George’s Outdoor Picks – Captain Mark Stover and Redhook Charters

Captain Mark Stover and Redhook Charters, Boothbay Harbor

Blog posts labeled “George’s Outdoor Picks” tell you about my favorite things from books to bullets to binoculars, fly rods to flashlights, focusing on what’s new – or at least what’s new to me. I do get a lot of products to try, some great, some good, some not so good. In these posts, I’ll only be telling you about the best. To alert you to each Pick post, I will include a photo of my super-large toothbrush, perfect for anyone with a big mouth!

It was good to learn that stripers are now providing some guiding opportunities in the mid-coast. When the stripers disappeared from that area, some of my friends gave up guiding. I remember then-Representative Tom Watson telling me he’d contacted all of his customers for the upcoming fishing season and canceled their trips – unwilling to take their money when he could find them no fish.

I was out for a family boating adventure with Mark Stover of Redhook Charters a couple Saturdays ago, and noticed that his boat had a lot of fishing rods. Mark told me his clients had very good luck catching stripers the day before, including a few large ones. Very good news indeed. Maybe enough to get me back down the Kennebec River for a fishing expedition.

If you are looking to book a striper adventure while the fish are in, I can recommend Mark Stover. While I didn’t fish on our family adventure with him, we were all entertained by his amazing knowledge of every island and house in and outside of Boothbay Harbor, where he docks his boat at the Tugboat Inn Marina. He grew up here and knows everyone and everything about the region. Mark is a talented guy, playing and singing in a popular local band called the Holy Mackerels. His boat is big enough for a sizeable group.

Linda and I are planning a return trip with Mark soon to do a bit of striper fishing and enjoy a picnic and some bird watching on Damariscove Island.

I can also recommend a stay at the Tugboat Inn, where Mark’s wife Bonnie is the long-time and very hospitable manager, and a meal at the Tugboat’s restaurant, where their crab cakes are to-die-for. You can read a column Lin and I wrote about the Tugboat in the Travelin Maine(rs) section of my website (georgesmithmaine.com). Select the “Best of Maine” category, and then the town of Boothbay Harbor, and the column will come up.

Captain Mark Stover, 207-633-3807, 720-0527 cell

George Smith

About George Smith

George stepped down at the end of 2010 after 18 years as the executive director of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine to write full time. He writes a weekly editorial page column in the Kennebec Journal and Waterville Morning Sentinel, a weekly travel column in those same newspapers (with his wife Linda), monthly columns in The Maine Sportsman magazine, two outdoor news blogs (one on his website, georgesmithmaine.com, and one on the website of the Bangor Daily News), and special columns for many publications and newsletters. Islandport Press published a book of George's favorite columns, "A Life Lived Outdoors" in 2014. In 2014, George also won a Maine Press Association award for writing the state's bet sports blog. In 2016, Down East Books published George's book, Maine Sporting Camps, and Islandport Press published George and his wife Linda's travel book, Take It From ME, about their favorite Maine inns and restaurants.