Fishing Lines: Get your salmon-river kicks at Pool 66

Drive along Route 108 between Doakstown and Blackville, and you pass dozens of signs showing nothing but a large blue fish. It doesn't mean Salmon Crossing the Road, or even Beware of Salmon. It's simply an acknowledgement of how vital the silver visitors are to this part of Canada.

Not so long ago, this area of New Brunswick got by on logging. But suddenly the US started buying from China instead. Nobody wanted Canadian pine. (Intriguingly, someone in Blackville is already advertising Christmas trees, when everybody must have several thousand in their gardens. Get in quick before the rush starts.)

Fortunately, the area had an even better and almost untapped resource: the Miramichi River and its tributaries. Few knew just how good the fishing was, and those who did kept it very quiet. People like the Rockefellers, Bing Crosby and the baseball star Ted Williams escaped here to fish for salmon. The legendary Black Brook Fishing Club are said to have just 15 full members, who pay $1 million (£530,000) to join. They have quietly bought some of the finest fishing, but have been frustrated in efforts to snap up what many locals consider the best spot of all.

The 66 Pool comprises just 66 feet between two of the Black Brook Club's premium stretches. This is Crown water, where anyone with a salmon licence can fish. Offers of over $1 million have been shunned. Ultra-rich American lawyers and doctors can only gnash their perfect teeth as they rub shoulders with the serfs.

Dozens of Crown waters are scattered along the Miramichi. Though the world is starting to discover that this extraordinary river offers fishing from a bygone era, locals will never be priced out of their own backyard. How's that for enlightened government?

Is it worth spending an average of $1,500 for a week's fishing here? Well, I spent a morning at the 66 Pool and watched thousands of salmon. I lost count after 200 in less than 15 minutes. Wherever you looked, huge fish of 30lb or more were jumping, rolling, breaking the surface. The BBFC members, who looked like they carried pockets of silver dollars to tip the guides, were old money and icily polite. But you could tell that it galled them mightily to see oiks catching their salmon.

It's not all as spectacular as that. But our elegant wooden lodge is right on the river. Gaze out of the window for just a couple of minutes, and you will see a salmon jump. No wonder the ospreys look overweight. But conservation's the name of the game these days. Even the sports who would once have insisted on a trunkload of fish as proof that they were getting value for money put back all their salmon. A trophy nowadays is a photograph, not a corpse.

Once upon a time, everything was killed. How many salmon ended up being fed to a cat, or even worse, dumped in a trashcan? Now, an annual licence allows you just eight grilse (salmon under 53cm). Even the local Mikmak Indians (sorry, First Nation) no longer net the river indiscriminately, as they have the right to do. For New Brunswick to live and thrive, it's salmon, not several million pine trees, that show the way ahead.