by Hans van Klinken

During our very first visits to Tuckamore Lodge, Barb was already offering her fishing guests a real fly fishing paradise. The nearby Salmon River and Northwest River were perfectly suited for my research in identifying any connections between my fishing successes in Norway and those salmon that took the dry fly so well in Newfoundland. The travel time from the lodge to the nearby rivers is short, and the watercourse, current and bottom structures were very similar to the rivers I had fished in Norway. The similarity of the river systems was very important to test and evaluate my Norwegian fly fishing techniques in an objective manner. Some of my conclusions I will relate to you in the more specific fishing sections within this story.. 

In the past, I always found a good run of grilse in the Southwest brook and Salmon River. The salmon fishing season begins in late June and continues to the early days of September. The Atlantic salmon in this area weighs, on average, between six and ten pounds. Real salmon (salmon over 3 kg and longer than one year at sea) I caught only in the Salmon River. In addition to the Salmon, for serious fly fishermen there is also the challenge of Brook Trout, Arctic Char, and Sea run Brook Trout. 

While fishing the Salmon River and Southwest brook quite extensively in those days, I was also lucky to deal with some exceptional weather as well. I ran into very cold temperatures and experienced very high water levels, but also had to fight a serious heat wave in which the water had dropped to dramatic levels. 

Air temperatures around 10 degrees Celsius and lots of rain during our 1997 trip were responsible for us not doing so well with our dry flies, but we finally succeed while using wet flies in much bigger sizes than most local people used. My Bondal series of flies, for example, were absolutely great under those circumstances. We also caught a lot of Brook trout in some inland lakes where guide Junior took us.

The most difficult fly fishing for Atlantic salmon that I ever experienced happened to me in the Newfie drought of 1999. It was a terrible year for a fly fishing tourist to be in Newfoundland because DFO (The Department of Fisheries & Oceans) had closed most rivers in the south and southwest already. It was a really bad year for most of the fishing lodges as well. The fishing in Mainbrook also had become very poor, even with plenty of fish in the river. Using small dry or wet flies was useless, which we had already discovered by experience in the south, and I wracked my brain to find a solution. It is not that I can't stand it when catches are poor or nothing; it is more the kick to catch one when everybody fails. It was always a personal challenge when people would tell me that fishing will be useless. Realize well that we were fishing with air temperatures far over 30 degrees Celsius, with no rain for several weeks. There were no other fishermen as crazy as we were, but therefore we had the rivers to ourselves and that is an unbelievable feeling. I think a lot of people can't understand us, but if you are fishing wild places and salmon are leaping everywhere, it is still very enjoyable just to be there. While I studied the Salmon river well, I discovered that at several places the current was rather slow, almost dead. When most fish rolled at the edge of each current, it came to my mind to try to tempt some fish by using some small unweighted nymphs. I never tried it before in Atlantic Canada, so the challenge was born. I could use the dead water to let the nymph sink well under the surface, and when I could move it with a very slow retrieval, it maybe could work. It's a technique that is extremely popular for catching whitefish by fly, and if you know that I use several of my grayling techniques to hook salmon by dry fly, why this couldn't work as well? I prepared a new leader and tied on a 4 lb. almost 2 meter long tippet, instead of the normal 6 lb. I believed any trick to present the nymph as deep as possible under the surface could improve my chances.