By Peter Fritsch
By dawn, the rain has been tapping for a solid hour on the roof of our cabin. Perfect sleeping conditions, especially when paired with the cool June air and stillness of this idyll on the shores of Lake Munsungan, deep in the North Maine woods.
Dave Mosher, 82 years old, is having none of that. “Hell-OOOOO! Anybody alive in they-uh?!,” Dave bellows as he peers through a screen window, hands cupped like blinders, not for the first time this week. “We got a window before the heavy stuff comes down. Meecha at the truck!” He frames a broad grin with two thumbs up and is gone.
Dave is a fly-fishing guide. More than that, he is a Registered Maine Guide, an elite breed of several thousand men and women qualified to take you to places even the makers of the most preposterous of SUV commercials fear to tread. Theirs is a life of woodcraft, a love of the land and a passion for its conservation. Not to mention early starts.
The first Maine Guide, licensed by the state in 1897, was Cornelia Thurza “Fly Rod” Crosby. Among America’s first professional fly-fishing guides, if not the first, she also shot Maine’s first caribou (legally anyway), befriended Annie Oakley, lobbied for less-restrictive dress for women and once landed (by her count) 200 fish in a single day. She liked to describe herself this way: “I am a plain woman of uncertain age, standing six feet in my stockings…I scribble a bit for various sporting journals, and I would rather fish any day than go to heaven.”
Dave is Cornelia’s most worthy successor. Standing five-foot nine in his boots and retaining more than his fair share of sinew, he is a bantam rooster of a man who has to arch his neck and cape sharply to see over the hood of his Ford Super Duty F250. That doesn’t guarantee he misses the hazards that approach on the logging roads with the relentlessness of Tetris blocks. “I don’t baby her,” Dave says, giving the dashboard a couple of love taps. “But I treat her right, yes I show-ah do.”
Suddenly, the front left tire jumps and lands with a thud. “Dave, I think you might have hit that snapping turtle,” I say. “Hope so,” he replies. “They eat ducklings like popcorn.”
Dave lives by a simple code: if you are a creature accretive to the success of the species that Dave and his clients like to pursue, you’re good. If you’re not, you’re bad. To wit, the loons on Big Pine Pond have learned how to ambush fishermen in canoes. They pop up like corks right where you drop your fly in the hopes of poaching a hooked and helpless trout. Just the previous evening, a pair of loons ruined what should have been an epic evening of dry fly fishing. “I’d like to give ‘em my .357,” Dave says. “Nasty, shameful birds.” Which also happen to be stunning animals of unusual grace who, of course, were there first.
I was contemplating having that very debate with Dave while en route back to camp post loon fiasco when we came upon a ruffed grouse holding her ground in the middle of the road. “She’ll be protecting a brood, sure as sugar,” says Dave. Sure enough, eight chicks with surprising dexterity on the wing flee for the woods. Dave is elated, almost in tears, as their mother perches on a birch sapling by the road, standing her ground between her offspring and the big metal intruder with bright halogen eyes. He turns down ’50s on 5 playing on Sirius radio, powers down the window and coos: “Oh sweetheart, I love you! Take good care of those honey pies you beautiful girl and I’ll see you in the fall!”
When grouse hunting season opens.
Born and raised near Bangor, Dave got into fly fishing in July 1956, invited by his high school baseball coach to camp and prospect for brook trout (it’s actually in the char genus, so not technically a trout). The hook was set. It was all split cane, slow-action bamboo rods in those days, handcrafted tools requiring profound patience. Today, those rods are more commonly found mounted on an old rod and gun club’s wall than on the water. His first rod now belongs to a grandson, one of his 12 grandchildren. “Still works perfectly,” he says.
An accomplished fisherman who, of course, ties all his own flies (often with feathers from birds he’s shot himself), guiding is Dave’s third career. After the Army, Dave taught high school math for 26 years while raising a family of six children with his high school sweetheart. “We were young and had four before we figured out what was causing it,” he laughs. After retiring, he bred and trained champion bird dogs before turning that business over to a son six years ago. “Made more money teaching dogs than humans.”
Today, Dave guides. A lot. Grouse and woodcock hunts. Bear hunts. Trout. You name it. Like all the best guides, Dave is a kind and patient man who forgives every mistake with a laugh and a sincere “done it myself a thousand times.” Unlike most guides, some of his rods are duct taped together. His canoe paddles are cut from cedar milled on his own property. He eschews new-fangled water-proof packs, preferring to tote his gear in an old-fangled L.L. Bean ice fishing pack basket. Please don’t offer to carry it for him. “When I can’t lug it, that’s when I’ll stop.”
On our last, rainy morning together we head to Great Cedar pond. We’d been fishing all week and had even landed a rare blueback trout, a landlocked species of Arctic char stranded by receding glaciers from the last Ice Age and now found only in a handful of deep lakes in Maine. Truly the fish of a lifetime. The dry-fly fishing was fantastic too – Dave and I fished together one evening taking a good number of wild brook trout, he on Cahills and me on a size 16 cul-de-canard caddis.
But Dave wasn’t satisfied. He was due to go home the night before, but we hadn’t caught what he calls a “gommer” of a brook trout, a true giant of the sort that roams the depths of ponds and lakes in northern Maine. That’s what brought him to our cabin window on a rainy morning on a day he should have had off. “We need a mountable fish,” says Dave. “A cigar fish. Not gonna be happy driving home if we don’t get her, no sir I won’t.”
It’s a rugged, sloppy hike down to Great Cedar on a trail Dave blazed himself a couple years back (on his day off). Now, six canoes are stashed near his honey hole, surrounded by fresh moose tracks. We’d fished the pond earlier in the week and I took no small amount of joy in switching out a fly Dave gave me for a black-nosed dace I’d tied myself. That landed me four decent fish. But no true gommers.
No sooner did we launch our canoe than the rain stopped and the sky brightened. The water was a black mirror of cedars, pine and birch. Dave suggested I forgo the dace and handed me his unpatented “Sugarfoot Smelt,” a tie of his own design employing white marabou, peacock herl, French tinsel and a feather resembling jungle cock I am not at liberty to disclose.
We saw a rise and I cast to it. But that fish wasn’t really feeding on top so I cast a few times over the rise on full sinking line, giving it a solid 20 count to get the fly down before stripping back to the canoe in steady 6-inch bursts.
Bam! The unmistakable weight of a good fish straining the backbone of my 6 weight and testing the 4x tippet I’d tied on. Five nervy minutes later and he was in the net. The biggest, fattest slob of a brook trout I have ever seen. A gommer. Too beautiful to measure or weigh, we took a quick picture and let her go.
We’d been on the water for all of 20 minutes.
We agree to call it a day right there. We drive back to camp listening to 50s on 5, smiles draped ear to ear. Dave pulls out a cigar for his four-hour drive home. I get out of the truck and warn him I’m going to hug him.
“Please do!” he says.
— Peter Fritsch is a former Wall Street Journal reporter and editor who lives in Maryland and wished he’d taken up fly fishing decades ago.