#FrederictonHasA(Fishing)Scene

This article originally appeared as the Faces Outdoors column in the May 2012 issue of Faces Fredericton, a local lifestyle & entertainment magazine that features those who partake in the city’s nightlife, dining, shopping and entertainment events in and about Fredericton.

Saint John River smallmouth, caught in Fredericton

Click to visit Faces Fredericton

Something that seems to regularly surprise people I speak with about fly fishing is when I tell them where my favourite spot in New Brunswick to chase fish is: Fredericton

The reactions are varied, ranging from mild shock (“Fredericton?!?”) to receiving a look one might get if they had just sprouted a second head from their neck. Once I explain myself, however, they’re usually asking me to take them fishing.

Sadly, it seems some people here in Fredericton view the Saint John River only as an obstacle to get across during rush hour, but unbeknownst to many residents of our fair city, the waters of the Saint John River hold big fish. Trophy fish, such as four-pound smallmouth bass, muskie over a meter long, and the powerful striped bass, some weighing over forty pounds.

Of these three piscatorial local residents, my favourite is the smallmouth. While the number of people chasing ‘smallies’ or ‘bronzebacks’ on a fly rod here might be on the small side; throughout North America, smallmouth fly fishing fans number in the tens of thousands. Kirk Deeter, an editor at Field & Stream magazine, called them “the ultimate fly rod fish” in an online article in June, 2011.

Smallmouth had big fans way back in the day, too: “Inch for inch, pound for pound, (they are) the gamest fish that swims,” wrote Dr. James Henshaw. Back in the day in this case means 1881, that is.

I can say not much has changed in how much fun can be had chasing smallies on the fly rod. And I must not be alone, for even super-high-end rod manufacturer Sage makes a $550 rod for them...and it’s on its second, updated version!

Smallmouth bass are native to the Great Lakes, St. Lawrence River and the upper Mississippi River, but due to stocking programs in the late 1800s, they are found in all ten provinces and every state except Alaska & Florida in the USA.

New Brunswick was first stocked with smallmouth in about 1870, and they have since thrived here. In fact, prolific smallmouth angler, guide and author Tim Holschlag consistently puts the Saint John River in his list of top 100 smallmouth locations in North America, and we’re regularly featured in Outdoor Canada’s annual list of top fishing spots in Canada.

If you’re a new to fly fishing, or attempting to help someone get started in fly fishing, smallmouth bass are the answer, for two main reasons:
1. they are (usually) very willing to eat.
2. they fight like green demons once they’re hooked, with multiple jumps and rod-bending runs for cover.

Besides, if you only have 4 hours to fish after dinner, do you really want to spend two of those hours driving to & from Boiestown or Doaktown?

Save the gas money & give fly fishing for smallmouth in Fredericton a chance; once you’re hooked up with a couple pounds of bronze fury, you won’t regret it.

FFF - Federation of Fantastic Fridays

A distinct lack of interwebz in my new apartment has hindered any & all attempts at posting since last week's Friday Post of Randomness.

Add in moving, fishing, unpacking, etc., and all of a sudden, sitting down for an hour results more in symptoms of narcolepsy than words on paper...or screen.

So this routine should seem a little familiar: go grab a coffee, sit back and relax. It is Friday, after all; it's not like you're actually working.

FredRock 2012 Lineup

My good friends at BabZees Entertainment have announced the lineup for FredRock 2012, being held again in August at the Loyalist Rugby Club. I don't need to say how awesome it is that we're into year four of FredRock, with all but the first festival held at the rugby club.

The lineup for this year's show, being held over two nights, features a lot of talent, with a few of my favourites in there.

Matthew Good headlines Friday night, and Steve Earle...yes, that Steve Earle...headline Saturday night.

Supporting acts include frequent 411#3 embedded youtube talent Matt Mays & el Torpedo, as well as The Trews, AWOLnation, The Sheepdogs, Walk Off The Earth, Elliott Brood and Poor Young Things.

I think this is one helluva lineup for FredRock this year. Congrats to the guys at BabZees for pulling together such an event for the city of Fredericton (and at the Loyalist Rugby Club, too).

Musical Interlude

Here are a couple tunes from two of the acts on the FredRock 2012 lineup.

One of the Coolest Things Ever!

A few weeks ago I wrote about Robert Cunningham's book, Chasing Records; I had downloaded it to keep me warm & fishy while working in Nunavut.

A few days after I posted it, the man himself emailed me to thank me for reading and reviewing the book. Since I'm not bold enough to assume Mr. Cunningham is a regular reader, that's pretty cool in itself.

What's really cool is what showed up in my mailbox this week: a signed hardcopy of his book.

I appreciated just receiving an email from him. I really appreciated this.

Thank you, Mr. Cunningham.

(Note: I still remain envious of his boat & seaplane. I told him so in my email response. He still sent me the book. Honesty, people. Honesty. It pays off.)

The Birth of a Tournament Angler...

...takes place tomorrow morning. Though it almost wasn't going to happen; as I mentioned last week, my truck is awaiting new parts which prevents the towing of the Magnificent Basstard.

No worries, as my tournament partner Pat (he of the City Limits Muskie last year) also has a boat...which suffered from a broken trailer axle a few days ago. Fortunately he has it fixed up & running, so we should be good to go for tomorrow!

The rod quiver tomorrow includes:

• Cabela's CGR 7'6" 7/8wt, matched with Hardy Ultralite reel and Sage's Performance Bluegille Taper fly line;
• Redington's Predator 7'10" 6wt, matched with Redington's Rise reel & Rio's Smallmouth Taper fly line;
• Quantum's most inexpensive spinning rod & reel in existence, in case it gets dirty, stinking windy out.

The Long Stick Renegade, as Cameron over at The Fiberglass Manifesto tweeted to me a few days back. I like the sound of that. Stay tuned for a post-tournament report, and perhaps I will live-tweet the tournament action (@mattrevors).

Upcoming Stuff

• The cool folks over at Redington have sent me a pair of their Sonic-Pro Wading Pants to use & abuse. I had them on yesterday for the first time, and will be taking them to Alaska to test out.
• I'm heading to Alaska! For three weeks! But it's for work, and it's on this coming Tuesday, which is way to soon, considering I only got back from the Arctic last Tuesday.
• Word on the street is I'll have some grayling and possibly pike & salmon available in Alaska. I'm still in the decision stage of what gear to bring, but it looks like it's been narrowed down to my 5wt, 7wt and possibly my 10wt.
• The cool folks over at Rio have sent me one of their specialty pike taper fly lines for the 10wt rod to  demo (hopefully) on our local muskie population. Seeing that there are pike in Alaska, and I do have a score to settle (and asterisk to remove) with pike, I'm leaning towards the 10wt setup coming on the trip....just in case...
• Fly tying has taken a backseat due to the move & such, but I'm hoping to get back on my tarpon, smallie & muskie tying kick real soon.
• I'm currently reading Captain John Kumiski's Redfish on the Fly: A Comprehensive Guide. Read into that statement as much as you like, knowing what you know about my impulsive travel habits. And expect a book review at some point.

More Music...

...from FredRock 2012 performer Matt Mays & el Torpedo.

That's all for now

Have a great weekend, everyone; may all your fish be epic in fun...not size.

Lazy-ass video post

Time/Date: 2050 CST, 09-Jan-12
Location: Nuevo Balsas, Mexico

So, yeah. I'm in Mexico for the next three weeks.

I'll be working night shifts with sporadic wifi coverage, so expect some irregular posting schedules...more than usual, even.

In the meantime, check out this quick & easy but bad-ass pike fly (*cough* muskie fly *cough*) tying video from McFluffChucker:

Musical Interlude (again)

Time/Date: 1210 AST, 09-Sep-11
Location: HOME!

I made it home.

I'm excited about this; it's five weeks off. In the best part of the season for Atlantic Salmon...and smallies, stripers and muskie...oh my!

I'll have some fishy content next week after I take a few days to win back the love of my girlfriend & Awesome the dog.

My new furled leader, fly box, and a couple books were waiting for me when I returned home. Notes about using/reading them will be included in this so-called fishy content I speak of.

Hope everyone enjoys their weekend. I'm going to Lava Vodka Lounge & seeing Bedouin Soundclash tonight.

Here's some music. Definitely NOT Bedouin Soundclash. Enjoy!

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City Limits Muskie

Time/Date: 0950 AST, 23-Jun-11
Location: Fredericton

Well, I didn't catch it, but I was there to help net it & photograph it.

Congrats to my buddy Pat on his first muskie of 2011!!

After the quick pic, it was safely returned to chomp another lure in the future!

My muskie trip was cut short right after that, but I got my fix later on with a couple (small) smallies on my 5wt. As I've been saying for the past week: They. Are. FUN!

But I would've rather a muskie...

Here's some music:

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Location, location, location

Time/Date: 1000AST, 21-Jun-11
Location: Fredericton, NB

Imagine a town with:

You could be fishing & living here...

• smallmouth bass fishing within walking distance.
• muskie fishing within walking distance.
• river-run striped bass fishing within walking distance.
• sea-run brook trout within biking distance and/or 25 minutes' drive.
• pickerel fishing within 20 minutes' drive
• world-class Atlantic salmon fishing within an hours' drive.
• striped bass in the salt in an hours' drive.
• brown trout in an hours' drive
• even more epic salmon & striped bass fishing within 4 hours' drive.

Add in decent (and growing) local music scene, a couple decent coffee shops, a few good pubs & clubs, reasonable rent & real estate...

And a pretty kick-ass local fly shop...

Where is this place?

I'm not telling. 

But if you can figure it out, you're more than welcome to visit.

(This is a basic IQ test: if you can't figure out what town this is, you're too dumb to be here. This is to prevent you getting elected to the provincial government.)

Here's some of that (sort of) local music I speak of. I say 'sort of' because, while not necessarily from here, he visits. Often. In fact, this summer, at FredRock.

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Any fish, anywhere, any time...

Time/Date: 1010 AST, 20-Jun-11
Location: Fredericton, NB

(Can't see the pics or video in the post? Click here to see the full post)

Side note #1: I had to look up the date and the day of the week. No clue. I consider this a positive aspect of my life.

Side note #2: This is my first post in 6 days, which pushes the limit on how far I go between posts. But when it comes down to fishing or writing about fishing, well, you now know that outcome.

Tuesday, 14-Jun-11

 3-day fishing result

I left for the coast just after supper, timing my arrival coincide with slack tide on the low. The moon was full on the 15th, so the already-intense Fundy tides were more intense for a few days last week.

With weather & water becoming a little warmer, I figured this was a good time to (try to) land my first striper from the salt.

Or not. I didn't see anything: no stripers, no baitfish, no birds. Nothing.

And anyone who says fly fishing the coast at night is easy is full of shit. I can't wait to try it again really soon.

Wednesday, 15-Jun-11

Bucky with a nice one

Back to my freshwater roots for sea-run brook trout & the possibility of early Atlantic salmon on the Miramichi.

We hit a couple pools, finding them high, fast, and tea-coloured.

Bucky got into a nice one; however, I had another date with that black & white bastard.

This skunkening was more my fault than the previous night: a strip-set on what would have been a nice trout was a little...over-aggressive...to say the least.

Later I rolled a nice-sized grilse (or huge sea-run trout) on a shrimp pattern but received no love on successive casts.

Side note #3: This was three skunkenings in a row. At no point did I feel like torching police cars or smashing windows of stores & looting.

Side note #3.1: The term 'skunkening' is my own. It is derived from skunked. I got the idea from the movie Your Highness, which used the expression 'the f**kening.'

Thursday, 16-Jun-11

A last-minute invite for a downtown fish for stripers/muskie/smallies resulted in the end of the skunkening.

I wasn't messing around; this is what I rigged up for an afternoon on Pat's vessel:

• 5wt TFO with WF-5F + small cork-bodied popper
• 8wt Redington CPX with WF-8I clear sink tip + size 2 Clouser
• 10wt Redington CPX with sinking-tip Striper line + big, eff-off muskie fly

The Clouser did it for me: nice smallie. Skunkening over. Video evidence exists, too.

Side note #4: As a highly experienced smallie-on-the-fly person, I can confidently state smallmouth bass take Clouser minnows 100% of the time. And if you take the previous sentence seriously, you are a complete jack ass.

Side note #5: Smallmouth bass on the fly rod have been my best surprise fish of 2011. It's a good time! I mean, they can hit hard or they can take subtle, they fight, they jump. Fun as hell.

Side note #6: I really, really need a 6wt fly rod, reel & line now...

Friday, 17-Jun-11

Back in April, Bucky & I bid on a trout-fishing trip for two at the Miramichi Headwaters Salmon Federation silent auction. We won.

It was at Rocky Brook Lodge, more famous for its swanky digs & salmon pools, but they also offer trout fishing on their (what I would assume to be stocked) lakes.

Side note #7: This place is really swanky. The manager, Manley Price, is a great guy, and it's staffed with some really friendly guys that probably know more about fly fishing than I will ever learn. Thing is, they don't act like it, which is even more awesome. But I couldn't find a website, so if you ever want to go there, leave a comment & I will get you the contact info.

It was strongly suggested by a few people to use spinning gear. I chose to ignore that suggestion.

Luckily, it was a prudent decision: when we arrived, all the loaner spinning gear we had been promised had gone missing through various means. So fly gear it was.

We weren't disappointed with the decision.

The first two fish were taken on a small black & white Clouser. Then I switched up to a #16 mayfly dry, which brought a lot to the boat. Once that got too soaked with fish slime to float, I changed to a #12 Stimulator.

And then it was on.

We boated a couple dozen. Each. In under four hours. 

We released them all, but lost one to the psychopathic loon swimming around (& underneath) our row boat.

Side note #8: Those friggin' things are fast as hell under water. And a little scary.

Good times. Except for the loon.

A typical-sized offering

It's not a small trout; I just have GIANT HANDS!!!

Psychopathic stalker-loon

My weekend was spent relaxing with my beautiful girlfriend (she doesn't fish a lot). We went to see Super 8, which was pretty damn good (and fortunately not a two-hour ad for the motel chain).

I'm hoping to be chasing some St. John River fish within the next couple hours.

I'll try to not wait six days to write a report.

Side note #9: I remember saying I would try to keep my posts to 250 words when I started this. Yeah. Might try to do that again.

*******

Music time: when living a hero's life, you require a hero soundtrack. I think Explosions In The Sky provides that soundtrack. Even if you're just cleaning your bedroom (which, in some cultures, might be seen as heroic).

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Predator Patrol

Time/Date: 1100 AST, 14-Jun-11
Location: Fredericton

The muskie hunt on Saturday morning was really fun.

I got to learn a few things about muskie and their habitat & prey, and also (finally) got to try out my Redington CPX 10-weight rod.

PLUS...

There's something perversely enjoyable about fly fishing from a boat in downtown.

The only way it could've been better would be if it was a week day and all the sorry saps stuck in traffic on the Westmorland Street Bridge were on their way to work while I was casting away all the worries in my little world.

In fact, if it were a week day, I would've tweeted the mayor to look out his office window. I probably would have invited him. There's a good chance he'd accept, too. That's what it's like having a cool mayor (looking at you, Toronto...that's what you get for electing an ass).

As for fishing for muskie, I'll let this photo speak for itself:

Regardless of the outcome, it was a good time, and there's plenty of season left to land this so-called fish of ten thousand casts.

Only about 9500 more casts to go.

Thanks for the guided trip, Andrew!!

********
Tonight, it's striper-hunting time on the Fundy Coast.

Tomorrow's a full-moon, i.e., higher than normal tides (aka "spring tides"). It's mid-June. Migratory stripers may be here.

Where I'm heading, low-tide is ~1730, high tide is ~2330. Sunset is about 2130-ish. This could work out in my favour.

It'll be a late one; I plan on fishing until 2AM or so.

But I am ready.

We'll see how it all unfolds tonight.

An army of Clousers await marching orders for tonight

It will be about an hour and a half drive each way. I'll probably a little tired on the way home. That's why I have this tune well-situated on several road trip playlists to sing along to. It gets the synapses firing.

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Goodness

Time/Date: 1050, 10-Jun-11
Location: HOME!!!

I made it home on Wednesday afternoon...it was a long four weeks, but all is good (even better once my invoice gets paid).

In addition to my adorable dog & my beautiful girlfriend, I had a couple packages waiting for my arrival as well.

One was my new pair of Costa sunglasses I won from SoCal Salty's #Salty500 contest. They are pretty sweet. I'll have a review & pics of them posted soon (like, Sunday-soon).

The other was this gem:

Yeah. That's right. The new John Gierach book, No Shortage of Good Days, autographed by the man himself. And Bob White, too. One of Bob's paintings was used as the cover illustration.

I'm a pretty big fan of Gierach's writing; in fact, one of my earliest posts featured some of his quotes. You can read that post here.

The Trout Underground has an epic review of the book (I'm still reading it); Tom also has an interview with Gierach that he's working on as well.

On top of all this goodness, I went fishing yesterday, too. I slept through an epic rain & thunderstorm that happened the night before last; unfortunately, water conditions on the Nashwaak were high, swift & cloudy.

I still caught an above-average sized fish, though: a 10" creek chub.

Tomorrow will bring a 5AM wake-up for another fly fishing adventure: muskie on the fly rod.

I will be hitting the vise this afternoon for a few more big "eff-off" flies like this:

Being back in the land of reliable & fast interhorn connections, I was also able to finally download Matthew Good's new album, Lights of Endangered Species. It will be on while I clean...and tie big "eff-off" flies for the muskie (mis)adventures tomorrow.

Here's some Friday music goodness:

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Hurry up & wait...

Time/Date: 0105 CST, 05-June-11
Location: Saskatchewan...still...

I'm making the transition to night shifts for my last few days onsite here. The new drill hole is taking some time to get started due to technical difficulties. I say technical difficulties as I don't want to dive into any more details than that for fear of losing my readers to boredom.

So there's a whole bunch of hurry up & wait going on in my life. All I want is to hurry up & get home, but that's coming soon enough.

Of course, there are a couple pluses to this: time at the tying vise as well as playing around with new apps for my iPod.

First new addition is DropBox. It's kinda cool, if you're interested in that whole 'cloud computing' thing. I have it installed on both my laptop and iPod. A free account nets you 2GB of online storage, with paid subscriptions available for many more gigabytes if you need them.

You should check it out, and, if you use this link to sign up, both you & I will receive an extra 256mb of storage for free as part of their referral program. Lifehacker has a few more methods to increase free storage amounts here.

Next up is Instagram, which is a photo sharing app. It shoots pics, modifies them with different finishing effects, and posts them to various social media accounts a person might have. I shot a couple pics this evening & I like what I see of the app so far.

Here's a screenshot of what it looks like when someone clicks the link:

Here are the two pics I snapped using Instagram (conveniently transferred from my iPod to my laptop via DropBox):

As for fly tying, the top pic is a black & white Clouser, aka a "Bow River Cop Car Clouser." Nothing fancy, but apparently it works. It brings the official count of Clousers tied here to 15.

The monstrosity below it is a chartreuse & white yak hair streamer, with striping on the chartreuse hair artistically done up with a black sharpie. It will (hopefully) feed a muskie on an upcoming adventure...if I can cast the bastard.

This will be my first time muskie fishing, and I'm fairly certain there aren't a lot of guys in New Brunswick chasing them with a fly rod. The muskie fishery in New Brunswick is relatively new, but it's catching on quick. I know I'm looking forward to giving it a shot!

This will also be my first time fishing with my new Redington CPX 10-weight, though I hope to get some casting practice in beforehand.

(If you have noticed an increase in mentions of Redington (Twitter: @RedingtonGear) lately, well, it's because I received their guide deal through my association with Fredericton Outfitters. And also because they make awesome stuff. Hence me choosing Redington over any other brand carried at FOA.)

Here's some music:

(I have really been pushing the Canadian content lately, huh?)

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