June has finally arrived and salmon fishers are once again spending time on the river, anticipating with every cast, that they might just be lucky enough to hook one of our early season Atlantic salmon … the freshest and healthiest fish of the season who put up a tremendous fight. These early salmon swim upstream as much as 20 miles per day so getting your fly over one can sometimes be a challenge, but when you do it’s incredibly rewarding! The first salmon run on the Miramichi system is usually a little later starting out compared to some of the other New Brunswick salmon rivers like the Restigouche River or the rivers in Quebec although we typically have a longer season and more returns, so that creates many opportunities to hook salmon. May fishers have already been fortunate to land a couple of beauties with a few others being lost and folks along the river are seeing the odd one jumping and rolling which is a very encouraging sign for this early in our season. Hopefully, this might suggest a solid year of returning fish, which would be most welcomed by both fishers and outfitters alike!

This past week we ended our spring fishery with our last group of striped bass fishers from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. In total, they landed well into the hundreds of stripers, all on fly rods! Now they are all keen to try their hand at targeting Atlantic salmon on their next trip but they will have to be a little more patient with the salmon than the stripers!

Along with a great group of guys fishing for stripers this week, on Friday we were most fortunate to welcome a special guest to Country Haven Lodge, the Honorable Gudie Hutchings, the Federal Minister of Rural Economic Development. She was such a pleasure to have at our lodge and we discussed the Atlantic Salmon fishery, the rich history of the fishery in our region, and the charm of the wonderful river system that we have here. Her own knowledge of Atlantic Salmon came from fishing as a young girl, and eventually owning her own outfitter’s lodge in Newfoundland & Labrador! It was truly wonderful to meet someone at her level within the Federal Government who understands the challenges and opportunities of our fishery, as well as fully appreciating the important economic impact that it has on our region. Having such a wonderful and knowledgeable person in a position of power, who cares for our Atlantic Salmon as much as we here at Country Haven Lodge do, gives us hope for the future of the Atlantic Salmon fishery here on the Miramichi and all of the salmon river systems across Atlantic Canada. Thank you Minister Hutchings for including us on your visit to the region and we do hope that you will have an opportunity to come back again one day and wet a line with us!

The canoeing conditions are terrific right now and with the warmer weather on its way, it makes for a wonderful time of year for canoe trips down the Miramichi or one of its many tributary rivers such as the Cains, the Renous or the Dungarvon, with all of them offering some terrific brook trout fishing and always the possibility of hooking into an early run bright salmon! With each passing day, the river conditions will continue to improve, along with the warmer weather, and we will start to see and hear of more sightings of fresh fish coming into the system. As an outfitter, we are forever optimistic at the start of a new season, but with the positive events of this year’s run already, we think that 2022 may be one of those years to remember! Here’s hoping!