A Few Days on Great Pond

After finishing my last test and turning in my final essay, I joined nine friends to make the twenty mile drive due west to Tucker's cabin on Great Pond in the Belgrade Lakes region of Central Maine. We brought nothing but the essentials: ten sleeping bags, four beer balls and two cases of beer, ten pounds of hamburger meat and two pounds of flank steak, three fishing poles, two dozen night crawlers, two avocados, five packs of Bubbilicious Bubble Gum and one pack of original Redman.

For three days we terrorized the cold waters of Great Pond in search of elusive brown trout and male bonding. We woke up early and fell asleep late.

Regardless of how often I organize my tackle box, it inevitably looks like this. I guess tackle box entropy is an essential part of fishing and a necessary hurdle standing between a fishing pole and a golden fried trout.

Four of these Beer Balls lubricated the cold the water of Great Pond and sleeping on the hard floor of Tucker's uninsulated cabin.

We relied on manpower to negotiate the glacial lake, not this fine piece of American outdoors equipment.


LL Bean Old Town Canoe like my Grandpa has. Old Milwaukee Beer like my dad drank at the University of Wisconsin. Night Crawlers like I used on the banks of the Columbia River as a little boy.

Tucker's Blackberry is back in action after five months in Copenhagen studying architecture. I look forward to bopping around Maine next fall with Tucker after my summer in the Big City.

We didn't catch a single fish, but we sure drank a lot of beer, ate a lot of meat, burned a lot of wood and told a lot of stories. I couldn't ask for a better start to my summer. Many thanks to Heather, Tucker's mom, for letting us use the cabin.

Here are some more links,
Fishing on a Monday (Picasa),
Fishing in a Canoe (Vimeo).