The carriage road provides easy access to Upper Breakneck Pond
Upper Breakneck Pond covers 9 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 for about 2,500 ft on the 16 foot-wide and well-maintained carriage road. Leave your car in the small parking lot located 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. The pass can be purchased on-line or at the Park’s main visitor center on MDI, among other places. I reach the parking lot at 9 am and head first to Lower Breakneck Pond. I then carry my canoe through the 50 ft long outlet that connects the lower pond to the upper pond. Note, however, that Upper Breakneck Pond can also be reached directly from the carriage road via a short walk through the woods.
General view of Upper Breakneck Pond looking north. The pond is pretty in early spring before it gets overtaken by aquatic vegetation.
Upper Breakneck Pond is a pretty little body of water. Unlike nearby Lower Breakneck Pond, the carriage road veers off from its eastern shoreline, keeping the touristy traffic out-of-sight and allowing for a more “remote” fishing experience. The pond’s surface water is quite clear but the substrate consists mostly of sand and muck covered with aquatic vegetation. The pond is stocked each fall with around 275 brook trout measuring 8”, which yields 31 fish per acre. Most of these trout, although small in size, are still available to be caught the next spring because the pond is closed to ice fishing.
The outlet linking Lower and Upper Breakneck Ponds is short and shallow. The upper pond is shown in the background.
The upper half of the pond (i.e., the one closest to the inlet from Lower Breakneck Pond) could be fished by foot along its eastern shore because the pond is easily accessible from the nearby carriage road. However, keep in mind that the water is relatively shallow (< 3 ft deep) all along that shore. 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 temperature becomes too high. Plus, based on the Google Maps link provided above, the water all around the shoreline gets choked with aquatic plants later in the season. The depth map shows a teardrop-shaped pond, but that does not reflect the actual shape I observed while I was there. The lower half of the pond presents a large expanse of shallow water which is not properly captured by the map. General fishing laws apply on this pond in the spring. Click here for the full fishing rules.
That’s about the size of brook trout one can except to catch in Upper Breakneck Pond.
I drag my canoe through the short outlet into Upper Breakneck Pond after fishing Lower Breakneck Pond for two hours earlier this morning. The wind has abated a bit but is still blowing strongly out of the southeast. It is otherwise a glorious early spring day, with no mosquitoes or blackflies, or anyone else on the water. My strategy is to troll around the one deep hole located in the upper half of Upper Breakneck Pond using my lead core line and three small trout spoons placed one color down (i.e., 5-7 ft deep). The circuit is actually quite small because the hole covers no more than about two acres. I start paddling and consistently snag aquatic vegetation on the bottom, which is a real pain. After going around the deep hole a couple of times, I learn to avoid the vegetation and I finally hook my first brookie. I hook two more trout and land one over the next hour. All three fish are 8” long and represent the trout that were stocked last fall. I’d really love to fly fish this pond in the evening in late May when the bugs are hatching, but that’ll be for some other time.
The results: I landed two 8” brook trout in two hours of hard fishing.
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