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 – if you treasure Atlantic salmon as we do, then there are two very important things that should be on your must do list for 2023. The first is to become a member of the Miramichi Salmon Association. This is the organization that is really doing helpful things to stop the decline in Miramichi salmon. The second thing is to support the MSA US fundraising activities so that we can continue our, …Read More →
Fishing Friends: I really love Atlantic salmon fishing, and I especially love to do it in the Miramichi. In the Miramichi you can normally fish in a relatively wild setting, on wade-friendly gravel, and both see and sometimes catch beautiful salmon that go from 5-pound grilse to 30-pound repeat spawners. It isn’t all that far from the northeastern United States, the Canadians are a friendly lot, and we have similar laws and speak the, …Read More →
The final 10/31/2022 Miramichi trap numbers for both Millerton on the SWM and Cassilis on the NWM were posted to the Cumulative Counts page of the DFO website today. Let’s look first at how those numbers compare to other years in an absolute sense and see in what direction the run in recent years seems to be trending. On the SWM, Millerton ended up with 417 salmon and 554 grilse. This compares to 305, …Read More →
Fishing friends: Another salmon fishing season on the Miramichi River system has ended. I’ve been home for a week, but I still miss the river every day. I’ve reviewed my daily fishing calendar, opened up the historic water level data and weather data websites, and reconstructed the day-to-day fishing and conditions that we experienced. There is a lot more to cover though: the smallmouth bass debacle, the future of stock enhancement on the Miramichi, the, …Read More →
Fishing Friends: Our local weatherman in Portland, Maine reported on 9/1 that it wasn’t often that the actual weather conditions in the Northeast and the first day of the meteorological season coincide. But it did this year. On August 31 it was hot with near record humidity and the next day it was dry and cool. In the middle of the change we got dumped on with a good rain too. On the Miramichi, …Read More →
Fishing Friends: On the Miramichi, last week some relatively cool weather and rains brought the water levels up and temperature down enough for DFO to reopen the cold-water holding pools to fishing on August 11. You can see from the graph pasted in below that the water temperatures got down for two consecutive days to the below 20C/68F level needed to reopen the closed pools. Current water temps, though, are not really cold at, …Read More →
Fishing Friends – I love these “on the cusp” moments during the season. My old friend, the late John Cole used to say that it was never really hot on the coast of Maine after the first week in August. I’m not sure we can say that these days, but there is often a pronounced change, and you can see that change in the coming forecast. According to Environment Canada an extreme heat wave, …Read More →
Fishing Friends – I’ve got a number of items from the Atlantic salmon world to let you know about in this blog post. First, I returned yesterday from a trip to the Serpentine River in Newfoundland, and I’ll fill you in on how that went. Second, I have recent reports from several lodges on the Miramichi as well a look at the latest salmon and grilse numbers from the traps. They’re quite good, especially, …Read More →
Fishing Friends – I just returned from the Miramichi where I had arrived and begun fishing on the evening of June 10th. That first evening the river was running at a high 1.6 meters on the Blackville gauge. That is up enough so that wading off the grass bank is generally not possible. The salmon then are traveling upstream along the edges, and you need to cover the travel lane – there generally is, …Read More →
Fishing Friends – It seems that there are more opportunities right now than there is time to take advantage of them. I thought that I would make a purely brook trout fishing trip up to the Cains this past week without the worry that I could have instead been fishing for bright salmon. I got fooled. On May 22, 2022, Colin Gilks fishing in Blissfield, caught this beautiful salmon that measured 40 inches with, …Read More →