The alarm goes off at 3:40 and I lie there for a minute wondering whose idea this was. Mine, apparently. I wrote it on the kitchen calendar back in February, when forty degrees sounded like a gift instead of a chore.
By 5:15 I’m standing on the gravel bar below the Route 153 bridge on the Saco, and I am far from alone. A truck with Maine plates idles at the pull-off. Two guys in a jon boat are already drifting through the run above me. More headlights come down the road behind me, one after another, like it’s the first day of deer season and there’s a checkpoint ahead.
This is opening day. Fourth Saturday in April. Every person in three counties who owns a rod had the same thought at the same hour, and here we all are.
How the morning actually goes
The water is 42 degrees and running high and brown with snowmelt. Cold water means slow fish, and slow fish means I spend the first hour retying. I hang a brown Woolly Bugger on a sunken branch I know perfectly well is there. I do it every year.
Around 7:30 a kid upstream, maybe ten years old, hooks a rainbow on a gold spinner and plays it like he’s done it before. His father gets the net under it and holds it up for a photo in the gray light. That’s the best fish I see all morning. I hook one brook trout at 9:15, nine inches and colored like a carnival, and it comes off at my feet. By 11 I’m skunked and half frozen and driving home past the line of cars still parked along the river.
I love opening day. I also catch almost nothing on it.
What October gives me instead
Here’s the case I make every year to anyone who will listen. October is the best fishing month in New England and almost nobody acts like it.
The water cools back down into the fifties and the fish go on the feed. Brook trout in the upper Pemigewasset turn that impossible color, orange bellies and blue halos, and they get careless about what they eat before spawning. In Maine, landlocked salmon move up into the rivers out of the lakes and they will hit a streamer you swing through a tailout without much argument. Water temperatures around 50 degrees put trout in the fast water more of the day, so you can fish hard from 10 in the morning to 3 in the afternoon and do fine. In July that stretch is a siesta.
The pressure drops off a cliff. Labor Day ends the season for most of the crowd, and by Columbus Day weekend the pull-offs along Route 302 are empty. Last October I had the pool at the Jigger Johnson campsite entirely to myself on a Saturday, with fog on the water and a heron working the far bank. On opening day there’d be six people standing in it.
There are no black flies in October. I’ll take 45 degrees and no black flies over 60 degrees and a cloud of them every single time. And the weather is honest. A bright cold morning in October usually turns into a fine afternoon. An April morning can turn into sleet.
I still go
I’m not arguing you should skip opening day. I’ll be on the Saco again next April with the rest of them. The morning has a pull to it, the ritual of it, the crowd’s energy, the feeling that the season is starting whether you’re ready or not. My friend Dave and I have gone every year since 1998 and I’d miss him if I quit.
What I’ve learned is to stop expecting the fishing from it. Opening day is a social event with rods in it. The fishing starts in October, when the fish are fat and colored up and the river is empty, and I can stand in the water and think about one thing at a time.
If you get skunked this April, mark the second Saturday of October on the calendar instead. Bring the same rod and a box of streamers. You’ll thank me.