The put-in is located in a quiet side channel. Note the surrounding “sand dunes” created by erosion.
I want to try my luck this morning fishing for smallmouth bass on the Saco River in front of the hydroelectric station located by the Hiram Falls dam in Hiram, Oxford County, Maine (see The Maine Atlas and Gazetteer map 4 C3). To access this location, drive into downtown Hiram on Routes 5/1134/117 (Pequawket Trail) and cross the bridge over the river. Make an immediate left on River Road and drive down that road for 2.3 miles (note: the power station will be visible to your left after 2.0 miles). Look for an unnamed dirt road on the left that leads to a spacious dirt parking area. The river is about 400 ft down a path through the woods on the right. Only hand-carried craft can be launched from this location.
Yep, that’s all the fish I caught after casting for a full hour all around the pool in front of the power house. The rock face of Great Falls appears in the background on the left.
I arrive at the parking spot at 9 am and am glad to see that I’ve got the place all to myself. I drag my canoe and fishing equipment down the hill, and launch the boat from a sandy side channel. It’s a beautiful late-summer morning in Maine: the temperature is forecast to climb up into the high 60’s later this morning with a partly sunny sky and a light breeze. I make my way out of the channel and into the main stem of the Saco River, and from there paddle upstream towards the power station. An aerial view in Google Maps before my fishing trip shows the presence of a large pool in front of the falls and the turbine house. I’m actually quite pleased with the beauty of the natural surroundings when I get there. The area is deeply wooded and the 75 foot-high rock face of the (mostly dry) Great Falls (a.k.a. Hiram Falls) is rather impressive. The river banks are surprisingly sandy and deeply eroded. The amount of water moving over the falls during the spring snowmelt must be incredible in order to create these erosional features.
No comment… Note the deep erosion going on along the shoreline
I use my anchor line to perform a quick depth check before I start fishing. I’m pleased to find up to 17 ft of water right in front of the falls, and less than 6 ft around the turbine house. The current is also interesting – and typical of hydropower stations – with a strong flow coming straight out of the turbine house and water streaming back upstream in two slow-moving gyres on either side of this current. The whole set-up also has multiple current seams which are a favorite of river smallmouth bass. I fan-cast this whole area with my go-to smallmouth bass lures (i.e., a 2-inch Rapala jointed chadrap brown crawdad, a 4-inch soft bait stick rigged “wacky-style”, and a #2 Mepps spinner) for a full hour, moving multiple times, and catch a grand total of … one 8” bass. What the dickens is going on here??
Still no comment…
This is certainly not looking good! I let myself drift out of the pool and into the main river channel, casting around using my Mepps spinner and soft stickbait. Over the next hour and a half, all this additional effort yields a tiny yellow perch, a fat fallfish, and one other smallmouth bass. Overall, the fishing in this stretch of the Saco River was utterly disappointing. I’ve had great success in the past catching bronzebacks in front of hydropower stations on other rivers (click here, here, here, and here for examples). I have also fished multiple other stretches of this river in Maine over the years and rarely found it to be a consistent producer of quality bass. The only redeeming feature of my whole experience this morning is the beauty and quietness of the surrounding woods and the total lack of bugs!
The second, and largest, smallmouth bass caught out of the Saco River this morning.
The results: I caught 2 tiny smallmouth bass in two and a half hours of lousy fishing.
Was the information in this blog useful? I invite you to share your thoughts and opinions. Also, feel free to discuss your fishing experiences at this location.
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Hi Stan: we are back home but I was interested in reading about the Saco. We cross it on the way home and I have often wondered about the fishing. So your post indicates that I am not missing much.
One place I like but it’s a long paddle is to put in at the Durham boat launch and paddle upstream to the rapids. It’s really too long a puddle for me anymore but you could get there with the outboard–just have to be careful of the rocks.
Hi Roland, I fished those rapids on the Androscoggin above Durham about 20 years ago (and caught smallmouth bass and pike, if memory serves me), and completely forgot about them! They’re back on my list of places to check out in the future!