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Belgrade's October Fishing Producing Fun Times

October 16, 2007 - October has produced superb angling weather so far, and I have taken advantage, mostly from shore in the Belgrade Lakes -- on Long Pond to be exact.

I've spent lots of time at Castle Island, a narrows between Long Pond's two basins. Browns and salmon have produced fun times in complete fishing solitude, and I have yet encountered another angler there.

In the last two years, salmon fishing has picked up on Long Pond, but we haven't seen the glory days of the 1980s and early 1990s returning yet. I'm guardedly optimistic that salmon numbers will improve, though.

Recently, John Dieffenbacher-Krall of Hudson accompanied me for a few hours of casting at The Spillway at Long Pond's inlet, Castle Island and the Wings Mills dam on Belgrade Stream below the pond.

We had Castle Island and Wings Mills to ourselves, but the Spillway struck John as weird. His idea of fishing includes a remote stream and solitude - not standing within 15 to 20 feet of the nearest caster in a village setting with spectators.

The truth is pig simple, though. The Spillway produces big brown trout and occasional salmon. If you don't mind anglers casting over your line or even hooking your line while you play a fish, the sheer number of catches and size of the salmonids in this pool make it a premier destination.

With that said, crowds keep me from fishing The Spillway, but that's my loss. As the old saying goes, I'm lopping my nose off to spite my face.

An odd feature of The Spillway in the last decade leaves me baffled. In my lifetime, I have seldom foul-hooked a salmon there but in the past five years, have watched folks inadvertently snag dozens and dozens of brown trout.

The afternoon Dieffenbacher-Krall accompanied me there, one angler foul-hooked several browns. The salmon he did catch was mouth-hooked.

Steve Duren of Belgrade often fishes this spot and uses ultra-small nymphs and dries. He catches lots of salmon and browns and seldom foul-hooks them. I take breaks from work and drop by The Spillway to watch Duren do his thing.

For 35 years, I have lived through Long Pond's ups and downs with landlocked salmon. During uptimes, this water has produced a terrific landlock photo file for me, and such widely divergent magazines as Fly Fisherman and Boys' Life have published my salmon images from there.

During the last three decades, fisheries biologists for the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife (DIF&W) have wrestled with managing the heavily-pounded salmon resource there. They have produced dynamite fishing at times since 1980 when I started hitting Long Pond hard.

Beginning in the early to mid 1990s, though, DIF&W biologists lost the dynamite salmon fishery. They claim over-fishing and illegal pike and landlocked-alewives introductions have decreased the salmon population.

Bill Woodward, a DIF&W assistant regional biologist, has an interesting, three-part theory about Long Pond's recent salmon woes. Some of his colleagues disagree with part of his assessment.

First, Woodward feels the one-fish daily salmon limit rules out over-fishing as a problem (in 1992, DIF&W pushed for an artificial-lure-only regulation on Long Pond to reduce the fishing and kill pressure but backed off because of public opposition). Woodard also feels the illegal introduction of northern pike and landlocked alewives has negatively impacted salmon, and most folks agree.

It's the third part of Woodward's theory which stirs controversy within DIF&W, but local anglers agree with him. He thinks ending salmon stocking on Great Pond hurt Long Pond's salmon fishery.

Until the not-too-distant past, DIF&W was stocking 3,500 to 4,000 salmon annually into Great. These fish were dropping into Long, a one-way trip because fish cannot migrate back upstream past the dam at The Spillway and return to Great Pond. Shortly after DIF&W abolished Great Pond's salmon program, Long Pond fell onto hard times.

Woodward thinks that stopping the Great Pond stocking may not be the sole reason Long Pond salmon declined, but it exacerbated the problem.

Instead of salmon, DIF&W started stocking brown trout into Great Pond, which soon started migrating into Long Pond. They were brutes, too. Folks who agree with Woodward's theory cite the browns dropping into Long Pond as proof that Great Pond fish augment Long Pond.

My personal history with Long began in the late 1970s, when DIF&W biologists realized that they were overstocking salmon there and across the state. That practice was stunting salmonid growth, so amid howls of protest from anglers, they reduced salmon stocking numbers statewide.

This managerial move started improving Maine's fisheries within 12 to 24 months, according to head fisheries biologists at DIF&W circa 1980.

Long Pond salmon in the 1980s were getting a little bigger every year, and in the mid-1980s when Dennis McNeish -- then the regional fisheries biologist overseeing the water -- raised the minimum length limit from 14- to 16-inches, something happened that impressed me with DIF&W biologists.

The season following the length-limit change, Long Pond salmon were ultra-skinny. According to McNeish, DIF&W's new regulation had resulted in a salmon overpopulation, causing smelt numbers to plummet.

McNeish decreased stocking numbers on Long, and within two years, salmon fattened so much that they were shaped like a football (apparently, at the time, McNeish's salmon-stocking numbers on Long Pond balanced well with the stocking figures on Great Pond)

From about 1985 and into the 1990s, I was publicly claiming that Long Pond ranked as one of the best three landlocked-salmon waters in the state and had photos to prove it. Let's hope those days return -- soon.

SOURCE: Kennebec Journal

DATE: 10-13-2007


Lakes: Great Pond, Long Pond
Regions: Belgrade


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