Return to Beaver Lake

 The light of the rising sun touches the tops of pine trees on Beaver Lake, New Hampshire. A lonely loon cries for the end of summer days.

Our neighbour, Mr. Benson, retired last year so he could spend all his time at the lake house. To make the most of every day, he starts with a swim at 5 am, setting out for the far shore with strong regular, over-arm strokes, towing a red marker-float on a short rope, parting the inches thick mist that hugs the grey surface of the water and scattering the black silhouettes of mallards on the way.

The ducks make for the shore at first light to have a preen and look for acorns under the overhanging oaks until Mr Benson returns.

It's good to be the first person out there because by 6 am the first sport-fishing boats will be leaving the public launch ramp and revving their engines. Keen kayak fishermen will be already afloat, probing the shoreline for large-mouth bass that come to the shallows to hunt in the early light. The aluminium bass boats follow them round, passing only yards from our dock, using silent electric motors that are front mounted to make a stealthy approach that isn't possible with a 120 hp outboard engine.

As the sunlight warms the trees, the small birds start their day. It's fun to sit on the dock with your back to the lake watching the cedar waxwings fly-catch over the water. They are soon joined by small flocks of tree swallows, a pair of black and white kingbirds and a pair of eastern phoebes, all of them aerial hunters of insects. A male bluebird with an orange breast calls from the very top of our tree. They are more like our English robins than the American robin, which is really a kind of blackbird.

The lake is surrounded by cabins, many of which are used as holiday or week-end retreats, but an increasing number are lived in year-round. It's the year-rounders who regularly fill their bird feeders  and so attract a lot of "garden" wildlife.

Hummingbirds need to eat as soon as it is light and then in frequent short bursts during the day. We have a special feeder for them, but they ignore it and feed from the touch-me-not balsams along the shore.

Blue jays are noisy and sociable. Their arrival scatters the sparrows and gold finches from the feeding station and they fly to the trees to mix with white breasted nuthatches, chickadees, tufted titmice and woodpeckers. High up in the canopy, passing warblers and vireos glean insects from the undersides of the leaves in our red-oak. A belted kingfisher, as big as a pigeon, rattles past our dock and hovers over the promontory at the end of our bay.

There is a public beach on the lake where early rising pensioners go to do their exercise drill in unison and then swim to the big-band sounds of their youth coming over the tannoy. I can see rubber swimming caps and goggles bouncing along in the roped-off area across the bay.

Chipmunks are late risers but when they get moving they are comically hyperactive, twitching nervously, stuffing their pouches and bouncing on all fours across the lawn. It's time to stock the larder for winter so over a couple of days they take kilos of expensive bird food down into their burrows. Their chip-chip alarm calls alerts me to a hawk overhead.

The State Trooper comes by with his boat on a trailer. He patrols the lakes in the area, looking for fishermen who have no permit, unregistered boats, people using alcoholic liquor, being rowdy or  breaking the law in other ways. He gives me a stern look as he boats by, but I'm just bird-watching. I don't think I need a permit for that.

The air is beginning to move enough for the big soaring birds to come by. A bald eagle planks its way across the sky, glancing down at us with no real interest. A fish laden osprey yelps repeatedly to its unseen offspring. Later a pair of turkey vultures wobble their up-tilted wings as they adjust to every innuendo in the rising breeze. When they are not carrying any food, they seem to have too much wing and not enough weight, which makes them look unstable, like a sailboat with too much sail.

It's getting hot and humid now and there are big cauliflower clouds reflected in the water. Hot gusts of wind scatter silver-dust ripples across the lake. My ears hunt for sounds and I'm almost deafened by the constant background of crickets chirping and cicadas sawing. Normally my brain filters the sound of insects out but in the heavy, oppressive stillness before the storm, they sound threatening.


The birds almost all disappear by brunch-time as the sun gets too bright and the air gets too warm. Our cabin becomes a hot-house and we leave the lake for a while to eat at Mary-Anne's 1950s Diner which has air conditioning.

At noon there is an impressively violent thunderstorm with gusts of wind, hail and heavy rain. Everyone and everything leaves the lake. Then it's all over. The sun pushes through and the puddles vaporise before our eyes. The insects start up again, louder than before and the garden shrubs are visited by dozens of huge monarch butterflies that are on their way from Canada to Mexico. They are surprisingly aggressive, bumping other insects off their chosen patch. All the same, a few other conspicuous species manage to get by them, including great spangled fritillaries, painted ladies and American white admirals. Two kinds of sphinx moth hover over the budleigha flowers, one imitating a wasp and the other a bee. Afternoon seems to be the best time for big insects such as gigantic yellow-and-black bees and huge black wasps and there are are dozens of them to see.

The serious ladies' kayak club appears every day around four o'clock. They paddle by in a strung out convoy, each locked in silence behind dark glasses. My greetings are not returned. One of them has her black dog tucked in the cockpit with her.

Bill-next-door takes his three grand-children out in his pontoon boat for a spin. They chat, scream and giggle joyously. A few fishermen come back for a second session, but after tea the lake gets really busy with water skiers, jet-boaters and party people. The gutsy smells of petrol and grilling barbecues invade the cabin.

In the fading light, nighthawks drift back and forth across the open ground near the public beach, plucking moths from the sky. Their southward migration south has only just begun and we see more of them each day.

It's family time now. Lights appear from the cabins and docks around the lake before sunset. There is a narrow window of opportunity to eat outdoors in the evening air before the mosquitoes become too fierce and most people seem to take advantage of it.

Just after dark, every ten minutes, I patrol the garden with my son to look for Tinker-Belles (fireflies) in the darkest corners of the shrubbery. We pause to stare at the millions of stars above, but are driven indoors by the mossies. Later we lie in bed, listening to the gentle splop of tiny waves that bump our aluminium canoe against the dock.

There are beavers out there in the dark, but they stay away from the cabins until the lake is frozen over and only a few year-rounders are left to see them, but as dawn approaches again I spot a pair of muskrats as black, mini-beaver silhouettes against the greyness of the water. They dive repeatedly for water plants that grow prolifically in the shallows near the shore. I put on a jug of coffee and so begins another day at Beaver Lake.

Beaver Lake

Dawn on Beaver Lake. Mist rolls across the water and the black silhouettes of pine trees stand like cut-outs against a backdrop of a painted pink-and-ink sky. It looks like the start of a slick TV commercial, shot in HD. A large bird flaps across the water. It's a bald eagle that comes here every day at dawn, about an hour ahead of the local osprey.  A great blue heron stands alert on the little dock in front of me. To complete the image of a backwoods paradise, a loon calls as it too comes to start fishing. All these birds eat fish so that's a good sign, but  by 5.30 am the first kayaker will be fishing right in front of our cabin and by 6.30 there will be an array of water craft passing by, all with guys on board, fishing for large-mouth bass.


Every day starts the same, although it's busier at week-ends. Because the fish "seek structure" they like to hide among the legs of docks and under moored boats along the shore, so boating anglers like to cast towards the shore with rubber worms or frogs using light bait-casting roods. I prefer to beat them to it by fishing a short fly-rod from the shore.

The thing on the end with a hook in it can't really be called a fly; its made from a small cork, painted bright yellow and it has three white rubber bands threaded through it and a red tail made of feathers to finish it off. It's called a pan-fish popper and it could represent a bug, a frog, a grasshopper or an injured fish. The technique is to plop it down with a splash almost under the neighbour's dock and watch the ripples spread. If nothing happens you give it a twitch which causes the flat face of the cork to make a popping sound while creating a bubble and more spreading rings. It's great fun because you can see the action the whole time and you can keep the popper in the "hot-spot" near the dock for quite a long time by making very short pulls and long pauses.

Because my rod is very short and light, it can't cast big "bass-bugs" very far, so I use the smaller panfish sizes. This means I might miss a few strikes because the hook is small, but it also means that I don't just catch large-mouths. Mostly I catch beautiful sunfish that look like something you would expect to see around a coral reef. The one's here have iridescent scales of green and blue.

My tactic is to start at the shore and cover every likely spot, then work my way out along our dock to the end where I might spend half an hour casting towards a swimming platform moored off shore. Sunfish like to come in at dawn to take up territories at  the edges and can be found in only four inches of water. As I move out to deeper water, the chances of catching a bass increase. The popper might need a couple of chugs and then there will be a noisy boil where your fly was. If you see the actual take, your fly is just inhaled into a hole about the size of a jam-jar or a seaside bucket. The noise is a "glug" rather than a splash.  It stops you dead; but you wake up when your reel starts singing. Even small  largemouths are impressive fighters on light tackle. They can pull your line around the dock or they can go airborne, rattling their fins as they do so; and they keep it up for ages.


Unless you are in a big boat, a landing net is not necessary; you just put your thumb in the fish's big mouth and lift him up by his lower jaw. Don't try this with pickerel though. They have needle sharp teeth despite being much smaller than our pike.

New England is really small-mouth bass territory. Largemouths don't belong up here in the cool zone. The big ones are found down in the deep south where there is no winter ice cover, so a good fish at Beaver Lake would be less than three pounds. But once you have caught one you can see why they are widely stocked around the world, not just in the USA. You only have to look at the boats and gear that anglers buy to catch these fish to know that bass fishing is a multi-million dollar business. There are "Bass-pro" shops, magazines, DVDs and TV shows.

A fully rigged bass boat has a huge outboard motor on the back to get you to the hot-spots ahead of the competition. The flared V-shaped hull lifts the boat high so that it almost flies but, when you stop, it drops down to become a stable pontoon to fish from. Usually one angler fishes from a swivel-seat on the nose, guiding the boat around with a little electric motor controlled by foot pedals. He can read the relay from his fish-finder/GPS/echo-sounder from there too. Another angler may fish from the stern. These flash, bass-boats have everything from cup-holders to bait-wells built in and they fit on a small trailer that even a mini-car could tow. They are immensely desirable, but they are not my style.

After breakfast I take out an ancient, aluminium, Canadian canoe and fish from that. Others might prefer kayaks, but for fly-fishing the canoe is more stable. This is the ideal way to fish for me and it's a great way to approach wildlife and take photos. There are still beavers on the lake and any beaver lodges, logs or even old tyres will have turtles sunning on them by mid-day. I always wanted to be Davy Crockett when I was a kid, so that tradition is probably part of the appeal for me. Ideally I'd have a vintage wooden canoe but the aluminium one works fine.

Beaver Lake lies on the outskirts of the little town of Derry in New Hampshire. It's about an hour from Boston and just off the main highway, so its a popular spot, especially for ice fishing when other lakes may be difficult to access by road.  The NH Fish and Wildlife Department, which has a generous stocking programme, posts information on the lake with a useful map showing depths and access points.

New Hampshire is "The Granite State" and so it's no surprise that this spring-fed lake is low in nutrients and crystal clear, even after rain. Erosion is minimised because of the surrounding pine forests and besides, there is almost no soil around the shore to run off in a storm. The lack of weed in the main lake is probably due to low nutrient levels and the effects of the long, hard winters here.

Almost the whole shore is in private hands. An array of cabins, week-end homes and permanent residences lies beneath the trees, each home sporting its own dock and boat, but you can access the water from a public boat ramp and there is a swimming beach with a lifeguard on duty when it is open.

There are thousands of lakes like this in New England. The most accessible ones are heavily stocked and heavily fished while the more remote ones may have wider access from the shore and could be good for small-mouths, brook trout and lake trout. Bait fishing on the bottom might bring you a surprise catch. Burbot are extinct in the UK but these freshwater cod are still found in the north-east USA where they are called eel-pout. There are also some catfish down there in the depths.

For someone like me from the Old Country, every cast is an adventure.