While fishing on Maine’s largest lake is on the verge of heating up, a fishing guide says the state’s second largest is seeing some great salmon fishing.
Anglers are still contending with solid or floating ice on parts of Moosehead, but some serious fishing is happening in the Moose River.
Reel Moosehead Guide Service said Tuesday they’re fishing the river, but haven’t seen anything massive yet. They did catch a nice 4.5-pound togue that was released back into the water.
Spring fishing can be some of the best in Maine. Fish are closer to the surface right after ice-out because the water is still cold. Once the air temperatures start warming things up, cold water fish like salmon go deeper and seem harder to catch.
“The fish are big. The fish are healthy. Fishing is great,” said registered Maine guide Tom Roth, who lives on Sebago Lake and runs Sebago Lake Guide Service. “Catching salmon in the 3-5-pound range was unheard of until last year.”
Last year was the best one since the late 1980s, he said. Fishermen were catching fat, football-shaped fish, both native and stocked by the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife.
He usually trolls with a fly rod just in the spring, but last year he didn’t need to use lead-core — weighted fishing line — until August to get deeper where the fish had finally gone.
He and his clients caught more than 100 salmon last year, when in an average year, he catches 20-30, he said.
Roth, who has been a part-time guide for seven years and studied fisheries and biology as an undergraduate, said there are some reasons for the improved salmon fishing.
The number of lake trout are down 30 percent because the state took bag limits off the species, meaning there’s less competition for food, and there have been heavy smelt runs into the lake, which is the salmon’s primary food source.
The salmon also have some challenges. There are more alewives coming into the lake more regularly. A steady diet of alewives is not good for the salmon’s long-term survival, because it can make them sterile and blind them, he said.
The lake also has crappie and pike in it now, both of which are considered invasive. Some salmon have heavy scarring, most likely from pike, but could be from lake trout, he said.
Roth has been out on the water for just the last two weeks to gauge the fishing. He takes his first client this weekend, he said.
Usually he goes to Rangeley to fish for big salmon each spring.
“There may be no need to do that this year,” he said, referring to the great fishing on Sebago.
