Processing Canada in my head - when we found the fish it was incredible, but like anywhere you can also bleed

Flying back from Halifax on the east coast of Canada to Heathrow on Sunday was a shorter flight than it is to depart from Halifax and fly across Canada to Vancouver on the west coast. The scale of a country like Canada is hard to get your head around, indeed having had the amazing experience of a few days of striped bass fishing in one tiny area of such a vast country, in many respects it has fried my brain even more because of the endless possibilities there are…………….

Now that I am back home I feel more able to be a bit more clinical with my perspective on the week. For sure we had some incredible striped bass fishing when we found the fish, but that’s it in a nutshell - when we found the fish. When we didn’t, we bled, and that of course is like fishing all around the world. However strong the local stocks are, you ain’t going to do very well if you can’t find those fish! Even when your local fishing back home is firing, you can’t tell me that you can simply wander down to any bit of water and catch bass, and it’s the same over in Canada. We went to Prince Edward Island blind, and without a bit of luck and good judgement we could have just as easily have come away disappointed.

Which we very much didn’t because we had a few epic sessions where we found a lot of hungry striped bass. But we also had a few sessions where we picked some likely looking spots on Google Earth but didn’t do very well at all! Even though the stocks of the Canadian striped bass have come through the most amazing recovery process, they are still fish which are moving around on the hunt for food and so on. If you aren’t in the right place at the right time it doesn’t matter how many fish there might be though, but then you all know what with regards to whatever fish you choose to chase.

To be perfectly honest you could spend a lifetime heading over to somewhere like Prince Edward Island and still not fully get to grips with the place. It’s a big area with a hell of a lot of open coast and estuaries. We covered a lot of miles and we didn’t even scratch the surface. I feel like I know a lot more now about what to go looking for now, but even then my Canada striped bass experiences are at this point in time based purely on one week - the associated time of year, wind directions, weather and tides. We had a couple of memorable sessions at the one specific spot, but if I returned and the winds were completely different, would it fish remotely the same? And a couple of amazing looking spots where we blanked, would they produce for us next time around with different conditions and tides? That of course is the whole crux to saltwater fishing.

What I find the most exciting and interesting though is the potential scale of fishable water over there. My basic understanding is that the chance of the largest Canadian striped bass lies with the Bay of Fundy stock and what is often some very coloured water because the tides around there are the largest in the world. Then you have the Miramachi stock of striped bass which we were fishing for, and because these fish are generally smaller they give us the opportunity to fish with exactly the same sort of gear we would use for our own bass. What also really appeals to me is the lack of crowds and that you can more often access multiple locations because private land and associated access issues are far less in Canada.

But what really does it for me is how much there is to discover. I believe that this might come from what was almost a total stock collapse and then a subsequent rebuild - we can but dream about this here in Europe! - and the fact that the striped bass fishery over there that we see now has only really been in existence for ten years or so. Which in turn means you have got what is basically a new fishery as such, and in my mind this means newer anglers who don’t have a lifetime of experience of fishing for striped bass - which then means that there surely has to be a scary amount of ground that hasn’t been fished and is potentially waiting to be discovered all up and down that vast east coast of Canada. Is that a logical way to think about it or has my brain gone to pot?

Whatever the case I am still bouncing. I went fishing for our bass yesterday and luckily had one in the net within about five minutes of starting fishing. At around 4lb+ I was obviously rather happy, and especially in such bright and settled conditions, but because the last fish I hooked before that was a larger and more powerful striped bass on a similar type of lure rod, the poor bass yesterday was in my net so bloody quickly I don’t think either of us quite knew what was going on. I am coming back down to earth but I am very aware that last week could have been very different if we hadn’t found the fish on a few occasions. I can’t wait to get back to PEI, but I am also planning to do a bit of a road trip out there next year and go see what I can find………………