All photos courtesy Lenny Ackerman
The author sets up his East Grand Canoe for an excursion on the lake.
The Cessna Seaplane circled the western shoreline of East Grand Lake, at the edge of the Maine border with Canada. My buddy, Ted Stratigos, had given the pilot the latitude and longitude of his family fishing camp, located on one of the rocky coves. From my cramped position in the back of the small cabin, I squinted out the window for any visual clues we might be getting close. I had never been there, so I wasn’t exactly sure what to look for, and I was distracted by the surrounding lake scenery.
Ted, his significant other, Lori, and I had planned a trip to the Restigouche River in Canada to fish for salmon that weekend, intending for me to meet them at the camp and then drive the hour or so up to the lodge in New Brunswick, Canada, the following morning.
The pilot announced he had a landmark in sight: Greenwood Island, a small, uninhabited, fully forested mound in the middle of the lake surrounded by ancient glacial boulders. I could see Ted and Lori on a dock, waving a bright yellow blanket. It was summer, 2016, and that ride in the rear seat of a claustrophobic seaplane was for me the start of a different kind of fishing adventure.
Seaplanes are one of the transportation options for visitors to northern waters like East Grand Lake.
Though I’d not seen the far north before, I had made trips to southern Maine for years with my wife, Judie, from our home in East Hampton, New York. Camden had become a regular destination for us starting in the late 1990s. We were enchanted by the quintessential, coastal New England town nestled between the Camden Hills and Penobscot Bay. Over the next five summers we stayed in various rentals in the area, always drawn back by the natural beauty, the hiking and boating, and the uncrowded, unhurried pace of life. It was an idyllic period, while it lasted. In 2004, Judie suffered a debilitating stroke, and though she fought back for a spell and our summer visits resumed, a second stroke further limited her mobility in 2012.
After that setback, urged by Judie and my daughters to go, during the next several years I fished throughout the United States, Alaska, Canada, the Amazon, Patagonia, New Zealand, Iceland, eastern Europe, England, Ireland and Wales. No place was too far or exotic, which is how I found myself in that seaplane, meeting Ted and Lori.
The dock was slippery with a heavy coat of mildew and lake debris. As I greeted my friends, I glanced at the upward sloping property dense with weeds and overgrown bushes. The remains of an old log pile were scattered off to the side. Behind all the rough growth some 20 feet from the dock was a rather grand but decrepit log cabin with a green, mildewed roof topped by an old brick chimney. A few ragged remnants of wire mesh screen clung to the framing around the front porch, and in the grass before it, a metal signpost lay flat on the ground. As we walked up, I could see it was a corroded “For Sale” sign.
We were standing on the neighbor’s land. There were simply too many submersed boulders in front of Ted’s camp next door for the Cessna to land safely. The owner of the derelict property was a retired woman from New Hampshire, but she hadn’t used the camp for years and in the meantime had put it on the market.
[Above]: The screened porch at Camp Kabrook has a tremendous view of the lake. [Middle]: A fire ring in the front yard is well-situated for lakeside evening entertainment. [Below]: The camp’s stone fireplace is welcome on cool summer nights and in the shoulder seasons.
A fire ring in the front yard is perfect for lakeside evening entertainment.
I began to poke around. A smaller second log building in even worse condition was to the rear. I turned back to look out at the view of the water and stopped. For a moment everything was still—the water, the air, the trees. It seemed in that instant that even the birds fell silent. This was a rough gem of a campsite set in a blanket of evergreens on a secluded lakefront. Perfect.
That night, drifting off to sleep at Ted’s camp, I thought about how Judie would enjoy sitting on the porch overlooking East Grand Lake and, more importantly to her, how she would love being involved in the refurbishment and decoration of that tiny pearl in the woods. I felt a renewed surge of optimism about a future for us together in Maine. It would be a simple “home waters” place where we could spend time off the grid with our girls and friends. No more foreign fishing expeditions, as I would be able to cast for the lake bass and salmon right from the dock. I could make it work. I went back the next morning before we set out to write down the broker’s information on that overturned sign.
I fished for Restigouche salmon over the next few days, but didn’t catch any. My mind was elsewhere the whole time. Conversations centered on East Grand Lake as I peppered Ted with questions about his family camp and the worn-down camp next door.
The camp’s stone fireplace is welcome on cool summer nights and in the shoulder seasons.
Ted’s family history at East Grand Lake dated back to 1963, when his father, Chris Stratigos, an engineer with Grumman Aerospace on Long Island, learned about land for sale in northern Maine from a co-worker. That summer, the Stratigos family packed up the old Ford station wagon and headed north to East Grand Lake.
There, Chris met up with a local logger who owned lakefront property that he reputedly won in a poker game and now was selling off as single lots. A new logging road had opened on the west side of the lake, but only went about a half mile in. The secluded two-acre waterfront property Chris Stratigos bought would have no car access for another year. After carrying their gear the last half mile, an area was cleared for a tent and that was camp for the next two weeks. By the late 1960’s, the tent was replaced by a pop-up trailer, and later trees were cut down on site and spoke-shaved clean to serve as logs for a 20- by 40-foot cabin. The building rested on a foundation of four large granite rocks, of which there were many on site (the newly cut road was eventually christened, appropriately, “Boulder Road”).
The Stratigos family camp was one of the first on East Grand Lake, and the original buildings still stand and are used to this day by Chris’s children and grandchildren.
And, of course, other camps had also been built around the lake, including the one next door that had caught my eye.
A smallmouth bass is the catch of the day during a fishing trip on East Grand Lake.
The natural history of East Grand Lake is glacial, formed as it was during the last ice age. The thousands of massive prehistoric sub-surface boulders (the bane of many an outboard motor) are the timeless remnants of it. Its waters teem with various species such as landlocked salmon, lake trout, yellow perch, white perch, smallmouth bass, largemouth bass, American eel, and brook trout, among others. Long before the first seaplane alit on its glassy surface, the lake and its environs were inhabited by the indigenous Passamaquoddy and Maliseet tribes, followed by pre-colonial European settlers. The plentiful natural resources in the region provided ample sustenance and materials to maintain their ways of life.
During the 1800s, life around the lake underwent rapid change when it became a hub of the burgeoning lumber industry. Tree trunks were floated down to sawmills for processing and then transported along to other destinations in the region. For nearly 100 years, logging was the essential economic activity in the area. Danforth, the closest community to East Grand Lake, was officially incorporated in 1840 and was, until the decline of the timber industry in the mid-20th century, a thriving, all-American small town. The advent of summer recreational activities on the lake, like fishing and boating, has revived the economy somewhat, but Danforth remains largely depressed.
After returning to East Hampton, I set aside the idea of buying the camp for a while. In the spring, on a whim, I called the Danforth broker to see if the property was still available, and it was. Though I hadn’t seen any of the interiors, other than what was posted on the realtor’s website, I told her I would pay the asking price. It was only after I signed the contract that I flew up to walk around inside the two cabins and inspect what I had unflinchingly bought.
One month passed between the final contract and the closing, which was on August 8, 2017. Judie died unexpectedly at home the next day. I didn’t return to Danforth for more than a year after her death.
A 1958 Aerocraft Aeroline RSD aluminum runabout is equally adept as a fishing platform and classic lake cruiser.
It was Lori who finally coaxed me back up to Maine. The two cabins were cleaned out and I stopped along the way at the L.L. Bean store in Bangor to buy some furnishings. Slowly, a warm, inviting home away from home was created out of those two old, rundown cabins on Boulder Road. I called the camp “Kabrook,” a blend of my daughters’ names, Kara and Brooke. In 2019, I met Patti, my new love in my life, who has made the camp what it is for me today—home waters.
Each spring since, I’ve evicted what must be the same family of mice that have been living there for generations. The kitchen was improved with modern appliances, but the original old kerosene heater keeps us warm on those early May visits when trout season opens. Recently I built a third cabin on the property—a small library-office-painting shed to house my books and other hobbies.
Since buying the camp I haven’t needed another fishing trip abroad. I take my morning coffee down to the dock and cast for small mouth bass, then afternoons my guide and friend Andy picks me up dockside with his canoe for jaunts on the lake to search for top-of-the-water bass. Greg, the camp caretaker, and I regularly go fishing for trout in beaver ponds he assures me no one else knows about. I take float trips with my 20-foot East Grand canoe and regularly explore Baskehegan and Spudnick lakes.
When not fishing or boating, the author relaxes with his watercolors.
Camp Kabrook is now the home waters that Judie and I had always hoped to build together. It is a peaceful place, with morning sun each day over Greenwood Island. I am reminded of something I said to Ted during that first trip to Danforth: “I’ve fished in some of the most beautiful rivers, lakes, and streams all over the world, and East Grand is the most magnificent lake I have ever seen.”
✮
Lenny Ackerman is a lawyer, a columnist for The Mountain Messenger newspaper, and the author of three books: Here Back East, Fishing the Morning, and Fishing to Home Waters.
