Sportsmen, especially those of us who still have traits of boyhood lingering beneath the surface, like to form clubs or groups that foster fellowship and camaraderie. Two such groups stand out for me. One is a hunt group and the other is a fishing group. The hunt group, the Skulkers of Seboeis, is still around after all these years. The fishing group, the Crater Lakers, has long since faded and is today just a memory. A number of Crater Lakers have passed on and are no doubt paddling the Silver Canoe with my Millinocket friend, Wiggie Robinson, who passed away about this time of the year in 2007.

Crater Lake, which is located way up north in Aroostook’s Deboullie Country, is a tiny, shallow, silt-rich kettle pond. The trout are an elusive, sulking sort that lay in the silt and rarely hit a fly or a lure. If you were lucky enough to catch one back in the heydays of the Crater Lakers, you would be amazed that a brook trout could be so fat! Crater brookies looked like mutants, with little beer bellies hanging in front of their pelvic fins. Great in the pan, though. Red, succulent meat.

Founded by Millinocket school principal, Floyd Bolstridge, the Crater Lakers got rolling in the early ’70s. Floyd grew up in Aroostook County at Buffalo Siding near Portage, not all that far from the old logging roads and walking trails that crossed the Red River and made the Deboullie Country accessible to the die-hard trouters willing to walk 10 miles to catch big trout. When Floyd was a kid, he and his dad made the long trek with packs on their backs, their fishing rods, some grub and plans to stay for a week. Back then, in the early 1940s, you could keep 25 trout a day. For that week, Floyd and his dad lived on trout. Shelter was a tarpaper lean-to. Later on, in the early 1970s, the Crater Lakers – with Floyd’s fishing knowledge of the area — caught some handsome trout. But compared with the size of the trout in Floyd’s faded family snapshots of him and his dad, our trout were large sardines.

For a span of about eight years, the Crater Lakers gathered every Memorial Day weekend at the Togue Pond tent sight. There was always six or seven of us. The three-day outing, as I recall, was heavy on eating, imbibing, story telling and fishing. Sleep was a rare commodity. We were young then.

In the evening around a big campfire at the lake shore, Floyd would pass around a jug of Ole Stumpblower. After some lubrication, Floyd would stand atop the big rock beneath the star-studded sky, cup his hands around his mouth, suck in a lungful of cool County air and render the so-called “Buffalo Hoot.” His hoots would echo back from the distant hills and rocky cliffs that still surround the deep, cool trout ponds that make up Deboullie Country. I can still feel the hair standing up on the back of my neck.

On one trip, two of our Crater Lakers, the late John Rogers from Winterport and Henry Downs from Newburgh, got hopelessly lost on the maze of logging roads on the way into camp. Frustrated, the disoriented twosome stopped at a brook about nightfall to get their bearings and share a tug or two from a bottle of Irish Whiskey. Long story short: our wayward Crater Lakers finally found camp, but not until midnight. Their old pickup truck was mud-caked and festooned with leaves and alder branches. Inside the cab of the truck it looked as though there might have been a scuffle, stuff strewn everywhere. Sandwich wrappers. Fly boxes. Candy wrappers. A torn map. Some empties. Amid the debris, on the floor of the truck, was what was once a fine 5-weight fly rod broken in a number of pieces. Of relevance is the fact that our two latecomers were, in their workaday lives, Bangor Daily News executives. The broken fly rod, a keepsake Sage, was a loaner from the legendary Bangor daily News outdoor writer Bud Leavitt. The rest is history. To this day, I don’t know the whole story of what happened that night. I do know that a new fly rod was purchased for Mr. Leavitt. He did, as I remember, manage to use the incident, as I have, as fodder for one of his daily outdoor columns.

As with any good hunting or fishing club, members are a diverse group from all walks of life. One Crater Laker, the late Jack Groves, was a custodian at the school where our leader, Floyd, was bossman. About a month before our spring fishing trip, Floyd had to fire the custodian in an austerity move. Receiving his notice in Floyd’s office, Jack grew misty-eyed. “Floyd,” he choked, “does this mean that I won’t be able to fish with you guys?”

Jack did fish with us that year, and a number of years after. In fact, he was with us the year of the Big Fish Fry. For two days the rain never let up. Looking for a spirit lifter, we erected a big tarp, pooled all of our trout, picked some fiddleheads at Galilee Pond and invited some other wet campers to join us for a fish fry. It was a raucous, festive night and a meal to be remembered: crisp pan-fried brookies, fresh fiddlehead greens and beer biscuits.

Good times, good food, and good fellowship. For a fleeting, little-known Maine fishing group, called the Crater Lakers, Memorial Day weekend in Deboullie Country was always a very special time.

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The author is editor of the Northwoods Sporting Journal. He is also a Maine Guide, co-host of a weekly radio program “Maine Outdoors” heard Sundays at 7 p.m. on The Voice of Maine News-Talk Network (WVOM-FM 103.9, WQVM-FM 101.3) and former information officer for the Maine Dept. of Fish and Wildlife. His e-mail address is [email protected] and his new book is “A Maine Deer Hunter’s Logbook.”