2024 Miramichi Fall Salmon Season Wrap Up

Fishing Friends –

I think I can safely say that for anyone who does very much salmon fishing, 2024 will be remembered as the toughest season in a very long time.  That isn’t to say that no fish were caught, and that there weren’t some bright moments, but in general it was a continuation of the trend that began in 2012 and has accelerated in the last few seasons.  Striped bass, massing in the mouth and estuary of the Miramichi to spawn are eating a high percentage of the salmon smolts heading out to sea.  This is showing itself first in the extremely poor grilse numbers, but also a significant decline in multi-sea-winter salmon.  MSW salmon numbers are to a degree bolstered by older, repeat spawners, though despite that boost the decline is still very serious.

There are some strong efforts underway right now to get DFO to reduce the bass numbers to a level where the bass and the salmon can coexist, and to do it right away.  According to fishery scientist John Bagnall, and echoed by others including retired DFO John Ritter, retired DNR Bill Hooper and others, bass number needs to be below 100,000. You’ll be hearing a lot more about that later this fall and winter.  We have to be successful or there simply will eventually be no Miramichi salmon fishery at all.

Just returning recently from 5 weeks on the Miramichi it is fresh in my mind how much I enjoy salmon fishing.  My love for the salmon and the Miramichi River itself are big factors in my life.  I know I’m not alone in my passion for the river, and I assure everyone reading that very soon you will have your chance to meaningfully help Miramichi salmon.

The summer portion of the salmon season on the Miramichi wasn’t great, but a lot of that was the weather and not strictly the size of the salmon run.    A look back through my 2024 early summer blogs reminds me that the Miramichi was hit with an unusual early season heat wave on June 16, and it was more than a week before fishing became possible again.  Note that you can just scroll back on the blog page and read the entries for June and July of 2024, but also any blog from the last 12 seasons.  As it normally does, a decent run of fish came in right around the first of July, in fact the pool at Doctor’s Island was full of salmon one evening, but they wouldn’t touch a thing.  A few days later the river was again too warm for good fishing, and it stayed that way more or less until September.  Contrast that to the two previous years when we had high, cool water all summer long.  The bottom line was that there were only a couple of weeks during the first half of the season when we had both salmon and conditions when they would take a fly.

It seems that during warm summers, much of the salmon run arrives on time in spite of the conditions, but the fish move almost entirely at night.  The salmon end up in the headwaters and the cold-water pools with most anglers having only a passing chance at them at best.

Using the October 15 trap numbers as a rough total for the whole season. it appears that by July 31, 2024 about 60% of the entire season’s run had entered the river.  On both the SW and NW branches the trap numbers were greater than last year – very likely due to inefficiency of the traps in high water – but down by about 66% from the early 2000s.  The percentages of the run comprised by early and late running fish respectively do fluctuate a bit season to season, but a 60/40 early to late run comparison is not an unusual distribution pattern for the Miramichi, but it is on many salmon rivers.  This good run of late season fish often finds fresh salmon coming in on the last day of the season or even after the season.  I’ve experienced it many times, and the long season is one of the things that makes the Miramichi the great fishery that it is.

 

While warm water was the bane of the summer fishery, the problem was low water in the fall. To me, low water generally mean heights on the Blackville gauge of less than .69 meters.  Water heights that get down to the .55M or below range are thought of by most of us to be very low.  There are years in a row when we never see a water height below .55M.  This year it got down .40M!  Now that is really low.  Most pools had either no perceptible flow in them or just small areas of the pool with any flow at all.  Fishing usually just isn’t very good much of anywhere at those levels, as pooled up fish just don’t want to take a fly in that low flow.  Additionally, very few new fish will enter the river on periods of weak flow, and you are left with only stale fish.

The extreme low water persisted almost all of September and the entire first full week of October.  I say almost because we did have a modest rain on September 8^th   and a couple more drops on 9/27.  That first small raise lasted less than a week, but it did bring in a few new fish and moved a few more fish up the river from one pool to the next.  We did catch several fish during this period including a nice cock salmon from the Cains.  I was really surprised at how dark

that fish was for early September.  I suspect that salmon had been laying in the freshwater portions of the Miramichi since sometime in July or August.  I was stripping a big, orange marabou fly when the fish took.  You have to wonder if it was the advancing season making it defensive about its territory or excitement over getting ready to leave the pool that brought on the strike. I’m sure that fish had been watching flies go by it for a long time before that raise brought about the change in its attitude.

By the way, Steve Smith – pictured to the right with a salmon – e-mailed me that he had won £1,000 from a draw of anglers who had returned salmon tags to NASCO.  Interestingly, I compared notes with Eddie Colford of the Black Brook Salmon Club, and neither of us had seen a tagged salmon in our 2024 catches.  It could mean absolutely nothing, but it is unusual.

Around the middle of September, I started getting reports of fresh run salmon being seen down in the Rapids.  I heard from various people fishing Orr Pool, Mountain Channel, Grey Rapids and Quarryville, but mostly from the guides at Country Haven who are all over the Rapids in the fall.  Everyone was in the same boat, with fish being seen but few connected with.  On September 27 the main stem of the SWM did get a few mm of rain, and it brought us a handful of new fish.

Finally, there was about a half inch of rain on October 8 during the last week of the season, and it seemed to perk everything up.  On the 14^th we had another decent rain event, but most of the effects of that raise didn’t take place until after the season was over.  All four rain events of the fall did not equal 2 inches.

I’m looking forward to seeing  the 10/31 trap numbers if the 10/15 to 10/31 period has a decent number of fish entering the rivers.  I’m going to guess that it did.  I just got an e-mail from Byron Coughlan of Country Haven.  Byron said that Kenny Vickers had been working around the lodge on October 22nd.  It was a dark and glassy calm day.  Kenny said that Vs of fish that could only be salmon were making their way for hours up the placid water in front of the lodge.  This isn’t to say that all is well on the Miramichi and the fish just came later.  It is likely, though, that due to the warm summer and very low water fall that there are still salmon entering the river to spawn this fall.  Now is the time.  Spawning is already underway in some parts of the river, and the Cains is known for its late spawning activity.  New redds have been known to appear on the Cains well into November.

On both the 12^th and 13^th we found fish holding down in the bottom of Keenan’s across from the Campbell’s Pool house.  This should be no surprise since it has historically been a good fall producer.  The area is called Papa’s Rock after Flora “Papa” Keenan the patriarch of the Keenan clan who lived in the area.  Wayne Curtis – whose family is just upriver a few hundred yards – told me that local families used to net the river just outside of Papa’s Rock for salmon to salt for the winter.

On October 13 I had been fishing downriver at Doctor’s Island and was coming back up to my camp at Campbell’s by canoe.  I decided to stop at Papa’s Rock for a few quick casts.  It was a good hunch to play since I had struck two fish there the day before but neither one got solidly hooked up.  My friend Bill Utley was already waiting for lunch up on the deck overlooking the pool, and he took this long distant photo of me with a salmon of about 13 pounds on the line.  It was my last for the season.

We fished hard in the rain on the 14^th.  It seemed very fishy, but we never had a pull.  With a raise of water certain I decided to head

to Mahoney Brook, 21 miles up the Cains to fish the last day of the season.

I enjoy that area so much and have had such great late-season experiences there that it is hard for me not to get my annual fix.  The scenery and ambiance didn’t disappoint, but the water was just too low, and I got nothing but a couple of parr for my effort.  Even the normally cooperative brooktrout weren’t present.

For my last hurrah I had an opportunity to fish the famous Doctor’s Island Club pool at Muzzerol Brook.  I did see a nice salmon surface there, and later I had a very strong pull, but no hookup.

So ended my 2024 Miramichi season.  Meanwhile, down at Black Brook, Larry Phillips landed a lovely hen salmon at 6:45 PM to win the Miramichi Salmon Associations Last Salmon of the Season award to 2024.  Larry with his late fish and the John Rice artwork award certificate.  Hopefully Dr. Jake Swan’s May award winner and Larry’s fish will prime anglers for competition to win next year’s certificates.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A good example of the effects of that October 8th rain can be seen in the Dungarvon barrier trap numbers and both the Cassilis and Millerton trap counts for the NW and SW branches for the Miramichi.  There was one grilse reported passing through the Dungarvon barrier on September 3rd, and then no salmon or grilse went through that barrier from then until October 9th, a period of 5 weeks!!!  The barrier stopped reporting on October 11, but on the 9^th through the 11^th there were 7 salmon captured.  Presumably those fish had held up in the estuary due to the extreme low water and just shot in with the rain.  The barrier was opened after the 11th, and perhaps there were more still to come.

Between 9/30 and 10/15 Cassilis on the NW captured 36 salmon to reach 107 for the season to date, and Millerton had 29 which jumped their total to 191.  In both cases those numbers of salmon entering the traps were much greater than all the fish that had come in during the month of September.  In the case of the NW, that run during the last two weeks amounted to about 35% of the salmon for the whole season!  Remember that the traps are only meant to catch a sample, and the actual run is much greater than these numbers.

While it is true that most salmon rivers, except a handful in the very far north, had a slow season, the Miramichi has seen far worse declines than all others.  Dr. John Ritter attested to this in his important critique of DFO’s handling of striped bass – his paper is attached to my June 30 blog available on my website.  It is hard to exaggerate the terrible extent to which the Miramichi’s bloated bass population is eating the outgoing salmon smolts. That absolutely has to change, and the heat on DFO is growing by the day.  There will be much more in the not-too-distant future about the action plans to reduce this predation.

My wife June and I just returned from Saint John New Brunswick where we attended a Miramichi Salmon Association dinner.  I received a reward for years of service to the organization.  I love how I’ve gotten to know quite a few salmon anglers from all around the Miramichi.  It is an extensive and dedicated salmon fishing culture, and thank God for that with the with the current battle the Miramichi salmon are facing against DFO’s indefensible mismanagement of the river’s bass and salmon populations.  If you are interested in helping Miramichi salmon, you need to become a member of the MSA.

Future blogs this fall will include a complete wrap up and analysis of the season-ending trap counts and progress on all aspects of the conservation work being done to turn around the fortunes of the Miramichi.

Thanks for reading.  Brad Burns