Welcome to Brad Burns Fly Fishing
This website offers the books On the Cains and Closing the Season, and shares with my fellow Atlantic salmon devotees information about the Miramichi River’s Atlantic salmon fishery. Other books by me such as Maine to Montauk and Black Spruce Stream can be purchased through my “author’s page” on Amazon at this link.
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Do you have any questions for me about the Miramichi or Atlantic salmon fishing in general? Just e-mail me at bigbass@maine.rr.com. To read Miramichi salmon blogs and fishing reports select Miramichi Salmon Blog from right side of the menu bar near the top of the screen.
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Fishing Friends – the 2019 Atlantic salmon season ended on the lower Miramichi and Cains Rivers on October 15. I’d been in Blackville since September 5th, and while that is a long time to be in camp, I enjoyed every minute, and the unbroken stretch provided a good perspective of how the fall run developed on these rivers. I had a line in the water some portion of every day during that period. I’m, …Read More →
Late Summer Fishing: Miramichi and Newfoundland – On Tuesday 8/13 I drove from Falmouth, Maine to Blackville and fished the Miramichi at Doctor’s Island that evening. Conditions were not good with low and warm water, and I knew it, but I was itching to cast a fly into the Miramichi. As anticipated there were few to no salmon holding there with evening water temperatures around 22C/72F, but we did see one jump, and that, …Read More →
Fishing Friends – Recently the New Brunswick Department of Fisheries and Oceans published the July 15th fish trap numbers for the Millerton trap on the Southwest Miramichi, as well as the counts for a number of other locations in the Province. As a general statement the numbers were quite positive. The Northwest Miramichi was the only notable exception to trend. Larger salmon – as opposed to grilse – numbers were up marginally on the, …Read More →
Fishing Friends – The early season in review – I’m back from nearly a month in my camp at Campbell’s Pool in Blackville – the joys of retirement… In summary the run of salmon through the first few days of July on the Miramichi – the early run – felt more substantial than recent years, but the fish weren’t any easier to catch. In June we had the seemingly wonderful scenario of a moderate, …Read More →
For six days ending on May 28 Dawson Hovey of Fredericton and I fished the Cains, SW Miramichi, and NW Miramichi with guide Jason Curtis for the various species of game fish that are all available at this stage of the season. We caught both sea run and river-resident brook trout, lots of striped bass, and danced with salmon, but were unsuccessful in boating either a kelt or a bright fish. It was very, …Read More →
Last of the kelts and early brights – Looking back at last year’s blog I see that I called this time of the season “the tipping point” and in fact it is. Most of the kelts are gone from the river now, though there are still some, and as I reported earlier it wasn’t a bad season all things considered. Country Haven reported releasing over 1,000 spring salmon this year – which is well, …Read More →
An old fishing friend, Jim Lukens, and I went spring fishing on the Miramichi for three days this last week. After a rough start with very high, ice-filled water that made the river essentially unfishable for the first week or so of the season, spring fishing has been fairly good. In fact on the way home we stopped at WW Doaks where Jerry told us that one party that has been coming for, …Read More →
ICE OUT – Here is the post that I’ve been waiting to make for the last two weeks. Even though this was a cold, late spring, the ice has been thinning out for the last several weeks, and there have been open channels in many sections of the river. Pictures of the Cains River with the ice gone near the Doaktown Road bridge were posted on Facebook back on April 1. The substantial snow, …Read More →
The 2019 Atlantic salmon season in Scotland – the best place in the world to catch early run fish – got out of the gate with a bright, springer salmon coming from a pool called Potato Park on the River Naver January 19th. It is known that some bright salmon enter rivers on Scotland’s north and east coast in every month of the year, but mid-January is early, even by their standards. No, …Read More →
Dr. Tommi Linnansaari is an Associate Professor at the Department of Biology and Faculty of Forestry and Environmental Management, University of New Brunswick, where he holds the Atlantic Salmon Research Chair. He is also a member of the Canadian Rivers Institute at UNB and he is the Research Coordinator of the Collaboration for Atlantic Salmon Tomorrow (CAST). He did his undergraduate and M.Sc. degrees at the Department of Fisheries and Limnology at University of, …Read More →