Memorial Day is one of the best times of the year to fish pretty much everywhere you go. It’s not so cold that the fish are lethargic, and it’s not so warm that the fishing shuts down. Typically, you can find good fishing for just about any species, whether striped bass, smallmouth and largemouth bass, trout, or salmon.  In fact, last year I had a day where I went out with my friend Rob and we caught stripers, smallmouth bass, and landlocked salmon on the same day! You can read the article from that day here.

After last year’s success, I was clamoring to get back and repeat it this year.  Unfortunately, Mother Nature had different plans, and a nor’easter came through and dropped the temperatures between 10 to 15 degrees lower than seasonal. This created some challenges as the stripers that were originally migrating up the coast suddenly stalled their migration and remained offshore. The freshwater fishing was similarly slow as the water temperature dropped a few degrees, causing bass to move off their spawning beds and trout to slide out of the riffles into slower runs and pockets.

Nevertheless, with my flight ticket booked, I was determined to see how the fishing was. Despite a rainy first day, I awoke early in the morning to fish a local stocked trout stream that has a decent population of wild brook trout. I fished here with Jo last year and we did incredibly well (read post here). I hooked two fish within minutes of arriving at the spot. Unfortunately, from here on out, the fishing slowed considerably, especially as the rain started to pick up. I caught more fish, but I really had to work for them, and the majority remained in deeper, slower pockets and runs despite the higher flows. Eventually, the rain became too much and I called it before noon.

Two days later, I went up to Maine to link up with my good friend Rob and mutual friend Matt. Although we had originally planned to fish for stripers, the fishing was so poor that we had to come up with a backup plan, so we decided instead to try to get some northern pike on the fly. Before this weekend, I never even caught a northern pike, and Rob had caught a few incidentally on spinning gear, but it never caught one on a fly either. Pike are considered invasive in Maine and are a bit of a nuisance, so we went to a lake that is supposedly infested with them.

Within minutes, I’d landed my first ever northern pike fishing a spot close to the boat launch. It almost felt a little fluky, and the fishing seemed to confirm that as the action slowed down considerably over the next hour, with only a few small pickerel and a decent largemouth bass to show for it. My camera seemed to have the same sentiment as my first-ever northern pike catch was recorded in timelapse mode. I clearly had to pay my dues a little more. Fortunately there were still a few bright spots to the day. My friend Matt got the biggest fish of the day which was solidly 40 in! Rob got his first pike on the fly, and I got a similar sized specimen that was properly recorded on camera this time. The pike infestation was supposedly a bit of a misnomer that day since we had to work extra hard to get only a few fish, but it was well worth the effort and it showed me  a cool fishery that I had been ignoring for years.

With our moderate success on the pike lake, we decided to fish for stripers that following morning. However after a few minutes of casting fruitlessly, we knew that it was a losing effort.  We decided to end the day on a local trout stream as a bit of a consolation and to kill the skunk.  Overall this was among the toughest Memorial Day weekends I’ve ever fished despite having grown up in New Hampshire for the better part of 20 years. Deep down I know that the rain will help keep the fishing good throughout the summer but as I’m sitting inside writing this blog post, my first in three years, on a rainy and dreary Sunday, I know that it was fitting to have a cold and rainy return back home.