Brad Burns Fishing

Very warm conditions – not an outright heat wave, but a prolonged period of high humidity and temps in the high 20C range cooling only to mid to high teens at night – have prevailed for the last 10 days over the Miramichi region.  The closure of cold water holding pools took place and fishing was restricted to mornings.  Throughout the period water as cool as 72F or 22C has been hard to find,, …Read More →

Just back from 6 days on the Miramichi.  All is well with the  run, and according to the MSA – find the link on my home page and join if you aren’t a member – the trap numbers continue seasonally good.  I also read on the ASF – link in the same place and also very worthwhile – site someone comparing it to 2011…   Well, I don’t know about that just yet.  The grilse, …Read More →

If you accept that the Miramichi season begins on June 1 and ends on October 15, and that is fair enough even though the first two weeks of June are sparser than their October counterparts, we are right now at the midway point in the season.  Yesterday I checked the July 31 trap number updates for both Millerton and Cassillis – two posts back I explained how this counting system works.  The report was, …Read More →

Guide Jason Curtis With A Beautiful Miramichi Grilse Completing An Aesthetically Perfect Scene I got back on Sunday from a  week of fishing on the Miramichi and Cains Rivers.  The Cains River season is just starting, in fact we may have caught the first fish on the Cains for the year. When I arrived on Sunday a heat wave had just ended and in it had rained, and then it rained even more that evening. , …Read More →

The NB government maintains fish traps in the estuaries of both branches of the Miramichi.  Perhaps the best known one is Millerton, a few miles below the famous tidal pool at Quarryville on the Main SW Miramichi branch.  The govt counts and fish from the traps and tags them.  These fish are later captured further up in the rivers and the percentage of tagged to untagged fish is placed in a formula to calculate the size, …Read More →

I’ve just spent 4 ½ days at Campbell’s.  Three rods landed 6 fish, so nothing to brag about, but not a skunking either.  I’ve added a few pictures to the post including one of me holding a nice chromer of about 18 pounds.  The rest of our landed fish were grilse.  It is certainly good news to see a strong grilse run in progress, and we do have one.  Not that there aren’t some, …Read More →

June is an iffy month on the Miramichi.  Over the years there are many very good seasons that had almost no June component, the numbers in the government’s Millerton fish trap used to count fish bear this out.  Other years the early run is at times quite good, but the fish have on the after burners until they are above the mouth of the Cains.  There may be certain conditions that cause this, but, …Read More →

I just got back to Maine from Blackville, New Brunswick.  The opinion of Mark Hambrook of the Miramichi Salmon Assoc.  is that the season is off to a better start than others of recent years.  We didn’t land any fish, but I did hook two, and we saw them every morning and evening.  Another friend reported getting a salmon and a grilse at the tidal pool in Quarryville, and there were reports of a, …Read More →

It was reported today by the Miramichi Salmon Assoc. that 4 salmon and 1 grilse were reported in the Millerton trap. The Millerton trap, a few miles below head of tide on the Main SW Miramichi branch, captures about 5 to 6% of the run over the course of the year. At this time in June any day with more than a couple of fish is considered decent. It has been one here and, …Read More →

Here is a photo of two, harvested sea-run brook trout sent to me yesterday by a fellow Miramichi fisher. Another friend and I spent three solid days fishing the Main South West Miramichi and the Cains up above Muzzerol. We never saw a salmon – not terribly surprising, but we had hoped – but we did get a few brookies, both sea-run and river resident. At one point Jason Curtis and I had finished, …Read More →