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The sea at false dawn was a mess. It had been blowing for a week, with strong Easterlies stacking up roller after 6-foot roller to pound the beach. Rain fell long and hard and rivers brought down tree limbs and coffee-colored water. Huge clumps of bladderwort and saltcord grass floated on the surface, enough to foul every other cast.
Calm southwest winds followed the storm and called me to splash my skiff. Rob was on board, but truth be told, he...

When I first heard that the Edwards Dam on Maine’s Kennebec River was coming down, I couldn’t believe my ears. The 917-foot-long dam, built in 1837 from an early mix of concrete and timber, existed in some form or fashion for 162 years until it was demolished in 1999. Edwards Dam, along with 14,156 other New England dams built during the foundational era of hydropower, all had purposes related to our country’s development. Many gathered water for...

The school of striped bass blitzing down the beach had to be at least a quarter mile long and a hundred yards wide. Sometimes I saw their heads break the surface, other times their backs and dorsal fins sticking out. They frothed the ocean water white, trying to salvage the seven different types of baitfish swimming frantically about. The bait schools seemed to think getting close to shore was a good idea, as though salvation sat on the other...

I trimmed up my outboard, cut the motor, and drifted into the channel. The southwest wind blew warm and soft with a light smell of bladderwort drying on the rocks. I lobbed a short 10 feet of anchor rope because I wasn’t going to be there long before getting back after the stripers. My sand flats grocery shopping wasn’t going to take much time at all.
Friends from out of town came for a visit, and landlubbers always like seafood. Tonight we would...

I grabbed the striped bass by the lip and hoisted him over the gunwale. He was a good fish, a perfect fly rod fish in fact— a scratch over 34 inches in length and weighed 15-or-so pounds. He was an easy spot on the flats some 15 minutes earlier with his pronounced, vibrant, black-and-purple coloration. This fish hadn’t been inshore for very long, because if he had spent some time cruising the skinny, sandy water, his coloration would have...