Ole Time Woodsman, a fly deterrent with a story that spans back to Maine logging camps in the 1880s, has been resurrected and is now available for purchase online. With a pungent scent that is meant to mask the natural odor of a ripe lumberjack, the dark brown liquid is made from the same recipe as it was more than 100 years ago.
“It’s a mixture of pine tar, petroleum distillates — like mineral oil and stuff like that — and essential oils,” Ken “Skip” Theobald III said. An angler, hunter and businessman from Prospect, Theobald purchased the company from his father and has recently worked with the Environmental Protection Agency in Maine to get it back on the shelves after a two-year hiatus.
“It brings back a lot of memories, the scent does,” Skip Theobald said. “And it works. That’s No. 1.”
Skip Theobald, who grew up in Brewer, remembers he and his grandfather using Ole Time Woodsman when they’d go fly fishing together. The strong-scented concoction would keep them hidden from the hoards of blackflies and mosquitoes, biting insects that inevitably pester anglers throughout the summer in Maine.
To read the rest of “Ole Time Woodsman, a Maine fly dope from the 1880s, is back,” an article by contributing Bangor Daily News staff writer Aislinn Sarnacki, please follow this link to the BDN online.
