A record Maine Eastern brook trout weighing nearly eight pounds darted through my Facebook feed last week.
The photo and story posted by a fellow New England Outdoor Writers Association member told the story. Both were pulled from a recent issue of the Bangor Daily News, which had lifted them from the smaller biweekly Moosehead Lakeshore Journal, which seems to have broken the story.
So why not drag it through the five fingers of Montague and bordering communities?
Caught on January 22 by well-known Greenville, Maine ice fisherman Eric Ward, the record fish was a brook trout for the ages, measuring 25 1/16 inches in length and weighing seven pounds, 10 ounces. The weight topped John Dixon’s July 4, 1959 Moosehead record by two ounces. At 25 ¼ inches, Dixon’s seven-pound, eight-ounce fish was a hair longer, with a girth of 17 ½ inches. The girth of Ward’s fish was not reported.
The largest brook trout recorded in Maine was caught in 2010 at Mousam Lake. That one tipped the scale at nine pounds, two ounces. Maine squaretails grow so large due to high populations of rainbow smelt in the food chain. These forage fish are preferred bait for ice fishermen, and keep big trout and salmon fat during their winter dormancy period.
Known to northern New England anglers as squaretails or brookies, Eastern brook trout (Latin name Salvelinus fontinalis) belong to the char family. They are historically the only native trout in our familiar slice of the Connecticut Valley. According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, brookies populate eastern North American waters from the Great Lakes east to the Atlantic Ocean and south to Georgia along the Appalachian Range.
Squaretails are the first trout I learned to catch as a boy, bait-fishing a small, unnamed, mile-long spring brook that feeds the Connecticut River three or four hundred yards north of the intersection of Hillside and River roads in South Deerfield. The spunky, colorful, voracious fingerlings ranged in length from five to seven inches, and kept me and childhood buddy Mike Manson busy whenever our parents dropped us off there.
We’d return home with a creelful of the speckled beauties, which without exception went from creel to sink to batter bowl to a cast-iron skillet flavored with sizzling, splattering bacon fat. Thus the name “panfish,” brookies sweetest of them all, served with sides of thick-cut slab bacon and crispy home fries.
In later years at forbidden sites, we discovered much larger squaretails in the one- to three-pound range. We called them “bakers,” meaning oven fish. But why go there?
No. Check that. I must tiptoe back. I can’t sidestep my youthful indiscretions for this discussion. Why? The statute of limitations long ago passed.
The big brookies we routinely caught a half-century ago from posted, spring-fed impoundments are directly related to my first impression of the record brookie photographed in Ward’s hands. I wasn’t awestruck because I have seen many large local brook trout and heard of many others over the years.
The big brookies we caught were taken on lures in forbidden waters where they grew large. Golden Thomas buoyant spoons were most productive, but Daredevils and small Mepps spinners worked in a pinch, especially when cast at dusk into an 60-foot outflow neck that collided with a cold, shaded feeder stream once known as Sanderson, then Harvey Brook. The action was fast and furious, and the one- to two-pound brookies ranged from 12 to 18 inches long.
Though I myself never caught a fish that compared to Ward’s there, I did indeed hear of one taken by a neighborhood kid who was probably five or six years younger than me. This notable catch occurred in the late ’60s. I would have been about 15, and heard the tale repeated by several witnesses fortunate enough to see the elementary school-aged boy lugging the fish up the hill home on a stringer.
Word was that the fish had to be nearly two feet long because the kid couldn’t keep its tail from dragging on the road.
I know fish stories tend to be exaggerated, but one of the tellers was a state policeman who had given much testimony in his day, not to mention fished the same, productive spot. In passing, he’d pretend he didn’t see me and my friends fishing there. I guess he liked us because we were ballplayers, and he figured we could be doing much worse than fishing.
We referred to that tidy arrangement as “the hot setup,” and had a blast fishing there. In later years, I took big squaretails from that same bucolic spot on White Wulff and Hendrickson dry flies. That was even more enjoyable than open-faced spin-casting and lures, especially on my friend’s father’s Tonkin cane rod.
In advancing years, when old enough to carry a shotgun, I hunted partridge and woodcock in adjacent woods traversed by a major feeder stream. There I discovered a settling pool at the base of step falls, where large, upstream-swimming brookies congregated on their fall spawning run. It was quite a sight to behold, and one that I shared only with the best of friends.
While I doubt I ever saw a seven- to eight-pound brookie in the mix, the visuals imprinted in memory suggests that some of them may have gone four or five pounds; and that was likely the case for that aforementioned kid’s catch that had the neighborhood buzzing.
My point is that back in the day, before acid-rain endangered native brook trout, there was no need to chase off to the blackfly-infested Northwoods for big ones. They were available right here in our own backyards.
I can’t help but wonder how many of the only trout available to the indigenous people who lived here before us are left?