Robin's Outdoors

When the glaciers moved through the Spednic Lake area of northern Washington County they didn’t consider the boats that would be on the water 10,000 years later.

A boundary marker between Maine and New Brunswick, Canada. Spednic Lake. Taken on the Maine side.

We’re able to fish the Canadian side of Spednic as long as we stay in the boat. Don’t step out of the country. I’ve never seen Homeland Security on the lake but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Who knows. Maybe they’re some of the folks fishing.

Most of the boulders are along shore. Great spots to cast into for bass.

We caught a lot of fish in a few hours. It was slow at first, probably because it was 92* and the water was just short of white caps. The trolling motor’s battery was weak causing Steve to have to concentrate more than usual on keeping us off boulders just under the water. When the sun dropped and the wind died down it didn’t take long for the bass to come in from deep water and start feeding. Steve always fishes bottom on Spednic. He uses crayfish and salamanders in various colors. He usually catches the most fish. I seldom have the patience to fish bottom because I find every nook, cranny, crevice, log and imaginary object to get stuck on. We’ve fished this lake for three years and I cannot for the life of me figure out what we’re different. He seldom gets hung up. We’re both using 6′ rods with bait casters and identical baits except for color. I’ll figure it out some day, til then I’m catching a lot of fish at the surface or a few feet down. I used a white and pearl Shad Walker by Picasso. Bass like it, but the two most fun catches I had were 20″ and 24″ chain pickerel that put up great fights. It’s easy to unhook the fish because the Shad Walker doesn’t have two sets of treble hooks. I can manage to put four hooks in a 6″ fish (annoying) if I have two trebles. Taylor used a Rapala CountDown for her 15-16 fish and it’s the CountyDown that caught the bass while it rested on the water when I watched Taylor reel in another catch.

One of Taylor’s 15-16 bass of the day.

Spednic Lake is 17 miles long, has 106 miles of shoreline to fish, and covers more than 17,000 acres. We’ve chosen our favorite spots to fish based on knowing where boulders are and the best fishing. Experience has taught us a lot. Last weekend we hit the water thinking we’d fish on the backside of some islands to get out of the white caps. Instead, we found ourselves in wind tunnels between islands that caused a lot of backlash on our bait casters. After an hour we decided it wasn’t worth it and went home.

Taylor got the most and smallest bass. Steve caught the largest bass. I caught the largest fish, a 24″ chain pickerel that put up a great fight.

Spednic is a catch and release lake for bass. The fishing is great because of this law but I firmly disagree with it. If I catch a bass, it swallows my lure and I can’t retrieve it, the line is cut and the fish goes back. We’ve released fish that obviously aren’t going to live. An American bald eagle is likely to swoop down on the injured fish that’s swimming in circles on the surface, catch it and eat it. I often wonder what happens to the hook and eagle that might become hooked. I recently read that 70% of fish that have cut-line hooks will expel the hook in 10 days. I don’t know if this is fact or feel-good misinformation. I don’t know if it applies to treble hooks.

I’m pro-conservation. If the fish is fit to throw back, by all means, put it back. We keep less than a dozen bass a year between three of us and between open and hard water. If the fish is going to die why not eat the fish and keep the hooks away from birds? I can think of two reasons. It would be a nightmare for the wardens to enforce. Anyone ca easily say “it was going to die.” Sports want to catch a lot of fish and the people who take them out (not all are Maine Guides, some are locals who hire themselves out) make their money this way.

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