For our last show of the season we are ending where we started back in the spring on the Miramichi River on the hunt for Striped Bass. Our guest today is Veronique { Vero } Arsenault , Executive Director at the Miramichi Regional Multi-Cultural Association. We will chat with her a bit about that while we film.
Veronique co-hosts Have a Chat on Rogers TV with her associates Audrey Lynch and Judy Losier. This is an extremely popular show now in its third year. We were looking for a guest from the Miramichi area and Vero jumped right in although she had never fished before. For someone who had never handled a fishing rod before she picked it up quite quickly and she was somewhat relieved when she found out she didn’t have to handle worms.
We launched the boat down by Ritchie’s wharf and went exploring. I have only done one fall trip to the Miramichi and was trying to locate the fish and that in itself turned into a job . We went up to the area around Strawberry Marsh which had been good the prior fall trip but no luck. We chatted with a couple of other anglers and were told we needed to be fishing Mackerel which we did not have. In over an hour we never saw one fish hooked so off we went. I figured if we were going to try and find them on the Lowrance units we might as well be trolling so I rigged up a couple of the foot long Storm Eels with the back hook cut off. We covered a ton of water and only marked an occasional fish on the screen but caught nothing. To try and put a little something into the day I took Veronique over to where we found the wreck a couple of years back and we did half a dozen scans of that.
At 2pm we still had not had a fish on our fishing show so we headed back up the river to Strawberry Marsh again. I missed a fish on a big 6 inch White Kalin grub while I was doing an interview but that perked me right back up. A few minutes later I got into another one on the same bait and got it in the net. This was a 60 centimeter fish with a fairly big girth and put up a heck of a fight. A few minutes later Veronique was into one that was hooked on a big fluke on a swimbait hook. This one also came in right around the 60 centimeter mark. Over the next hour and a half we hooked two more, one of which made it to the boat and one came off at the net. We had a dozen strikes that just didn’t hook up for us. It almost seemed like they were just slashing at the bait. My thought is that we hit a moving school of fish. The Lowrance just lit up for a while with big marks and then they were gone again.
Veronique was a great guest with a passion for the community she lives in. She shared a lot of information with us about the Miramichi while we were searching for fish. My observation is that she is also persistent and tenacious. We made the offer to take her back to the launch when it appeared that the fishing was not going to pan out. She wanted nothing to do with that and we finally did get into some and she landed her first ever fish. We are going to make an effort to get her back out in the spring run and really give her a world class fishing experience.
Backwater Casting’s photo.
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