Popham Beach and the Morse River

High tide: Lagoon on left, Morse River mouth on right.

I recently returned to the Morse River after an absence of 12 years to find that it had changed hugely. When I parked-up at 5.30 am outside the locked gates of the Popham Beach State Park, my fly rod wasn't set up. By the time this was achieved the mosquitoes had made a meal of me so I vowed to keep the rod ready for a quick start on future visits, and to carry repellant.

Once away from the trees the mossies quit and I made a much shorter walk to the beach than I remembered from my last visit. One of the toilet blocks that used to be in the woods looks like it might well be in the sea by next year. The tide was ebbing strongly past a cliff of sand with trees sticking out of it where once there was a boardwalk to the beach. I made a few casts at the foot but had no luck so worked my way downstream a few hundred yards to the sea, a cast at a time.

Looking back down the lagoon to the car-park.

I didn't see a fish, but the bird-life was spectacular. Among brutal looking gangs of large gulls, little groups of waders ran about the water's edge. In the early light of a damp morning I could just about make out that some of them were plovers and lots of them were least sandpipers.  The ones that looked more dunlin-like turned out to be semi-palmated sandpipers, not the Western sandpipers I expected. Egrets and great blue herons abounded and double crested cormorants pretended to be loons.

I turned back and explored upstream where the river had widened to form a lake that I didn't remember being there before. It was well established with some emerging reeds at the edge. I followed coyote and raccoon tracks in the sand and watched short-billed dowitchers and lesser yellow-legs feeding in the shallows while a small flock of black-bellied plovers slept above them on a sand bank. A whimbrel called and then I came to a dead stop, and so did the river.

Looking up the Morse River towards Spirit Lake.

I was presented with a sand bar that completely blocked off the flow. Climbing over the top, I found the river on the other side where it made a right-angled turn into the sea. The stretch that I had spent an hour fishing was no longer part of the river, so where was all the water coming from? It seemed that the pond acted as a reservoir, filling with water at every tide and draining through the bottleneck by the cliff below.

Seeing the real river gave me fresh hope of a fish. A huge shoal of  sand-eels was gathered near the far shore and a seal was rolling about in the current. A pair of bald eagles watched from a pine-snag beyond. It looked very fishy to me, but I felt I didn't know anything anymore. It was a fresh start for me in a new land where my task was simply to find a place where I could catch a striped bass on a fly.

I made the trek back to the car park and was met by a ranger who gave me a good telling off for parking on the grass, but he was fundamentally friendly and informative ( he was a local lad who fished here himself) and he sold me a $10 night pass that gave me the combination to the gate-lock so that I could get access to the beach outside of opening hours for the rest of the season, which seemed like a good deal. I used the pass twice but saw no fish and gave up on the Morse River for this year. Perhaps this was a mistake because bass still go there and, if they do, you have a chance to reach them with a fly-rod. From the main beach, you'd have to get really lucky, but I tried.

The back-story is that, since 2005, a succession of hurricanes like the one that passed over New England this week, has caused a big shift in the beach at Popham so that the mouth of the Morse River has migrated quite a bit. By early 2009 the river ran close to the car park, taking out the dunes and even some of the pine woods that had been there for over 50 years. In August 2009, during Hurricane Bill, the river over-ran the offshore spit but it wasn't until the end of the year that the Morse broke through to the sea nearly a mile upstream, beheading the lower reach to form what is now called the lagoon.

The net result may not be so good for fishing, but the lack of fish is more probably due to other factors entirely. Meanwhile it is still an extremely beautiful place and it is much better for birds and wildlife than it was. No time spent there is wasted. I'll be back.