ROXBURY — At Ellis Pond Variety on Friday, owner Dennis Daniel was talking up the April Fools’ Day joke unwittingly played on fishermen last spring by the Maine Legislature.

At the behest of insistent clamoring from anglers anxious to fish open water following two years of ice-outs in March, emergency legislation was submitted to start the open water fishing season eight days earlier than the normal April 1. It quickly became law.

And now, along comes a normal spring when the ice isn’t going anywhere fast.

The upshot is that fishermen eager to wet their lines on some bodies of water are prohibited from doing so because of this year’s excess ice.

“That’s the joke,” Daniel said.

He said the ice is several inches thick and Friday’s snowstorm, which was expected to dump between 8 and 14 inches or more, would likely grow more ice.

“With this much snow, it’s just going to ice up the waters terribly in what open water we have,” said Peter Bourque, a state fisheries division director.

As of Monday, Roxbury Pond still had 2 feet of ice in places, “but not a speck of water anywhere,” Daniel said.

On Thursday, the last legal day of ice fishing on the pond, anglers continued to fish. By day’s end, they’d removed their shacks, Daniel said.

“Who would have thought we were going to have a snowstorm today?” he asked.

He said ice would keep anglers from fishing area brooks until late April.

One place in Western Maine that typically sees open-water anglers on April 1 is Lake Auburn. Anglers there have developed a unique method of fishing, Bourque said.

“Lake Auburn is the early one for open water,” he said Friday. “That’s where they use those great big poles and extend them out under the ice to fish.”

To get at fish in deeper water under the ice, they use conduit pipe to feed bait away from shore when there’s not enough open water to use a regular fishing rod.

“I don’t know of any other place they do that — innovative Mainers,” Bourque said.

He wasn’t aware of any open water on Friday other than the mouths of tributaries and outlet streams. That’s where any game fishing likely will happen.

Another ongoing opportunity for anyone into snagging sea-run smelts is along the Kennebec River, now that icebreakers have cut their way inland from the ocean, Bourque said.

One fishery is at the boat launch site where the boardwalk is in Gardiner and the other is on the same side of the river in Augusta right behind the buildings on Water Street that usually flood come high water in spring.

“The fish have got to be there by the millions,” Bourque said.

“People go down on the rocks (in Augusta) and they tie on fairly large treble hooks — maybe three or four large treble hooks — and they put a heavy sinker right on the end of the line and they use probably 10-pound test or better line, and they just cast out and keep jigging their pole and bringing it in and cast it out again,” he said.

He said one retiree from the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife went there this week and caught his limit of two quarts of smelts.

“And they’re there by the zillions,” Bourque said. “It’s a neat fishery and it’s pretty popular.”

Then there’s early brook trout and landlocked salmon action if one can only find open water.

But, even though ice fishing is done for the season on Roxbury Pond, it doesn’t mean one can’t still ice fish in Maine. And that’s where the confusion comes in with the rulebook changes, Bourque said.

If, by April 1 ice remains on certain bodies of water, one can continue to ice fish there through April, said Deborah Turcotte, spokeswoman for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife.

“But you have to check the law book for the specific body of water to be sure,” Turcotte said. “If there’s ice on it, and the law book says it’s not open to ice fishing after April 1, you can’t fish.”

tkarkos@sunjournal.com

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