04/12/2008
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Staff photos by Travis Barrettfrom the Kennebec Journal
Rep. Pingree hears varied proposals for health-care solutions
HALLOWELL Fire that cut communications labeled arson
MONMOUTH Police defended after slim budget rejection
State's schools chief to parley
Wasser will lead newsrooms at KJ, Sentinel and in Portland
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Hockey still in picture for Harrington
Portland boxer to face legend's son
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from the Morning Sentinel
$1.3 MILLION FOR HEALTHREACH
Families Matter grows to meet special needs
Chellie Pingree listens to ideas on health care reform
FARMINGTON Rain alters plans for 4th of July
District regroups after budget failure
Vote on county budget hits snag
Burnham driver wins checkered flag at 2 tracks on same day
Maine boxer gets unique opportunity
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from the Morning Sentinel
When it comes to fishing in early April, there are very few spots with open water. With this winter having dragged on even longer than most, and with more than a foot of ice still keeping most of our lakes and ponds under tight cover, there are even fewer spots available. Over on the shores of Lake Auburn, fishermen long ago decided they weren't going to be the ones waiting around.
So, they got inventive, devising a way all their own for fishing under ice.
"I'm really surprised people don't do it in other places," said James Morin of Norway, who has been fishing Lake Auburn for most of his adult life. "A lot of people are sitting around central Maine twiddling their thumbs waiting for the ice to go out."
Doing "this," and -- the part Morin left out -- catching fish. Best of all, all that's required is a bucket with some live bait, a traditional fishing pole and a bobber. Oh, and of course, you have to have a rubber band and almost a hundred feet worth of narrow PVC pipe.
Sound strange? You bet it does, but once you see it in action you'll almost want to slap yourself for not having thought of it before.
Stylings by Lake Auburn
As long as the ice is at least a couple of feet off the shoreline to reveal a small band of open water, there's more than enough room to fish on Lake Auburn, which offers eager lake trout and salmon in a place where ice fishing is prohibited.
Here's the deal:
The pipe is sold in standard 10-foot sections, and most people who employ the method use anywhere between 20 and 80 feet of the piping. The sections are held together by simple friction fits, with one end of the contraption being taped off with duct tape and a small plastic cover.
Where the tape winds around the end of the pipe, so, too, does a rubber band. Fishing line topped off with a hook, a smelt and a bobber is looped through the rubber band, and then the conduit is slid into the frigid water just under the ice. When you've put it out as far as you want to fish, you simply tug your line free of the pipe and pull the conduit in.
Now you're fishing -- Lake Auburn style. No one seemed to know exactly when the curious method was born, though the general consensus is that it started within the last half-decade.
"The first time I saw it, I thought the guy was coming down here with a smelt net," said Morin, who caught one lake trout and one salmon in a morning's worth of fishing. "I heard the smashing and banging coming down through the woods with the PVC. I had no idea what he was doing.
"Then he set up, and I asked him how he was fishing. He said he had his line out 120 feet. I'm sitting there and I'd been fighting just to get the smelts to go out a few feet (on their own). I was just wasting my time."
When Terry Hill of Greene first saw for himself how people were fishing Lake Auburn before ice-out, and that they were having success with it, he was sold.
So, too, were more than a few sections of PVC pipe.
"My first stop on the way home was Home Depot," said Hill, who purchased several sections of the pipe for $1.37 apiece this week. That, he said, compared to what it would cost every time you lost a smelt -- which go for an average of $7 per dozen these days -- trying to finagle it around the ice was an out-and-out bargain.
Morin said he went to Home Depot, too, and asked if they sold caps fit for the ends of the pipes. He was told that they didn't sell any, and the salesperson wasn't sure capping the ends of plumbing pipe was up to code.
"I'm pretty sure with what I'm using it for," Morin laughed, "there are no codes."
Perfect fit
Lake Auburn certainly lends itself to people who want to aggressively pursue fish as soon as the season opens, and there's plenty of proof that those anglers exist. On Friday morning, in a narrow strip of open water that couldn't have been more than 15 feet wide and 20 yards long, a solitary figure sat wrapped in a winter coat in his canoe with a line out into the water.
There are reasons for the lake's popularity and production in spring.
"In the springtime, this has to be one of the best fisheries in the state in terms of salmon and lake trout," Hill said. "It's the only time of the year I fish for trout. I'm a bass fisherman, but this is pretty hard to beat."
Lake Auburn covers just more than 2,200 acres with a maximum depth of 118 feet in the southeastern corner. It's home to lake trout and salmon, some brook trout and smallmouth bass. Plenty of smelts run through the lake, too -- a great food source for the salmonids, ones protected by laws prohibiting angling for the tiny fish.
"It's small enough that you can fish it productively," said Morin, who fishes along the northern shore of the lake, where it remains relatively shallow. "Plus, the water's clean. There's no ice fishing, so it doesn't get over-fished. I think that's the reason it is the way it is."
In hearing the peculiar fishing technique described, one of the first questions is always, "Yes, but -- is it legal?"
The very short and very correct answer is: Yes.
"There was a picture in the paper last week with the pipes running right out over the road, and the game warden is standing right there looking at it," Morin said.
"I asked wardens and biologists about it, and they all said there was nothing wrong with it. They said the only gripe they'd have was if you started dropping (the PVC) in the water. Then there could be a littering charge."
The same fine, it should be noted, you could be subject to if you were to lose you traditional fishing rod in the water.
Catching on
Shane Leblanc went off to the Air Force, came back and found a whole new way to fish on Lake Auburn. Sometime while he was in the service, the 28-year-old from Auburn figured people mastered the conduit method of fishing the lake.
James Morin knows it's nearly impossible to get people to understand how it works -- despite the fact the process is exceedingly simple.
"I try to explain it to people, and they're all like, 'Huh?' " he said. "You've just got to see it to get it."
It might be somewhat labor-intensive, especially considering the relatively short window of fishing from the season's opening day until ice-out most years, but Leblanc thinks it will certainly take hold in other places.
"It's all a matter of how many (sections) you want to carry out here," Leblanc said, pointing toward his 60 feet of tubing. "There's really no better way to do it. It totally took me by surprise, but it will catch on. It's just a matter of time before everybody's doing it."
Travis Barrett -- 621-5648
tbarrett@centralmaine.com
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