotted, not double, and where little spots of blue are lost in a sea of green.

Usually I require these places to be north of Map 38.

I'm looking for ponds -- remote ones. If I've never heard of a particular pond, so much the better.

If I have, I start researching -- and asking questions. Stocked? (Preferably not.) Strict regulations? (Yes!) Accessible by motor vehicle? (Forget it.) Is the hike steep, and treacherous -- or perhaps swampy, poorly marked or dangerous? (Yes, please.)

If, after careful inspection, the answer to any of those questions doesn't suit me, I strike it off the list.

What's remains is the last of Maine's most remote, wild brook trout ponds.

A close friend describes this affliction with two simple words: "hassle-factor." If the hassle is high: i.e. the hike long, the path obscure, the black flies thick and the outcome uncertain, I'll do it.

Otherwise, you can usually count me out. No one has ever accused me of being the brightest person in the world, he likes to add.

So it was that last week, in the midst of one of our state's longest-ever stretches of rain and cold, I found myself flipping through the Atlas, looking for one of those places.

It didn't take me long to find it.

Last year, I'd heard of this pond -- herin known as Secret Pond -- from a close friend, and brook trout and woodcock cover confidant: Jeff Miller, who develops fly rods and fishing waders for L.L.Bean.

The directions he gave me to Secret Pond were as follows, with place names changed to protect the innocent brook trout that live there:

"Drive 3 hours north from your home in Bowdoinham. Take a left onto the Lost Pond road. Follow it to the intersection near the Big Pond Campgrounds. Bear right. Look for an old tote road, mostly grown in with alders, eight-tenths of a mile past Clear Pond. Hike two miles down that road, until it dead ends. It's not marked, so be careful to stay straight. Where it dead ends, bushwack through the woods until you hit the trail to the pond. It's a little more than one mile from there."

At home, I did the calculations. Total travel time from our place on Merrymeeting Bay to the shore of the pond would be about five hours, one-way.

To do it, I'd have to find someone willing, able and as blindly obsessed as I.

My friend Matt Boutet fit the bill.

Together, we've hiked twenty miles in a single day, to return dehydrated, feet blistered and skin bloody with black fly bites -- all in a futile attempt to find trout water.

We've been lost, skunked on a regular basis, stranded at sea and had more flat tires than either of us would ever care to count.

Along the way, though, we've caught a few nice trout.

We'd originally planned to camp on the pond's shore, fish the evening, then awake and fish most of the morning before the long trek home.

As is often the case, it didn't work out that way. We would have one day -- Memorial Day -- to get in, fish, then get out.

The hike in to the pond was just as we'd expected: long, wet and cold.

The trail, only recently snow-free, was soft, wet and matted with faded beech leaves, balsam sprigs and birch bark. Fog hung on distant hills. Rain clouds darkened and drizzled above.

Along the hardwood ridges, leaves were still wrapped in tight red buds.

We'd left my house at 2 a.m. By 6:45 that morning, we were standing on the shore of one of Maine's most isolated -- and beautiful trout ponds.

Secret, you see, has never been stocked. With the legislation that protects Maine's native brook trout fisheries, it will take an act of the legislature to change that.

Secret is the type of pond I dream about in the winter. On cold winter days by the woodstove, I think about that last stretch of trail that every pond fishermen knows so well, when, through the trees, you catch your first glimpse of beautiful, sparkling trout water ringed by pines and cedar and riffled only by gentle breezes and rising trout.

It's part relief and part exhaustion, but mostly, it's a feeling of exhilaration from being connected to a place so wild, where a native fish like the brook trout can still swim -- free to spawn and live out a natural existence with little interruption by man.

When we arrived, Secret lay quiet, just as she's been for centuries. Only the whistling wings of a pair of goldeneye ducks, and the musical calls of white-crowned sparrows back and forth broke the peaceful morning silence.

We fished from float tubes with fly rods, stripping olive and black woolly buggers through the depths.

Within fifteen minutes, I'd hooked my first wild brook trout of the season. I felt her head bob and shake and my rod tip nodded in acknowledgement. The wet fly line slipped through my fingers, swishing through the tip as she ran along the pond's weedy bottom.

My rod doubled and then the fish was on the surface, thrashing. She was a big trout, nearly too big for the modest net I'd brought in from the trailhead.

I quickly released her, and watched as she kicked her tail and disappeared into the ice cold water below.

I wanted to yell to Matt, who I'd already lost in the fog, but didn't.

I knew he was catching them too.

Dave Sherwood 621-5648

dsherwood@centralmaine.com