Not really a river.

From the house, looking across the river.

Our house in Maine was an old summer "camp" in the woods above the New Meadows River. The location was perfect on a picturesque little road that dead ended not far away at the local Audubon Society nature reserve, with great views across the estuary. Best of all, we had a canoe to get around in and we had fishing on our doorstep.

It was a handy place too; only 15 minutes from the townships of Brunswick and Bath and only 25 minutes from Popham Beach State Park. The house was a bit primitive and certainly not winter-proof. It was designed perhaps 80 years ago for "Rusticators" like us who sought a more "back to nature" existence. Surprisingly, we had broadband and wireless access to the internet.

The New Meadows River from our landing point.

There are no real hills because the hard rocks have been worn down by huge glaciers, but it's still quite a lumpy landscape. The main features are the necks and inlets of the coast that are valleys formed by glaciers and then drowned when the coast sank beneath the waves. The big local rivers are the Kennebec and the Androscoggin that both flow into Merrymeeting Bay, north of us, then push through a narrow gap to the sea as one river to our east, past Bath where the ship-works takes advantage of the deep water.

Merrymeeting Bay isn't a bay at all; it's really a tidal freshwater lake but, in a boat, you can access it directly from the salt. The water stays fresh because the pressure of water coming down the rivers is greater than the push from the ocean. When these two forces meet at high tide it's an easy passage into the bay, but soon the current rips away as the tide falls and you can ride it all the way to Popham and the open sea. The whiff of all this fresh water coming out of the bay attracts migratory fish such as alewives, eels, short- nosed and Atlantic sturgeon, the odd salmon and some striped bass.

Looking out to sea from Sebasco.

So what of the New Meadows River? It isn't a river any more, it's a tidal inlet; really a fjord. It begins just south of Merrymeeting Bay in a salt-marsh and flows under three road bridges that disrupt the flow enough to form a series of lakes. This disruption delays the tide and creates white-water at the bottlenecks, so it looks like a real river at these points. In the old days, they would have taken advantage of the situation to build tide-mills here.

The New Meadows runs wide, but it doesn't seem to be very deep. At low tide there are sand bars and rocky shoals everywhere. Eider ducks, old-squaws (long-tailed ducks) and laughing gulls sit on the rocks while you paddle past in your canoe. There are chains of rocky, tree-crowned islands, each one providing a home for a noisy osprey family or sometimes a bald eagle.

Looking upstream from Sebasco.

Note the narrows and the clutter of boats and sea-weed.

Because it has no fresh water source, the New Meadows River doesn't attract migratory fish to the same degree as the Kennebec but at the seaward end, near Sebasco, it narrows up into a shallow rocky confusion of channels and bars where navigation is made almost impossible because of the profusion of lobster traps and their markers. A lobster co-operative operates from here and, of course, there is a restaurant there too. There is a similar-set up on the other side of the river at Cundy's Harbour.

I fished the New Meadows several times and caught nothing, but I did see signs of fish and I saw others fishing, so, I wouldn't write it off as a fishing spot. Because it has almost no current, is protected from the ocean by its rocky mouth and has little boat traffic to make waves, its a much better place to explore by canoe or kayak than the rushing, mighty Kennebec where you have to plan your trip to run with the tide.