Description
Along the way you'll meet some of the salmon fishers who helped make it all happen-people like baseball great Ted Williams, Hungarian freedom-fighter and guide Willy Bacso, and pioneering Miramichi outfitter Charlie Wade. You'll also learn about the near death of salmon sport on the Miramichi due to out-of-control commercial fishing and the re-emergence of the river as "big fish" water after conservationists were successful in pulling out the nets.
A large portion of Closing the Season is devoted to the Cains, a small wild river with big salmon that arrive in the upriver camp pools towards the tail end of the season in late September and October. The author's daily journal of the last five weeks of the fishing year lets the reader share with Burns and his fishing friends the thrill of angling for salmon on their spawning passage upstream while enjoying the abundant resident and migratory wildlife and the changing look and feel of this pristine place as the fall foliage peaks and wanes and the Cains settles in for the long, cold, Canadian winter.
Closing the Season offers more than 125 photos and illustrations and carefully researched historical maps and documents. But Closing the Season is most of all a celebration of the joys of fall salmon fishing in a great Canadian watershed that boasts the largest run of Atlantic salmon in North America.
About the Author
Brad Burns grew up in a commercial fishing family in a small village on the coast of Maine. His focus then was saltwater fishing, especially surf casting for striped bass, until the late 1980s when he discovered fly fishing and became expert at taking large stripers on flies tied at his vise.
As a longtime fisheries activist, Burns has served on a number of boards and advisory commissions, was a national board and executive committee member of the Coastal Conservation Association, and is the founder and president of Stripers Forever. He is also a U.S. Director of the Miramichi Salmon Association. Burns has received many awards for conservation work from organizations like the Federation of Fly Fishers, Sage Fly Rods, and the Fisherman's Conservation Association of New York.
His first book, the L.L. Bean Fly Fishing for Striped Bass Handbook, was published in 1998, and was followed by Fly Fishing Saltwater's Finest, which he co-authored with his late friend John Cole. Burns' new love of fly fishing expanded to freshwater species like brook trout and arctic char and eventually to the Atlantic salmon which has been his passion for the past twelve years.
Burns lives with June, his wife of 41 years, on the banks of the Presumpscot River (once a great Atlantic salmon river) where he still throws flies for striped bass.
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