Brad Burns Fishing

Another year of Atlantic Salmon fishing on the Miramichi has ended.  The season closed on Sunday evening October 15 on the lower river, and September 30th for the headwaters. As a general statement 2017 turned out to be a relatively poor year for salmon fishing on the Miramichi. While there is no question that the salmon run in the Miramichi and many other rivers was down, in the final analysis it was not down, …Read More →

I’ve always love the last days of summer on the Miramichi, and even though it is normally the low point of the season’s fishing, I have a hard time staying away.  During the last couple of weeks there were a few heavy downpours from thunderstorms; one day the headwaters of the Cains got 10mm or about 4/10ths of an inch rain.  Unfortunately none of these storms were prolonged or wide spread enough to bring, …Read More →

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans has updated the fish counts in the trapnets used to estimate the salmon run into the Miramichi River as of 8/15/2017.  The numbers are poor, but given the wretched conditions of the summer I’m frankly a little surprised that they aren’t worse. Note that the numbers below are the trap catches and only represent a small percentage of the actual number of fish in the run. Similarly the, …Read More →

Fishing Friends – the July 31 numbers are posted for the New Brunswick counting stations on the Miramichi.  There were 172 salmon caught, tagged, and released from the Millerton fish trap on the Main Southwest Miramichi.  This compares to 397 in 2016, 340 in 2015, and 153 in 2014.  I shouldn’t really include 2014, though, because Hurricane Arthur washed the net out in that year, and the records missed two weeks of the river’s, …Read More →

Fishing Friends – This is turning out to be a very difficult July for Miramichi system salmon fishing.  The temperatures since about July 10 – a handful of days accepted – have simply been too warm for decent salmon fishing.  Thankfully it has not yet been too hot for salmon survival.  Jason Curtis, who has one of the river’s best vantage points, has seen only 4 or 5 dead fish – there are always, …Read More →

Fishing Friends – just back from 10 days on the Miramichi, and to be frank the fishing was very poor. We only hooked a couple of grilse for the whole period, and I heard that the other camps from Boiestown on down were also struggling.  I have to believe that the chief culprit was water temperature.  Late June was relatively cool, and it appeared from forecasts that the good conditions would continue, but they didn’t., …Read More →

  Fishing Friends – this past week on the Miramichi the run was still very sparse, but it did show signs of starting to pick up with the early arrival of some pods of grilse.  Three of us fishing for three days netted two fish – one a grilse and the other a salmon of about 12 pounds.  Tim Politis caught them both.  The grilse came on a Red Francis, and the salmon on, …Read More →

Fishing Friends – two friends and I just came back from three days of fishing on the Main SW Miramichi at Campbell’s and Kennan’s Pool in Blackville, New Brunswick.   The short of it is that fishing was slow.  We did see fish each day, but we actually hooked and rolled less fish than the week before.  The difference was that this time we did put one in the net. Kent Mohnkern, on his first ever, …Read More →

  Fishing Friends – one of my old fishing pals, George Watson and I just came back from three days of fishing on the Main SW Miramichi at Campbell’s and Kennan’s Pool in Blackville, New Brunswick.  As they say in the U.K. we had “no joy.”  That is we landed no salmon, but we did come very close.  On Tuesday George had a good roll from a salmon down in the bottom of the, …Read More →

On 5/24 a Boston area friend, Ralph Vitale, and I left to fish the Varzuga and Kitsa Rivers on the Kola Peninsula in Russia.  We booked the trip last fall with Roxton’s Outfitters of England.  I had gotten great reports from fellow posters on the Salmon Forum chatroom in the U.K. about Roxton’s.    They have managed the Varzuga River salmon fishing for nearly 30 years. Standard practice for fishing the various salmon rivers, …Read More →