Miramichi Salmon Blog – Dog Days Report!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anglers at the Miramichi Salmon Club enjoying the 2025 grilse run

Fishing Friends – Let’s start with a review of the latest fishing information from the Miramichi.

Despite the fact that this July has been warm and with limited rain, the reports I’m getting from the river are quite positive.  Eddie Colford of Black Brook said he had a couple of grilse in each of the last two sessions and that there were much better numbers of fish around their pools then last season.  Checkout this little video by Eddie of a salmon jumping at Black Brook.

 

Colin Gilk of the Miramichi Salmon Club said that in spite of low and warm water conditions hindering the summer run, that catches were well ahead of last year.  Much of that is due to great increase in the number of grilse.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stephen Cail aka “Mr. Salmon” of Cail’s Pools said that in the warm water he was only seeing salmon moving through his pools early in the morning after they left the cool waters of Nelson Hollow.  Like all of us he is hoping for a good fall season.

 

Byron Coughlan of Country Haven reported some decent catches despite the warm water and consequentially a limited number of fishermen.  Byron loves to talk about young Sammy Duis from Germany who he says is nothing short of a magician with salmon.  Sammy, his father Arend, and another guest Scott Ballantyne from British Columbia all caught salmon or grilse the last couple of days.  A Blackville native named Tim Vickers also released a beauty of a 20-pound salmon from an undisclosed pool along the Howard Road!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Country Haven also sent along this great photo of guides Tyler Coughlan and Colby Donovan and young family members releasing a grilse 15-plus miles up the Cains just last evening.

Some of the grilse have already run all the way to the headwaters of the Cains!  The well-known Cains River wanderer Kensyle Cogswell e-mailed me that in a recent trip to his favorite brook in the upper Cains he released three 20-inch class brook trout and a fat grilse.

Good fishing makes for happy customers!  I got an nice e-mail and photo last week from Sean Patrick Sullivan who was the winning bidder of a trip to the Sutter Salmon Club at the MSA US auction.  Sean and his brother Dylan landed 6 grilse in 3 days.  It was Sean’s first salmon trip in 20 years, and he said that he was “thrilled to have the opportunity to spend the time on the water.”

 

In a little news from outside of the Miramichi, the far northern salmon destinations such as Labrador and Ungava are just getting going now.  The only report I had was from someone who said that a group returning from the Sandhill River in Labrador had very good fishing.  Tom Ackerman, whose company Classic Connections books a new lodge on the Delay River, said the lodge was getting ready to open and the owner and guides were in camp.  They were catching salmon in their spare time.  I’ll be on the Whale River which flows into Ungava Bay in three weeks and will look forward to reporting on that trip.

I also just got an e-mail and some photos from Doctor Andy Eisenhauer who was recently on the Old Fort River on Quebec’s North Shore near the Labrador border.  Andy reported good fishing and lots of black flies.

 

Dawson Hovey said that Paul Roger’s Newfound Outfitters on the Serpentine in Newfoundland had many more fish in the river than the last couple of years.  One recent day the group of 8 fishermen hooked 24 salmon and grilse! Looks like I took the wrong year off from going there.  Last week I met an angler who had just come back from Newfoundland’s Gander River.  He said fishing was very good.  They had been fishing not far above the head of tide, and loads of fish were coming into the river.  He said he’d never seen as many salmon jumping as he saw there.

I just got back from a trip to the Kedgwick River Salmon Club.  One of the club’s members was with us, and he is also a member of another club that owns a lodge on the lower Restigouche.  He had been on the Restigouche a little earlier in the month and said that he caught 9 for his week.  As with other New Brunswick rivers this year the catch seems to be predominantly grilse.  I would add that this year’s grilse are fat, powerful fish for their size that are quite spectacular on the line.  I would assume that their well-fed status is because of the same reason that we are seeing a lot of them.  It only makes sense that good feeding is a key factor in improved sea winter survival.  Hopefully that will be the case with the rest of that year class which will be coming back in 2026 as predominately 2 MSW virgin spawning females.

 

I fished the Kedgwick during the third week of June, in 2007, the first year that the club bought the lodge from the Fraser Paper Company.  I remember being very impressed then with the facility, and essentially nothing has changed.  We had excellent food, terrific accommodations and a great staff.  The numbers of pools holding fish seemed down to me from 18 years ago, but almost everyone caught fish during this three-day trip.  I was the winning bidder for this trip for two rods at the Saint John MSA dinner last fall, and Andy Dumaine split it with me.  Andy got the only large fish that I remember from the trip, but it was a good one, estimated at more than 20 pounds.  Andy caught it in the last pool we stopped at on the last day of the trip.  Most of the fish we caught were grilse.   Andy’s fish was netted by some guys who stopped their airboat trip upriver when they saw Andy with his fish on the line.

What a difference in water temperatures between the Kedgwick and the Miramichi, or even the main body of the Restigouche to which it is a major tributary.  The portion of the Kedgwick where we fished looks to be about 60 miles or so north of Blackville which by itself is inconsequential.  The extra altitude and steeply inclined river flowing out of lakes even further north in Quebec kept Kedgwick temperatures in the low to mid-50Fs, about a dozen degrees less than the Miramichi during the same time.  The Kedgwick has long been known as one of spawning destinations of the large Restigouche strain of salmon.  The camp record is an honest to goodness 45 pounder taken not that many years ago.  There seemed to be a lot of parr in the river.  I couldn’t help but wonder why the run is down both on the Kedgwick and on the Restigouche itself.  Neither the reportedly heavy netting of the early, large salmon by First Nations or the presence of parr eating striped bass throughout the river and estuary all season long can be helpful to returns.

On the Miramichi conservation front, there is constantly a lot to report on.  I never want to miss an opportunity to show how crystal clear it is that DFO’s mismanagement of striped bass has caused the catastrophic decline in Miramichi salmon fishing.  Throughout all my early years on the Miramichi I would look every year at data that showed that the Cascapedia, Restigouche and Miramichi all have fairly similar percentages of their smolts make it out of their native river and into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence.  That percentage varied at 60 to 70%.  The Miramichi escapement was a little lower than the other two, probably because we always had a spawning population of striped bass, and most Miramichi smolts go to sea after two years as parr and are therefore a little smaller and therefore more vulnerable.  That difference was just a very few percentage points, though, and the Miramichi more than made up for it by producing many more smolts than either of those other two rivers.

It was just confirmed to me last week that the percentage of smolt escapement to the GOSL from the NW Miramichi in 2024 was only 8%!!!  So, in 2005 if we started out with 2M smolts we had about 65% or 1.3M headed for Greenland.  In 2024 if we had 2M – and we no longer do, though we don’t know how many we do have – based on 8% survival we would only send 160K off to Greenland.  All these numbers are meaningless to the vast ocean which is going to swallow up X percent of them no matter what.  The percent that make it back from their ocean feeding journey varies – as we are seeing with this year’s improved grilse return – but it is usually somewhere between 3% and 7%.  In the early 2000s, with 5% of the 1.3M smolts surviving you got a 65K return.  Add to that repeat spawners and you have 80K or so and that is roughly where we were in 2011.  John Bagnall’s analysis work shows that this will seed the river and provide some buffer to potentially grow the adult population.  But, start out with only 160K and that same 5% produces just 8K returning spawners.  And that isn’t the end of it.  The 8K returning adults aren’t going to produce anywhere near 2M smolts.  All the numbers shrink in turn, and the downward path toward extinction or at best a remnant population is what you are left with.  DFO Gulf/Moncton knows this and is managing to let it happen.  We just can’t let it stand.

Just as some additional information on that point, check out these two graphics.  These graphs show the Miramichi and Margaree salmon and grilse runs from the 1990s up through today.  These rivers aren’t that far apart geographically, and in fact the Margaree is south of the Miramichi so at least as subject to warm weather, DFO’s favorite incorrect excuse.  Up until 2010/11 both had stable returns.  Since 2010, when the bass numbers went beyond 100,000 adults, the directions of the graphs really took opposite tracks.  The Margaree is not only stable but is showing a slight uptick while the Miramichi population has fallen away by 90%.  It is criminal.

 

While striped bass predation on smolts is the clear reason for the decline in Miramichi salmon, there are other factors that don’t help anything.  One of these is poaching.  Even as local outfitters struggle to maintain the businesses that employee local people, some of their neighbors are going out at night netting the pools.   Salmon Brook on the Cains River was hit just recently.  If you have any information on these low-lifes, here is a direct line to report them:  1 (506) 857-6328  I hope that everyone will write this number down and enter it in their phone address book.

A short while ago I sent out a proposed letter to the Minister of DFO for people to use, modify, whatever, and a list of people to send it to that included the DFO Minister, Prime Minister and the legislative committee that oversees DFO.  If you haven’t done it please do.  Here is a link to that letter and all the information you will need to take action.  I will add that Save Miramichi Salmon, the organization that has an active lawsuit against DFO for its malfeasance in managing salmon and striped bass in the Miramichi, is also planning to take some action around this with the legislative committee FOPO that oversees DFO – more on that later.  Please add your name to those bringing this to the attention of the Minister and the committee.

In terms of the latest news on this year’s run, the trap numbers at Millerton and Cassilis as of July 15 recorded just what we are seeing in the rivers.  MSW salmon returns are down, and grilse numbers are up – a lot – compared to 2024.  You can read about it at this link.  It seems to me that the run from July 15 to now has been a bit stronger, and so I’m looking forward to the July 30 numbers when they come out next week.   In the Dungarvon Barrier counts for the week ending July 20 there were 17 grilse in the barrier.  There were also three salmon, and so the week’s total of 20 amounted to 35% of the year-to-date total of 57.  That’s not bad for one week.  I’m also hearing reports of a good number of salmon being seen down in the lower river, so we’ll just have to wait and see how things pan out.

Just to add one more positive note to end the blog report, let me tell you about a book I’m enjoying that touches on the Miramichi.  An Angler for All Seasons by David Atwood is a sort of biography/fishing history of a man named Chip Stauffer.  Chip, born in 1905 was a contemporary and friend of many of the famous Pennsylvania and New York anglers of the day like Sparse Gray Hackle, Preston Jennings, Lee Wulff,  Dana Lamb, Art Flick, Charles DeFeo and numerous others.  Stauffer was also famous for breeding a strain of English game cocks that produced particularly desirable dry fly hackles.  I love historical stuff, and there is lot in the book about the New Jersey trout streams that are now gone and of the famous Pennsylvania trout clubs.  Later in his life and fishing career, though, Stauffer was severely smitten with the Miramichi and Cains Rivers.  He was part owner of the Harris Ledge camp on the SW Miramichi and a great friend and client of outfitter Herman Campbell.

On pages 71,72 of my book On the Cains there is a section based around information and photos provided to me by a man named Bud Hofer.  Bud, his wife Judy and their friends the Housers who own The Popples lodge have had a long association with the Miramichi and especially the Cains Rivers.  As a young man in 1958 Bud made his first trip to the Miramichi with Stauffer and his friends.  This trip is also recounted with some additional details in Atwood’s book.  Bud was an amateur photographer, and he gave me the use of some terrific photos.  The woman in this photo is Maxine Atherton who became a famous fishing woman and author in her own right after her famous, artist husband Jack died at 52 while fishing the Cains.

If you’re interested in a copy of the book all I can tell you is to start googling.  I found and purchased a remaining new copy, but what came up for me today were some used copies at fairly dear prices.  These things come and go, though, so best of luck and enjoy.

Thanks for reading.  Brad Burns