Last Friday I hopped in my car full of rods, waders, paints, and art and headed straight to Maine for Oxbow Brewing’s second annual All Species fishing tournament.
The rules: you have 24 hours to catch as many fish in Maine as possible. You can catch the most of all fish, the biggest of any fish, but most importantly you need to have a good time and stay hydrated… and you know, beer is mostly water!
I teamed up with my good buddy and neighbor Mike Barcone who runs West Kill Brewing. We headed up to Lakewood Camps near Rangely, ME with our other buds: West Kill’s Catskills taproom manager Nicole Pursell, filmmaker Bill Killer, and swamp rock country western DJ Eric Davidson.
And while giant Maine-sized Brookies were our Maine goal, considering the unfortunately timed heat wave of last week, we were hoping to catch pretty much anything. I knew at the very least I could see a new world of landscapes and was not disappointed at all.
All that said, fishing-wise we did pretty good! The brookies were hard to find, but the landlocked salmon were more than happy to say hi.
Truly, the hardest part was just measuring them. I’m quite envious of the teams targeting striped bass out on boats with rulers on the floor. Measuring tape, a landing net and salmon very much looking forward to leaving said net make for a hard combo!
By Sunday it was time to say bye. We zoomed back across the lake, hopped in our cars, and headed to Oxbow’s Beer Garden in Oxford, ME.
There winners were announced (Mike and I got third in salmon—though Eric should have won but, you know, the measuring…), hydration continued, and I sold some art too.
Thanks so much to Oxbow for putting this together! Cheers!
-Steven