Center of the Universe Pond
At Center Pond, native brook trout is what’s for supper. After a 5 mile hike up the mountain we put up our camp and took to the lake in the two canoes.
If Center Pond was out West in the dessert canyon country it would be considered a box canyon covered by a large shallow lake. The lake ranges from 15 to five feet deep. At the stream entry end of the lake it is deeper and full of rocks. At the drainage end it’s shallow and the bottom is silted in.
The mountain tops rise up on three sides and the wind swirls up the center of the lake, making it tricky sometimes to throw and see a dry fly. Dry fly fishing is best in the still of the morning and when it calms in the afternoon.
Native brook trout feed on dry flies like a size 16 Hornberg or Adams or on nymphs and leaches like the famous bead head nymph or black woolly bugger leach fly that we purchased along with our fishing licenses at Two Rivers Canoe and Tackle in Millinocket.
The water in Center Pond is the color of old dried blood from cedar tannins. The brook trout, which average ten to fourteen inches, hold a darker, richer color than any brook trout I have ever seen.
My brother and I tucked in close to the leeward shoreline and he fished a western dropper fly rig: a white Miller dry fly and a foot below it a bead head nymph. His first fish was on the bead head and was the largest fish of the trip, a fourteen incher.
My son Ian, our photographer whose work you can find at ianwilsonmedia.com, fished in the other canoe with his girlfriend Victoria. They fished in the large shallow flat above the marsh before the stream cuts its own valley between the three mountains.
The trout of Center Pond are voracious feeders and often will jump out of the water, their entire bodies arching up and down over the descending fly, so that they both hit the water together. In the pan over our Jetboil stove with salt, pepper and lemon the trout of center pond cook up firmer and richer than salmon.
After dinner and clean up and sitting around a dwindling campfire, the wind began to swirl above the mountains and we fell asleep on sleeping pads on the lean-to floor. In the middle of the night a big animal scattered our pots where we’d left them a stone’s throw away from camp. When I got up to look around the wind was still swirling, strangely warm for early September.
In the morning it had cooled down. We took to the canoes and caught and released a dozen fish each on Hornbergs’ before packing up and hiking back to the car. We released all the trout we caught in the morning. They are getting bigger and waiting for us at Center Pond.
The End
