Grand Lake Stream is a Maine village of about a hundred people, most of whom own a canoe, and the ones who don’t are being talked about. The stream itself runs three miles out of West Grand Lake down to Big Lake, and in September the landlocked salmon come up out of the lake to crowd the pools like commuters who missed the early train.
We fished it with a guide named Wendell, which is either his real name or the name every guide in Washington County agrees to use. He wore the same wool shirt all three days and carried a thermos of coffee strong enough to strip varnish. His first instruction was to stop false casting. His second was to stop talking about false casting. The salmon, he said, had heard it all before.
The first morning the dam pool held fish we could see rolling in the gray light, and not one of them wanted a streamer. We tried olive, we tried gray ghost, we tried a pattern my brother tied at the kitchen table that looked like a moth had lost an argument with a blender. Wendell watched all of this with the patience of a man who gets paid by the day.
Around ten he walked us down to a run he called the Hatchery Pool and handed me a size sixteen caddis. Dead drift, he said, and don’t lift until it’s done swinging. On the third drift a salmon came up like it had been fired out of the gravel, cleared the water twice, and ran straight at me so fast I was reeling slack for most of a second. It was maybe seventeen inches, bright as a new dime, with the black x marks down its sides that make you understand why people drive six hours for this.
My brother caught two more that afternoon on the blender moth, which Wendell has since asked him to tie a dozen of. We have not been told whether this is for the guide’s own box or for evidence.
Wendell’s closing assessment of the trip was that we fished fine for people from away. In Grand Lake Stream that counts as a standing ovation.
Cold water days are hoodie days. See our custom boat hoodies and sweatshirts, drawn from a photo of your own boat.