Matt catches the very first smallmouth bass of the afternoon!
My 16-year-old nephew Matt flew in from away to spend some time in Maine learning to fish with his uncle. He is a total novice at the sport and I need to ensure that he catches and stays engaged! He cannot properly cast, nor can he aim with any degree of accuracy. I must therefore find a place where he can cast without the need to be accurate and where the fish are abundant and aggressive. I set my eyes on putting him on smallmouth bass on the Androscoggin River in front of the Otis hydropower station in Livermore, Androscoggin County, Maine (see The Maine Atlas and Gazetteer map 11 A5). I have had good luck at this location in the past. Click here, here, and here for earlier blogs on this spot and for directions on how to reach it. Keep in mind that you will need a canoe or kayak to fish this section of the river.
But I’m not being left behind. It took us about 45 minutes to finally make it to the power house! Notice the river pouring over the dam…
We reach the put-in at 12:30 pm. We are enjoying a gorgeous summer day with partly-cloudy skies, a temperature of 76°F, and a gentle breeze. The water is a relatively cool 73°F. A quick look from shore in the direction of the dam shows that the conditions are NOT what they should be for early August when water levels are typically quite low. Instead, the Androscoggin River is pouring over the dam with great vigor. A local person walks by as we are getting ready and informs us that conditions have greatly improved compared to two weeks ago when the river was running much higher. OMG, this is just crazy and reflects the stupid amounts of rain that have fallen across the region over the last 2 months. The hydraulic conditions are also totally different from the typical summer setup. Normally, no water moves over the dam. Instead, the entire river flows through the power station, creating a narrow but strongly focused current that shoots straight out towards the center of the river. Today, the turbines are idle. Instead, all the water from the river flows over the dam across a wide front, creating two powerful back eddies along both shorelines which force water to move upstream towards the dam. We will focus our fishing efforts in those eddies where the current is more gentle. We also avoid getting too close to the dam where the back eddies pick up speed again and the water is more churny and treacherous. Safety first!
And the catching continues…
I set us both up with unjointed floating Rapalas so we can troll with a Ugly Stick medium rod and reel between our legs as we work our way upstream towards the dam. I like using that strategy when I must paddle in a canoe. The bottom line is that the more time a lure spends in the water, the more chances it has of catching fish! And so it is today! We land six bronzebacks over the next 45 minutes trying to reach the power station… Every time we hook, fight, net, photograph, and release a fish, the current has pushed us back to our starting point! No matter. The fish are aggressively biting, and Matt is ecstatic at all the catching activity. This kind of action is so much fun, and not just for him.
The bigger bonzebacks are definitely falling for the tube bait.
I eliminate the Rapalas after we finally reach our general destination in the vicinity of the dam. I set Matt up with a 4-inch pink plastic Senko worms work rigged “wacky style”. This system works great on the Androscoggin River which is cobbly, open and (mostly) unobstructed with submerged aquatic vegetation or branches. He can toss the lure anywhere he wants and it will do its thing, particularly when the fish are aggressively biting like this afternoon. I switch over to a bright white tube bait weighed down by a quarter-ounce jig head and flavor-enhanced with crayfish juice. We fish the two back eddies along both shorelines over the next 3 hours and nail bass after bass after bass. Most of them measure between 13 and 15 inches, with a few topping 17 inches. Most of these fish are clearly well fed, with large extended bellies. There’s obviously a lot of feed down there! It is approaching 4 pm and time to call it good. Matt is beaming, having hooked and landed 15 hard-fighting bronzebacks. His casting and hook setting also greatly improved with time. We had a successful afternoon!
It just does not get old!
The results: We landed a total of 32 smallmouth bass (largest = 17 inches) in 4 hours of fantastic river fishing.
Matt is learning how to efficiently unhook a bass without getting pricked by the spines. It does take some practice…
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