September/ fall fishing was a tale of two seasons. The first half of the month felt like August. This is now the norm for this time of year as the climatologists’ study of the data shows northern temperate forests colder weather is about three weeks later than it used to be.

A sampling of the temperatures I took in the 2^nd week of September was:

 Lower Kennebago River: 71 degrees, surface of Moosehead Lake: 68, air temperature at my camp on the 10^th:  80 degrees. Most of the fish didn’t move into rivers, streams or the lake shallows because of warm water.  For example, my daughter went up to the Debouille Pond area and the trout were not in the shallows yet.

River water levels were better than the last few years, but it didn’t seem to make much of a difference.

Even by the end of the month, most places in central and lower parts of Maine hadn’tt experienced any sort of frost and many nights stayed in the upper 40s to mid-50s.

Great fishing could be found if you fished areas in lakes where fish were staging, waiting for river waters to cool. These are usually places with springs or ground water cooling the water. I did find one area in a shallow part of a pond where this was the case and caught dozens of trout in the 8-10-inch range without moving. In my defense, I was fishing barbless and kept waiting for bigger fish to arrive, (which never happened.)

Occasionally, someone caught a nice trout or salmon because a few fish always seem to move early, but that was the exception, not the rule. I caught a few nice trout in staging areas as did others, but always within half an hour of nightfall or sunrise. Then nothing.

More about later September in the next post.