Backwater Casting season 5, Show 1
Today’s show actually started in November last year when I was asked to once again donate a fishing trip to the Fredericton Sports Investment Dinner and Auction. The FSI has been raising money for amateur sports since 1981 when a group of local business men got together to raise funds for the Jr Red Wings. The league they were in folded a couple of years later but the groundwork had been laid and the group has been providing funding for amateur hockey and other sports ever since. I believe that last year they surpassed the three million dollar mark in donations to amateur sports over the years.
Coincidently this year’s bidder on my trip is Kurt Allen whose father “Murph” was one of the founding fathers of the group. Kurt is also the father of Saint Louis Blues goaltender Jake who was a guest on our show last year. Kurt is Athletics Director at Leo Hayes in Fredericton so there is a tradition of sports excellence in the family for sure.
I met up with Kurt and his friend Matt at 6:30am and we headed for East Grand Lake on the New Brunswick / Maine border. This will be our first show shooting out of a brand new Triton 21 TRX bass boat with a Mercury 250 ProXS outboard on the back. One of the new things you may notice this year is that we are fishing with suspender type automatic life jackets. Although we have been fishing primarily in shallow water we have had a few comments about kids watching us fish without life jackets and we do not want to send the wrong message to the little folk.
I set Kurt up with a new Cumara 6’8” M spinning rod with a 2500 Saros and 8lb Seige green mono and Matt with a Crucial 6’6”M with a 2500 Stradic and we went to work. This spring has been a bit crazy weather wise and the fish were not where I expected them to be and we ended up just standing on the Minn Kota at low speed and hunting for them. There seemed to be plenty of fish around in the two pound range but the big fish were few and far between. This is generally a great time of year to get staging fish on a Squad Minnow but it ended up being a tube kind of day. Lots of fish came into the boat on Melon Orange although Kurt got into the box and mixed it up a bit. He got quite a few on a Sunfish pattern but the dark colours seemed to produce the most fish.
I think the best run of fish came in the last forty five minutes when Matt started hitting some bigger fish that were cruising a rubble line in a couple of feet of water. One observation was that the bigger fish still had a heavy slime coat on them which usually indicates that they have just come up from deep water. Also the windier the bank the less fish we caught.
Kurt and Matt are quite competitive with each other in the boat which certainly made for a lot of interesting chatter. Great guys to spend a day with although I couldn’t compete with the 140 or so Striped Bass they caught last week on the Miramichi which is where I am headed next.
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