My home river in central Maine made a fly fisherman out of me, and in my advancing years I look back at this small, intimate, classic water with gratitude. Without it to teach me intricacies, no national fly-fishing magazines would have bought my articles, but more importantly, this sport would have offered me less fun in life, because fly rodders with solid knowledge and skill in hatch matching and presentation catch far more fish.

My education began in my preteens. First, this river had two distinctly different habitats in a two-mile stretch. For the first mile below a dam, a pocket-water stretch rushed, tumbled and roared along in its 60-foot drop in elevation – a fast flow. Then the river hit a fecund mile-long bottomland with slower currents sliding over flat, gravel glides and glass-surfaced pools.

Trout in rapids where forage whizzes past must strike fast or miss the meal. The fast, mile-long plunge ensures that trout cannot scrutinize a hatching aquatic bug. Does the fly have a tippet attached or a hook poking out the posterior? In short, fast-water habitat makes salmonids far less wary – strike instinctively or go hungry.

On the other hand, the bottomland’s far less tumultuous flow gives trout plenty of time to inspect forage such as larvae in the more even currents or subimagoes on the glass-flat surfaces. To catch fish in such a place, fly rodders must match a fly to the natural in size, color scheme and silhouette, use the lightest tippet possible, and present the artificial so it behaves in exactly the same manner as natural bugs and baitfish in the river.

Habitat makes all the difference. Fly rodders can fool brook trout in a mountain stream tumbling down a slope far more easily than in a clear spring creek with long glides, meandering across a flatland beneath foliage canopies. My home river taught me about varied habitat in my teens.

That river had another plus. In spring and early summer, red quills and Hendricksons, Pale Morning Duns, March Browns, Sulfur Duns, Tricos and Hexes hatched – all in the same two miles. What a classroom.

These mayflies created an adequate base to help me understand entomology and presentation at an early age. Also, Tricos prove scarce in much of Maine, a tiny mayfly with light-gray wings and black body. Years passed with me missing the sporadic Trico hatches, but I hit it enough to learn. The Hex emergence required a long walk in tangled bank brush to reach silt pools far downriver to fish it, and that experience taught me plenty.

Alder, red-maple, black-willow, etc. canopies bowed over the river, making it a tough place to fly-cast. Such impediments helped improve my casting skills to take elsewhere. I could successfully fly-fish remoter, storied waters that cost money and time to reach. I’ve always appreciated my home river for teaching me solid basics for later fishing trips that drained wallets.

With such limited casting room, many of us on the river learned orthodox as well as unorthodox presentations.

One orthodox skill came from Ernest Schwiebert’s writings – hook casting. Let’s say a fly rodder stands at the bottom end of a glide that has hemlock growing along 35 to 40 feet of the east shore, and boughs hang from the east side of the river. Say the caster stands on the outside edge of the boughs and throws the line 45 or 50 feet upstream parallel to the edge of the limbs. At the end of the cast, a right-hander rotates the right wrist counter-clockwise with a little snap, which kicks the leader and end of the fly line to the right. The leader hooks around the end of the limbs so the fly can drift back under the canopy – quite the advantage to catching fish.

Here’s an unorthodox presentation that works on a long glide that has a pocket on the bottom west side. Folks can’t fish from the west shore, so they must cast from the east. To reach the pocket, here’s what I do. I hold coils of loose fly line in my free hand and cast a nymph quartering across to the west bank. Then I mend the line hard away from me and keep doing it until it is floating downstream parallel and close to the opposite shore. When the fly hits the pocket, I tighten up on the line so the nymphs swing in an arc from the pocket – often irresistible to trout because it appears to be escaping.

I could write several columns in a row about tactics like this, and have in magazines.

A huge plus on this river occurred in my late teens through early 30s. A small group of us often fly-fished here in May, June and early July. We’d arrive in different vehicles but knew one another, and many of us went to school together. This created superb camaraderie, as much fun as fly fishing.

I’m reluctant to name these people because of fear I’ll miss some, but here goes: Part of the crowd included the late Phil Morehouse, Bill Fosnaught, Harry Vanderweide, Jeff Norton and Keith Sproul, all who created folklore with their exploits on this river – many highly humorous – stories for another time.

Ken Allen of Belgrade Lakes, a writer, editor and photographer, may be reached at:

KAllyn800@yahoo.com