Behind the Scenes: Fall Stripers on the Miramichi

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Okee-Dokee everyone, you’re about to read up on a fish-filled, crazy trip that took place in mid-October of 2022.

For this Fish’n Canada shoot, we hit the Miramichi River with almost perfect timing for the fall Striped Bass run. We’ve been here previously but it was in the spring (crazy then too) and we had also been to the St. John and the Quispamsis in the fall, but never to the Miramichi for the late run. To say this river’s Striper fishing is amazing is, quite honestly, not giving it enough credit. If there’s a better Striped Bass fishery anywhere else on the planet, we’d like to know where it is!

The city of Miramichi is such an iconic “east coast” destination. 

The best part of this fishery is, a portion of this massive fish run is directly beside the city of Miramichi… we’re not kidding you. Hundreds, if not thousands of Stripers can be sitting “right out front” at any given time.

Pete Bowman holds a great Miramichi Striped Bass

We started out fishing soft fluke-style plastics thinking that the water temperatures were too cold for fast-moving baits and especially for topwater. Man were we wrong. 

Yes, we did quite well on the plastics, however, once we changed over to our Yo-Zuri 3DB Twitchbaits and 3DB Pencil Poppers, man did we start to light ’em’ up!

“This shoot actually has us fooled as far as water temps went,” says Ang. “We are strong believers in knowing as many details as humanly possible when we’re out fishing… our quarry may not be super intelligent, but they are super instinctive”

“What Ang is referring to as fooling us,” continues Pete “is that every day the water temps dropped, yet, the fishing got better for our hardbaits, including the topwater Pencil Popper. Normally it’s the other way around.”

This is a modified Yo-Zuri 3DB Twitchbait in the larger size. We say modified because we had to (by law) change out our stock trebles to single barbless hooks. We lost a few but we still caught a lot.

With both the flukes and hardbaits, we could tell the fish weren’t in their deadly warm-water mode. They missed our baits so many times by either slashing at them, bumping them, or whatever the heck they were doing.

Ang doesn’t look too happy now, does he????

Our electronics were a huge key on this shoot (as they usually do on all of our shoots). We literally looked for pods of fish, usually in LiveScope mode and sometimes in side viewing mode.

If we didn’t see any fish, we didn’t stop to fish.

Here is a great comparison of our Garmin’s LiveScope vs. Jeff Wilson’s (see below). We were in much shallower water and casting to our fish. That meant forward mode for us. Jeff and Steve were stationary in much deeper water. They switched their unit over to down mode since they only needed to see below the boat.

In our top image, you see a group of Stripers from about 5-15 feet in front of us. In Jeff’s image, you see big Stripers on the bottom almost directly under the boat, with a bunch of baitfish well up and away from the bottom (and the predators).

STEVE AND JEFF

As an addition to this already fish-packed episode/trip, our good buddies Steve Niedzwiecki and Jeff Wilson also did a nice cameo appearance at what could be one of the most accessible fishing spots we’ve ever encountered. 

They literally drove about two blocks from the Rodd Miramichi, launched Jeff’s boat, drove a few hundred yards, and started fishing. Once they located some Stripers and bait (again with LiveScope), they caught fish after fish.

CONCLUSION

As you can tell, we’re absolutely nuts about the Striped Bass fishing on the Miramichi River, near the city of Miramichi. This is a world-class fishery that, quite honestly, everyone should give a go.

Look out for this episode and the main web article to come.

Fish'n Canada

The Fish’n Canada Show first aired in 1986 with phenomenal success. In 1988 the program went coast to coast on CBC, the first North American weekly fishing show to broadcast on a national network. In 1992 the show went into syndication adding Global Television Network, prominent CTV and affiliates, and several cable networks. The move resulted in unprecedented fishing audiences. With the addition of WFN U.S. and The Sportsman Chanel Canada today the Fish’n Canada show dominates the airwaves with a national weekly reach of 3.5 million and ama of over 450,000 easily making it one of the most-watched “outdoors” programs in North America.

One Response

  1. I would have loved to have gone fishing with Angelo and Pete and/or with Steve when I was at the Rodd when I and my colleague met Angelo and Pete at the Rodd Miramichi restaurant. Unfortunately I had to work.

    Next time I’m bringing my rod and reel with me and fishing from the boardwalk!

    It was a treat to have met Angelo and Pete in person that week!

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