We’ve had cool weather, we’ve had rain, and now we’ve had blistering heat, which sends salmon and trout scurrying into deeper water. Nonetheless, they’re still biting at our big lakes. At Aziscohos anglers have been catching a lot of salmon, up to 18 inches, and fewer trout.
We’ve been concerned about Rangeley Lake the last couple of years as we’ve watched salmon growth rates slide. As a result, we curtailed stocking the last two springs as numbers of wild salmon increased, and we’re encouraging anglers to keep a salmon to thin the number of predators on smelts. These efforts may be working as we’ve seen some fatter salmon this spring, and anglers are reporting clouds of smelts on their fish finders. Managing salmon waters can be a bit nerve wracking, as it’s always a struggle to balance their numbers against the forage fish they feed on. And landlocked salmon are notoriously finiky eaters -- quite simply, if they don't have smelt to feed on, they rarely do well.
The past few years we’ve been stocking a number of “marginal” waters with large brook trout to create additional spring fisheries. Some of these waters become too warm in the summer for brookies and some have quite a lot of interspecific competition from warm water fish species, but brookies will certainly thrive for a few months after ice out. One such water is Harvey Pond, beside Route 4 in Madrid, Franklin County. We frequently travel this road on our way to Rangeley, but haven’t seen much in the way of angling activity. And so it was that Dave Howatt and Liz Studdert checked for the presence of these brookies with a net last week. They immediately caught large numbers of them, confirming that they’re there, waiting for someone to throw a lure their way.
With our stockings now listed on our website, it’s easy to find waters that have trout and other species waiting for anglers to go after them.