John Gonya steers his 18-foot aluminum jonboat through the slow-moving eddies of the Penobscot River’s main stem with a trolling motor. The water, though tannin-stained and dark as tea, runs clear, and the Maine river lays out wide and languid, rock gardens fronting deep pools, the current accelerating to light rapids as it runs over shallow gravel bars.
It’s a cool, cloudy Saturday before Labor Day, and Gonya, guiding on and off for 30 years, has navigated us to an attractive spot — a sand bank with a steep drop-off, submerged rocks just inside a line of slow-moving current. I plop a shiny, bronze-colored Rapala jointed minnow close to the bank, and two jerks later, wham! A feisty smallmouth bass clobbers the bait with all the ferocity for which these freshwater battlers are known.
The fish dives deep and rockets to the surface in a head-shaking spray of defiance. I’m fishing 8-pound monofilament on a 6-foot, 10-inch medium-weight, vintage St. Croix spinning rod. This is no occasion to horse a fish out of the water. About 10 minutes and three leaps later, I bring an impressive 20-inch smallie to the net. We’re two hours into our trip, and it’s the 37th fish we’ve caught and released. And we’re not close to being done.
A little more than an hour later, Gonya maneuvers us into a narrow side channel of still, mirrored water. He ruminates on why he thinks the lower river, particularly this stretch between the hamlet of Greenbush and the Howland Dam 14 miles north, is such a phenomenal smallmouth fishery. “Partly, it’s because it doesn’t get that much pressure,” says Gonya, who guides about 50 smallmouth trips a year during the season, from May 1 through the middle of October. “You kind of have to know what you’re doing.”
Penobscot, in most interpretations, means “river of rocks,” and the indigenous people of the Penobscot Nation who named it have been living along its banks and fishing its waters for 8,000 years. The description is no exaggeration. Ever-fluctuating water levels and countless unmarked, rocky reefs straddling small rip currents make it tricky to navigate. Some years ago, Gonya switched to a propless jetdrive outboard after learning the hard way that the river is a voracious prop eater. But what makes the river tricky for boaters makes it ideal for smallmouth.
I scan that glassy water ahead, and I like what I see. “Looks fishy,” I tell my brother, Bob Wells, who has flown in from Louisiana, where we grew up. This is his first visit to Maine, where I have been a seasonal resident for 10 years and a vacationer for about 30.
Bob agrees with my assessment. With stumps and brush piles cascading from a mucky bank decorated with marsh grasses, he says, “Actually, it looks a lot like the Louisiana bayous.” He would know.
The youngest of six Wells boys in a competitive, fishing-fanatic family, Bob recently retired after a career in nursing. Down on the bayous, he fills up his Facebook page (instead of his stringer) with routinely impressive catches of crappie and largemouth bass in fresh water and speckled trout and red drum in salt water. He fishes four to five days a week year-round, weather permitting. I’m required to say that when I’m down there fishing with my brother, as I frequently am, he outfishes me about 93 percent of the time. However, there are no smallmouth in south Louisiana, making him a smallie novice. This is my third time on this stretch of the Penobscot, so I figure I might have a slight advantage. Maybe.
I float that same broken-back Rapala close to a stump, and another scrappy smallmouth crushes the lure. Bob sails a Rapala Firetiger jerkbait 10 feet down the bank — and gets the same results. “Double!” he yells. Not 15 minutes later we snag our third double — the 59th and 60th fish of the day. Not bad for three-and-a-half hours of effort.
In this stretch, the smallies uniformly measure 15 to 16 inches — typical for the Penobscot — but Gonya tells me he’s seen at least one 23-incher caught here. We end up catching and releasing 67 smallmouth, four chain pickerel and a plump redbreast sunfish. Bob bests me by a fish or two, but since I caught the 20-incher, we declare it a draw.
John Rogers, a seasoned guide who fishes out of Lincoln about 20 miles north, tells me the reason lunkers are hard to come by is that the river has, well, too many fish. There are so many 15- to 16-inchers that “it makes it difficult to get to the bigger fish,” he says. Of course, looking at it another way, it’s not such a bad problem. Rogers has guided many anglers to catches of 100 bass or more in a single day.
What’s even more remarkable is that little more than two decades ago, some parts of the river were unfishable — several sections being literal cesspits of industrial waste and pollution, the hangover effects of generations of logging. “There was a time when I wouldn’t go near it,” recalls Gonya, who was born in the far-north timber town of Millinocket but grew up around Bangor on the lower river. “I can still remember as a kid the smell of the river as it moved through town.”
The water conditions were a deep concern for the river’s once-storied fisheries — brook trout and land-locked salmon in its upper reaches, sea-run salmon, sturgeon and smallmouth on the lower river — and a catalyst for a complicated and remarkable 25-year restoration effort that has brought the Penobscot back to life.
A Mighty River
New England’s second-largest river basin — and Maine’s largest — the Penobscot flows 350 miles from its headwaters to the Atlantic and drains an area of 8,570 square miles. Of two main tributaries, its West Branch rises near Penobscot Lake on the Maine-Quebec border, the East Branch at East Branch Pond near the headwaters of the Allagash River in remote northwestern Maine. They join at Medway, about 60 miles north of the one-time lumber port and shipbuilding hub of Bangor, these days a cosmopolitan college town of about 35,000. The main stem flows another 25 miles until it empties into Penobscot Bay near Bucksport in the area many know as Down East Maine.
The river maintained a thriving, millennials-old shad fishery and, in the days before logging and dams, supported a huge annual migration of sea-run Atlantic salmon, estimated at as many as 100,000 fish. Generations of the Penobscot people relied upon the fat-rich salmon and shad as key food sources. Vast schools of striped bass, alewives and shad foraged for 100 miles upstream.
Logging activities beginning in the 1830s led to deforestation and turned much of the Penobscot into a watery, log super highway. The scale was unimaginable. By one estimate, between 1830 and 1880 alone, endless log booms, guided by men known as river drivers, floated more than 8 billion board feet of lumber to Bangor for processing. Worker camps sprang up, and cities and towns swelled to serve the timber trade, adding to the Penobscot’s woes as untreated sewage found its way into the river.
Dams began to spring up, chopping up the river and impeding natural flow. Most were small scale and initially built to power the more than 250 sawmills along the Penobscot during the 19th and early 20th centuries. By the early 1900s, the lion’s share had been converted to produce hydroelectric power. Electric utilities added two more giant dams, the Veazie and Great Works, and reworked the gargantuan Howland dam into a hydroelectric facility. Sitting above Bangor, these three dams cut off ancient fish migration routes. By the 1950s, salmon, stripers, alewives, shad and the Johnny-come-lately smallmouth, introduced in the 1880s, had all but disappeared.
By 1999, ruing the loss of its historic shad and salmon runs, the Penobscot Nation worked to form the Penobscot River Restoration Trust, a broad coalition that included such organizations as the Natural Resources Council of Maine, the Maine Council of Trout Unlimited, the Atlantic Salmon Federation, The Nature Conservancy, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and state of Maine conservation and regulatory agencies.
The breakthrough came when PPL Corp., a giant New York Stock Exchange-listed electric utility with markets in Maine, purchased nine hydroelectric dams on the Penobscot. The company, after complicated negotiations, agreed to sell the Veazie, Great Works and Howland to the Penobscot River Restoration Trust in exchange for an agreement to allow increased hydroelectric production at other dams to make up for the power loss. By 2004, the trust was able to obtain permits and raise money for removal of the dams. Great Works was demolished in 2012, Veazie in 2013, and a fish bypass was completed around the decommissioned Howland in 2016. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service calls it the largest river restoration project north of the Everglades.
With the lower river reconnected to the sea for the first time in more than a century, the fisheries staged a stunning comeback. Atlantic salmon runs are rebounding. In 2023, the Maine Department of Marine Resources reported a count of 1,520 fish, the highest in a decade and a number that makes it among the largest sea-run salmon runs in the lower 48.
Baitfish numbers are also surging. “Anglers now catch shad in places that were inaccessible to this excellent gamefish for a century,” the Penobscot Restoration Project reports. Counts of migrating alewives, known also as river herring, a key to the riverine food chain, have recovered spectacularly. From almost none in 2010, about 23 million alewives entered the river in 2023, according to The Nature Conservancy. The Penobscot’s smallmouth aren’t going hungry.
Butch Phillips, a Penobscot elder who grew up on the lower river near Old Town, called the restoration project a “dream come true” because “I never thought in my lifetime I would see dams being removed” and the river free-flowing again “as my ancestors experienced it.”
A Rebound Worth Enjoying
It’s early October, and brother Bob has been back to the bayous for a month. And while I prefer to fish with a buddy, our trip and those 67 smallmouth has me hankering for at least one more outing before my wife, Lisa, and I close up our cabin and head back to Chicago after Columbus Day.
I text Gonya, and he says the bite is still on, but offers two caveats: We’re in something of a drought, and the water in the stretch that we fished above Greenburg is so low that most of the honey holes would be inaccessible except perhaps by kayak. We’ll have to fish downriver in an area known as Indian Island near the canoe-making mecca of Old Town, about 12 miles above Bangor.
Meanwhile, the weather has cooled considerably, and water temperatures are dropping. This is good if you’re looking for land-locked salmon or brook trout up on the Penobscot’s West Branch, not so good for smallmouth, which grow sluggish once the chill sets in. I understand but look for reasons to fish.
If you believe the fishing guides, river smallmouth act differently than lake smallmouth. Current is the reason. River fish constantly scan the moving surface for bait or bugs. That’s why shallow-running jerkbaits and top-water plugs are so deadly. That and the fact that the drought also means the fish are herded into smaller areas. That makes me think the temperature won’t matter much. I text Gonya: Let’s do it!
After two hours of fishing the Indian Island area, the chill seems to have in fact cooled off the bite. I’ve raised one fish on that bronze Rapala that was such a killer a few weeks earlier. Gonya believes the fish are hanging out deeper and switches me to a soft plastic grub with an eighth-ounce jig. Ten minutes in, the change hasn’t produced a fish.
Gonya edges the boat up to a retaining wall, and I flick the bait, which smacks the wall, and as it drops, bedlam. A garishly big smallmouth gashes the water in a glittering eruption as it smashes the lure. It rips off line as it dives, torpedo quick, for a submerged log. I can’t turn the fish, and the fight is over in about 10 seconds — line parted, fish gone.
We move upriver, where the Penobscot reclaims a wilder state, and the fishing picks up. I raise no monsters, but the grub remains the ticket. Shorelines bulging with boulders bleeding to rock gardens bathed in easy currents produce some of those feisty 15- and 16-inchers. I’d booked Gonya for a half-day, and with 14 bass brought to the boat, we call it quits. If Bob had been aboard, 30 fish would’ve been possible.
Later, when I ask John Rogers why he thinks the Penobscot smallmouth fishing is so good, he says, the “river is teeming with bait, but we also have amazing insect hatches, which many people overlook. Fly-fishing for smallies here is as good as it gets, and I think many times, flies will outfish traditional baits.”
Dry flies and poppers work particularly well, Rogers says. I think of the Orvis 5-weights on the wall in my Maine garage. I know what I’m doing next season.
