ESTESBOG

by Peter Walker

USFWS photo by Peter Johnson, 2008

Oh, why does man pursue the smelt?
It has no valuable pelt,
It boasts of no escutcheon royal,
It yields no ivory or oil,
Its life is dull, its death is tame,
a fish as humble as its name.
Yet – take this salmon somewhere else;
And bring me half a dozen smelts!

Ogden Nash, 1902-1971

            I can’t explain it either. But ever since I was a little kid I’ve had a fascination with the smelt. And lots of other Mainers do, too.

            Middle Range Pond, the natural lake at the foot of the hill where I grew up in Poland Spring, Maine had a thriving population of tiny, sardine-sized smelts. They lived in the lake’s depths and were only seen in the early spring around ice-out when they ran up the little tributary brooks late at night to spawn. Men used to stay out all night to go smelting. They would catch the tiny fish with fine mesh dip nets. The limit was 4 quarts per fisherman per night. But, as I soon came to realize, smelts for most Maine outdoorsmen, are simply an excuse to stay out all night and howl at the moon and drink themselves into oblivion.

            When I was seven I got my first bicycle, a 24” Columbia, and shortly after discovered there was gold on the roadsides in the form of returnable bottles: 2¢ for a long-necked beer bottle, 3¢ for a 12-ounce pop bottle, and 5¢ for a quart pop or beer bottle.

            One of my first bicycle trips afield was down the hill to a 2-track woods road that led in to a cove where Schellinger’s Brook emptied into the lake. It was April, 1955 on one of the very first warm days of spring at that high latitude. I don’t remember why I chose that destination but, when I reached the edge of the brook, I knew I’d struck it rich. Every square inch of the rocks and fontinalis moss in the brook from the mouth up to the first falls was coated with tiny yellow-white smelt eggs in testimony of what had taken place the night before. Everywhere on either bank lay returnable beer bottles by the dozen! I was rich!

            It took me awhile to gather up all the good ones and stash them behind a brush pile lest someone else find them and steal them before I could get them all home. In the process I came upon a big dry cell flashlight, the kind with a handle and a red-flashing beacon on the back. Even in the second grade I knew that whoever left that nice light must have been smashed when he staggered back up out of the woods.

            I never really caught the smelt dipping bug. Once in awhile in high school I would go out with a few buddies and try to locate a run. Once I remember walking out on the end of an 8” x 8” cross piece on a logging road bridge. “Be careful of these beams,” I warned my friends. “Some of them may be rot….ten!”

            A second or two later the outer 4 feet of the beam and I both hit the shell ice and water ten feet below. My buddies said the only thing visible in their flashlight beams was my wool cap floating on the surface. I spent the rest of the evening stripped down and wrapped in a car blanket trying to trap the entire output of the car’s heater inside my blanket.

            Angling for smelts was a different story. The smelts in the lake spent most of their time near the bottom even in winter. My older friend at the base of the hill, Ronnie Morrill, had a fishing shack that his dad would put out in the middle of the lake every January. For two months Ronnie and I would fish in 60 feet of water for the occasional lake trout and all the smelts we could catch. To catch a 4-5” smelt at that depth takes a special rig. We used a 10-12” length of spring steel such as an old corset stay anchored to the wall of the shanty above a hole in the floor. To the end was attached a length of fine monofilament line – either 2 or 4 pound test – long enough to reach down to within a foot of the bottom of the lake. On the business end of that line was a small sinker and a #10 or #12 fly-tying hook baited with a tiny sliver of cut up baitfish.

            We usually each fished two smelt lines and set several tip-ups with live shiners or smelts for lake trout in proximity to the shanty. In those days an ice fisherman could have up to five lines.  The object was to watch the tips of the bowed springs closely. When a tiny smelt took the bait far below the spring wiggled slightly. One had to grab the line to set the hook, then haul it in hand over hand. It wasn’t an occupation that would keep a person fed. If we caught enough smelts in ten days afield, for one man to make a meal  I don’t remember when that was. But it was a great way to spend a bitterly cold winter’s day and it sure beat the heck out of Saturday cartoons.

            For some reason the Maine legislature has never looked upon ice fishing at night with favor. Middle Range, like most of the lakes in my county, was closed to fishing after dark. One day Ronnie and I discussed the state of affairs and decided there must be a good reason for it. We figured it must be a conservation measure. Smelts must be much easier to catch at night. Therefore we hatched a plan to test our hypothesis.

            The next weekend we took a small bag of night-fishing supplies out to the shack. As evening came on, we taped black paper across the three, single-pane windows and banked snow thickly around the base of the shack so that no light would be visible from shore. As nightful came on, we turned off the portable AM radio and placed tiny candles just above the smelt springs that gave just enough light to see the movement of the springs.

            Well, darned if it didn’t work spectacularly! Just about dark the springs began to wiggle and we caught smelts one after another about as fast as we could bait our hooks. In a couple of hours we easily caught more smelts than we’d caught collectively in the past 2-3 years! Around 9:30 p.m. we quietly locked up and walked the half mile across the lake to Ronnie’s house making as little noise as possible.

            Among the other ice anglers frequenting the lake in those days was my much older cousin Bobby Walker and his friend Bobby Martin. Bobby had a better-built shanty much closer to the landing on Route 26 than Ronnie’s little tarpaper-covered shack. The week after our successful smelt poaching operation we bragged about our success to the older boys.

            Thus on the following Saturday the two Bobbies came equipped with black paper, masking tape, and candles to give our technique a try. It worked just as well. The two high school seniors had a ball catching smelts through the evening. Perhaps if Bobby Walker’s giggle didn’t carry quite so far on a still winter’s night and perhaps if their shanty was another quarter of a mile off the highway, the game warden would never have become suspicious and walked out to see what was going on.

That’s how, at 9-years-old, I out-poached my cousin Bobbie.