#sickdays: Atlantic Antics

A few years back Maher mentioned that his father had bought into a salmon club up in Canada. Salmon fishing is old school out that way; folks have been doing it since people settled into the North East. Stepped in history that I’m still just learning, it is East Coast fishing at it’s pinnacle. If you get the chance to put a fly in front of one of those freight trains you absolutely do it. So this year when Mike invited me to join in the boys trip with his dad and brother I was going to do everything in my power to commit.

The Black Brook club sits on the Miramichi River at the confluence of the Caines and the Black Brook flows through the property, spewing cold, oxygenated water into a deep pool where tons of salmon, fresh from the ocean, enjoy one of their first stops while they head upstream to spawn. When conditions like rain or cool weather/water come, Atlantics by the hoard start to push up through the productive private water. The camp can fish eight anglers spread around the few hundred yards of banks – techniques are pretty similar to west coast summer chrome with two handed floating lines – cast, swing, step – cycle through and head back up. We had some tough low water and warm weather for the majority of our trip that just shut the fishing down, but the week started off pretty good and we managed to make contact with a handful of them.

My experience with big game fishing so far really stopped at Steelhead, which are impressive in their own right, but size-wise pale in comparison to the potential behemoth Atlantic. While I didn’t get my 30lb salmon on this trip, I did hook into a few that were likely above 20lbs and managed to land one beautiful 16lb slab of a fish. The third fish that I lost had backing flying off the reel so far and fast I had no idea what was going on.

If luck is on my side, I might get an invite back to Black Brook another time for that next chance at that 30lb high-brow river monster.