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By: Rick Greene

I packed up the Oleary Buick GMC Sierra and headed for Halifax, Nova Scotia for some serious big fish. My special guests this week were Scott Jackson and Armel Daigle from Rogers TV New Brunswick and camera man Andre Arsenault. We hooked up with Captain Art Gaetan of Blue Shark Charters at 5:30 am and headed out into the Atlantic on the 42 ft. Black Pearl. A half hour into the trip out we had a whale swimming along beside us for a bit. A nice little bonus to start the day off.

The forecast was rain and some fairly stiff wind but luck was with us for this one and we didn’t get any rain and the wind was not too bad. We need some wind to get a good drift going and there is nothing Art hates worse than a flat calm day...

July 9, 2011

Kids Fishing for Charity Event

This is usually my favourite event of the year and although I didn’t get to fish this year it is still the best.  I usually have one of the grand children out for the tournament but we decided to tape the day’s events for the show. My son took both the kids with him this year and they both got a trophy so life is good.

The weather forecast seemed to change on an hourly basis and our hopes for sun were washed away by some pretty heavy rain in the morning. Thankfully it eased off in mid-morning and the awards and prize ceremonies didn’t get rained out.

The day is set up in a modified tournament format with each child allowed to weigh in one each of Yellow Perch, Smallmouth Bass and Chain Pickerel...

By: Rick Greene

Well, I will be the first to admit that we didn’t start this season off with a view to going after invasive species but here we are again dealing with the same issue. I hooked up Rick Courier this morning for what we thought would be a predominantly bass fishing day. As it turned out that was not the case.

We started the day down by Cranberry Brook and the first cast with a LC Sammy netted me a nice 2lb smallie. Funny as it sounds, I don’t have any great faith in the Sammy but my buddy Glen called before I headed out this morning and said to tie one on. He has been having great success with it this year. Forty or fifty casts later I decided that the bait was not a Bass Bait but a Pickerel one. They were all over it and I even had it cut off once on a strike and got it back...

By: Rick Greene

My producer Shawn and I drove up to Miramichi City today and interviewed Mark Hambrook from the Miramichi Salmon Association to get his views on the efforts to eradicate the population of Smallmouth Bass that were illegally introduced into the lake. Mark agrees that the DFO is having an effect on reducing the population of spawning fish and the removal of young of the year fish but feels that the use of Rotenone is what it is going to take to make sure that they get them all. This is going to be a tough show to edit with so much good information being exchanged. It is a shame that the government is being forced to spend these huge amounts of money to clean up a mess by some unthinking fisherman who caused this problem.

We got to visit the salmon hatchery and watch a group o...

By: Rick Greene

It was a fairly warm week and the water temperatures were up quite a bit. I talked to  one on the biologists on site and agreed to meet with him Friday morning. My goal was to try and locate beds and sight fish them, he would then use the slurp gun to vacuum out the nest. Mother nature threw a wrench into the sight fishing plan with high winds all day making it extremely difficult to see any distance into the water.

Plan b was to go fishing. We covered about two thirds of the lakes shallow banks in seven and a half hours of fishing. We hooked six bass and landed four of them. The biggest was just over a pound. We downsized our baits from what we tried last Saturday and caught all of the fish on Blue Fox spinners...

By: Rick Greene

Miramichi Lake is part of the headwaters of the world famous Miramichi River. It is well known for it’s population of Atlantic Salmon, which we all know are under considerable pressure and many regional runs of spawning salmon have ceased to exist. The Miramichi is home to twenty per cent of the Atlantic Salmon that spawn in North America.

As near as can be determined someone illegally introduced Smallmouth Bass into lake sometime around 2004. The first reported incidence of someone catching a bass here was reported to the Fisheries and Wildlife office in late summer of 2008. Fish and Wildlife biologists visited the site shortly thereafter and confirmed the presence of bass by capturing young of the year fish...

By: Rick Greene

Today started off just like most of the other days this month, that is dull and deary with a chance of showers. It quickly changed to a more upbeat kind of day when the grandkids asked to go fishing. We were not long packing a lunch and getting tackle and safety gear into the boat. We hooked up the Sierra and headed for Eel River. My son backed us in and two minutes later we were fishing. There were already a couple of boats in there when we arrived but we were into the fish almost immediately. Fan casting a number three silver Blue Fox in-line spinner produced numerous fish that averaged about 14-15 inches. Not a lot of big fish but lots of numbers which is what it takes to keep the kids busy and their interest high...

It has been a busy spring but we are up and running for season two with Backwater Casting on Rogers TV New Brunswick. We will start taping our first show late next week. Of special interest this year is a collaboration with the New Brunswick Sport Fishing Association and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. We are going to take a group of tournament anglers in to Miramichi Lake and see if we can remove some of the Smallmouth Bass that were illegally stocked into the lake. This is a serious issue because of the long term effects this could have on the Atlantic Salmon fishery. Hopefully we can help out and perhaps help to educate folks that moving fish is not the ethical thing to do.

See you on the water.

The first stop on this years Molson Mercury Bass Tour is the Grand Falls Flowage on the border with the State of Maine. This event is sponsored by Shimano Canada and Advatek Scales. My son drove up from Moncton to fish this one with me. With the trickle start you don’t always get the spot you want even if you are driving a faster boat and that was the case this morning. We almost caught the guys but didn’t quite make it. We stopped on a back up spot and went fishing. Second cast on a Blue Fox in-line spinner put a chunky 3 lb. smallmouth in the boat. Not to bad for a second choice. We fished here for about an hour and a half and alternated with Blue Fox, Husky Jerks and Pointers and got a few fish on each of them. The guys who had been on the spot we wanted left and we moved up...

The freezing cold prefish paid off for us this weekend. The fishing was still on the slow side and our first spot didn’t produce any fish. I had two faint harded hits on a Husky Jerk but they didn’t hook up. The water is still only in the mid forties and these fish are definitely sluggis.

We moved into our second spot and it seemed like it was going to be a repeat and then I spotted a big fish come up behind Phil’s bait. He did everything he could to entice a strike but with the wind blowing the boat around the fish spooked and took off. We were in the dumps big time because it looked like a monster bass. We decided to camp out there for a while. I got a high two for our first fish and then Phil hooked up with a good one. We figured she was a big three or low four and put her in the well...