The carriage road is wide and accessible to everyone
Lower Breakneck Pond covers 8 acres and is located in Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island (MDI) in Hancock County, Maine (see The Maine Atlas and Gazetteer map 16 B3). The pond can be reached by walking on the wide and well-maintained carriage road. Leave your car in the small parking lot off Route 233 across from Eagle Lake. Be aware that you’ll need a pass to legally park your car anywhere inside the Park, including here (even though the parking lot is right off a public road). The pass can be purchased on-line or at the Park’s visitor center on MDI, among other places. I reach the parking lot at 8:30 am and am glad to see only a few other vehicles. This relatively small lot fills up quickly later on in the season, particularly on weekends. I place my canoe on my “canoe wheels”, load it up with all my fishing gear, and walk the half mile or so towards the pond.
General view of Lower Breakneck Pond in early spring (no aquatic vegetation on the surface yet) looking south.
Lower Breakneck Pond is a pretty little body of water. However, don’t expect a “remote” experience while fishing this spot because the well-maintained 16-foot wide carriage road which runs right next to it is frequented by numerous hikers, joggers, bicyclists, families with small children, horseback riders, etc., all of whom are clearly visible from the water. The pond’s surface water is quite clear but the substrate consists mostly of sand and muck covered with aquatic vegetation. Several beaver lodges are visible along the western shoreline. The pond is stocked each fall with around 250 brook trout measuring 8”, which yields 31 fish per acre. Most of these trout, although small in size, are available to be caught the next spring because the pond is closed to ice fishing. It could be fished by foot along much of its eastern shore since the pond is easily accessible from the nearby carriage road. However, I wouldn’t recommend it because the water is quite shallow (< 2 ft deep) all along that shoreline. I also suspect that any trout in those shallows will have moved into the deep hole at the center of the pond by early to mid June when the surface water becomes too warm. Plus, given the shallow depth, the water gets choked up with plant life later in the season (take a look at the Google map link at the top of this blog for a summer view…). The available depth map shows that 70% of the pond is 10+ ft deep. Don’t believe it for one second! By my reckoning based on paddling all around it several times this morning, over 80% of this pond is less than 3 ft deep! Click here for the open-water fishing regulations.
The local goose patrol checking out the fishing activity.
My original strategy, based on looking at the faulty dept map, is to troll around Lower Breakneck Pond using my lead core line and three small trout spoons placed one color down (i.e., 5-7 ft deep). This approach falls to the wayside because my lures constantly get stuck on aquatic plants due to the shallow depth. The wind is also ATROCIOUS this morning, howling in from the southwest at a steady 20 MPH, which makes for miserable paddling and boat control conditions. Besides, the area over the one deep hole in the center of the pond is just too small to be properly trolled. I give up on paddling after an hour of frustration without a hint of a fish. Instead, I anchor the canoe in the vicinity of the outlet to Upper Breakneck Pond and start casting around with a small #1 Mepps spinner using my ultralight spinning rod. My expectations are low given the bright sunshine and the general shallowness of the surrounding water. I’m therefore very pleasantly surprised when I hook and land a small brookie after no more than 10 minutes of casting. That signal is good enough for me to revise my approach again!!
All the brookies I hooked this morning on Lower Breakneck Pond were about this size.
I paddle the canoe upwind to the other end of Lower Breakneck Pond and let myself drift down while fishing the shallow shoreline with my ultralight spinning rod. I repeat the same circuit several more times over the next hour. This new approach really works because I hook into four more brookies, two of which end up in the boat. However, all the trout are the small ones stocked last fall. Under different circumstances, I’d love to fly fish this pond from my canoe using a dry fly in the evening in late May, but that’ll be for another day.
The results: I landed three 8” brook trout in two hours of hard fishing.
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