Spring Recon 2015..

Dad, Joe and I headed to the Den yesterday afternoon to see how much winter was left and to be blunt, there's a shit-tonne.. I can't imagine things will be fish-able by the 15th but I guess we'll see!

We drove up through Fredericton, wanting to give the St Mary's bypass a rip and it's a good run but quite boring compared to the usual 123 route..

The mighty St. John river:

Route 8 seems to be infinite but we finally started to get back in familiar territory ... The Southwest Miramichi river at Doaktown:

A bit further down river - Blackville and Doctors Island ---and a whole lotta ice...

We finally made it to the camp, what a pile of friggin' snow AND ice... I  can't imagine how long it took to push all that snow out of the way..

Once we took care of the winter damage to our chimney we made some supper and had a few drinks. It was damned nice to be back at the camp and it was the earliest we've stayed there in spite of the over enthusiastic winter efforts by mother nature.

A few pictures of the river in front of the camp.. did I mention how many deer were around?

Here's a few pictures from the drive home this morning:

Doaktown (Southwest Miramichi)

Route 123
(Cains river)

Of all the ice covered water we saw the Cains looks the most promising... It'll be interesting to see if things are fish-able by the 15th! I'm not holding my breath, that's for sure.

I'm working on another entry that I hope to have up before the season opener called "Why I fish for Black Salmon" - Keep an eye out, it'll be up in the next week or so (hopefully!)






This episode brought to you by the good folks who know how to play a tune:

A whole lotta love ice!

Presentation to Ministerial Advisory Committee for Atlantic Salmon

Presentation to Ministerial Advisory Committee for Atlantic Salmon

Sinclair Crown Reserve (part 1)

It's been a while since I've posted any updates.. mostly due to slow fishing and depressingly low salmon returns across the entire Atlantic Canadian region... The last time I was out seriously fishing was in early July when I hooked 3 and landed 1 within an hour... talk about getting your hopes up! Sadly, we just managed to pull off one of those right place, right time deals where we managed to catch a pod of passing fish. I did get to spend a few minutes of quality time with this beauty though and she was safely returned to the river to continue her mission to pass along her genes to the next generation..

Sorry for the aside, now back to the Sinclair trip!

This would have been my first time to this stretch and I made a promise to myself it won't be the last! It's yet another beautiful salmon river (North Pole) located in the rugged wilderness a long way away from pavement. The bonus --- no cell signal --- !

Bill, Paul, Steph and I packed our stuff and headed to the woods - I have to say, even though this year has been such a depressing salmon fishing season, I was extremely excited to be going on a crown reserve trip with close friends. Crown reserve is special, if you haven't been on one and you're a resident of NB do yourself a favor and book a trip. Even if there aren't many fish around the scenery makes it all worth while.

The view from the camp:

(((CLICK PANORAMA IMAGE FOR A CLOSER VIEW)))

We didn't waste any time after arriving and soon decided on a plan - we'd all head to the upper pools closest to the camp. Bill and I to one and Paul & Steph to the other. 

Things were fairly uneventful at our first stop. We didn't see any fish so we headed down river to the next pool. It wasn't long before I raised a fish on the old faithful blue bomber.. I wasn't 100% sure it was a grilse or trout as it took in fairly quick water .. I kept at it and managed to hook up solid to a nice grilse! It was a good scrap with quite a few jumps and I probably shouldn't have landed the fish but we managed to somehow:

(safely released)

There was a pretty decent rain shower and we managed to get soaked so we headed back down to the camp.

We finished up the rest of the evening uneventfully.

I just can't get over this view from the camp... what a place!

We woke up the next morning to some chilly temps, in fact we had ice formed on the vehicles both nights... Fall is definitely in the air!

0.0 degrees Celsius!

Our plan for our full day (day 2) involved heading up river ... the logging that goes on up there is depressing... why can't we protect the headwaters of our salmon rivers?
(((CLICK PANORAMA IMAGE FOR A CLOSER VIEW)))

(((CLICK PANORAMA IMAGE FOR A CLOSER VIEW)))

(((CLICK PANORAMA IMAGE FOR A CLOSER VIEW)))

Apparently they don't want fords across this bridge... thank goodness we weren't driving one!

I think I'll leave off here for now... Part 2 to follow in the coming days!