My Love For Smelting

By Tom Remington

It seems that everyone I know and probably everyone that you know, has a love for something. I would suppose that lacking in a love for something or even someone would create a sense of uselessness or one of no purpose. Thankfully, I have passions for many things. Love and passion for hobbies, activities or I suppose inanimate objects comes in several shapes and forms. For some people, a true love of sports, for example, runs their lives and renders them useless in other ways. Those would be the extreme cases. A passion for your job, although I have never been able to understand that myself, is something that shouldn’t be allowed to fall into any of these categories because I consider the word “job” to be one of negative relativity. So, let’s forget about that. I am talking mainly about hobbies and things of the sort that occupy one’s “spare” time like hunting and fishing, or reading and exercise or jumping over 35 school buses parked side by side on a Yamaha Enduro dirt bike! Did I say that?

Rainbow Trout

My love for smelting would be comparable to jumping the 35 school buses or playing in traffic on the Ventura Freeway on a Friday afternoon. Sorry, but I have never been able to muster up a love for the sport. I’ve tried. I find it fascinating to learn of the quest of the little guys (and gals; I need to remember my political correctness) working so hard to find that perfect place to spawn and produce more little guys. The most of them will never live long enough to find their way back to where it all began.

Perhaps it all started way back many years ago when I sat down at the table one night for supper; in Maine it’s called supper so stop laughing. Placed before me was a plate of fresh smelts prepared wonderfully by my mom. They were breaded in some concoction of cornmeal, flour and specially selected herbs and spices. Yeah, right! Who am I kidding? I’m trying to make the entrée sound exquisite. Actually it wasn’t bad except for two things. If you don’t want to hear about this anymore, I suggest you stop now and return to the home page.

The two things that perhaps were what caused me to not like smelts and in effect smelting itself were the heads and guts. The smelts still had the heads and the guts in them and to make matters even worse, I watched unbelieving as my dad ate them that way, including the bones!

Have you ever tried taking off the heads, cleaning up the guts and de-boning a pan-fried smelt? As dexterous as you may be, it is an act in futility. I do need to clarify one thing before I proceed. I have never been one to eat much fish anyway. I am deathly allergic to all forms of creatures that come from the sea and I am sure that doesn’t help in my desires for fresh water species either.

But let’s put the eating aspect of it aside for a few moments and discuss the other elements of this strange sport and see if we can determine exactly what it is that would make me not enjoy going smelting.

Most of us work for a living and I am no exception. That, for the majority of people is a 9-5, trying-to-make-a-living thing, and when 5 p.m. rolls around who in the hell wants to go out and be up the rest of the night looking for little fish swimming up small streams? Well, I suppose many people but I’m not one of them. Only the die-hard smelt lovers are the ones who venture into the wilds of the cold, damp nights in search of the elusive smelt. Let’s not kid ourselves either. It’s not so much that you are up most of the rest of the night trying to get a robust “2 quarts” of smelts after sometimes driving 150 miles, it is what you do while you are awake during that time that kills you. Not to get off the subject here but I can’t help it. Does anyone else have a difficult time understanding why we measure quantities of smelts by quarts? I know I am not the brightest leaf on the tree but isn’t that a liquid measurement? Why don’t we measure them by weight or numbers? Never mind.

Let’s face it! Some of us require very little sleep and some more than what would be considered average. I am somewhere in the average to perhaps a little more than average and therefore have a difficult time pulling an “all-nighter”. So when trying to decide whether or not to go out smelting for the night, this factor weighs heavily.

Not to sound as though there is nothing good about smelting, I can think of one thing I did enjoy when I went. This was at a time when I used to smoke and while I was outside freezing my ass off, I could smoke all I wanted and I didn’t have my wife and two kids whining at me about how smoking was going to kill me. Little did they know that smelting was what I thought would really kill me.

I might add at this point before all you positive, “I love smelting freaks” leave my story because you think I’m just a downer. Writing this story is actually helping you guys out. If I can convince a few hundred fence sitters that smelting really isn’t much fun, then there will be more room on the brook banks and more smelts for all of you to enjoy. So stay and finish reading and stop groaning. I’m doing you a favor!

We have already determined that being up all night stinks and perhaps eating smelts all intact might roll your stomach. What else can we think of? While out in the boondocks, because that is the only place you can find smelts, you may get hungry so you stop at the local convenience store (or do you remember The Brown Owl) on your way out of town to pick up some nourishing foods to take with you. You will stock your cooler with things like: Twinkies, beer, potato chips, beer, a Slim Jim or eight, beer, Little Deb’s snacks and beer. While you’re getting stuff, you probably want to grab a “family pack” of the King of Beers (I know I always shared my Bud with my “family”).

Once you and your buddy arrive, the fun begins. The first thing you discover is you have forgotten you rubber boots. You didn’t forget your waders because no one in their right mind would go wading for smelts anyway so you have deliberately left them home. All you have on are sneakers so you know immediately your feet are going to be wet and nearly frozen all night long. Of course you are half-smart because you remembered an extra pair of socks to put on after the night’s fishing.

You quickly march down to the brook’s edge and begin scanning for smelts. You travel out to the mouth and back up-stream for some distance to discover the same thing the other 238 smelters had found out before you arrived – nothing! Time to break out the Budweiser – you and 238 others – and wait and drink and wait and drink.

By now it is 1 a.m. and you hear some drunken man yelling, “I think the (*^%*&^ things are starting to %*&^ run now!” Everyone dashes to the brook to see this awesome spectacle. 229 of the men fall into the brook and the other 9 begin cussing them out because they are going to mess up the run. While all this is going on, two guys have put on their waders and have lit their Coleman Lantern and are wading out into the mouth of the brook to “draw” the smelts in. The fighting begins. “Get your &%@*&^ ass out of the pond! Your screwing it all up!”

And so the night goes. By the time you go and retrieve your net and buckets and get down to the brook, it is total mayhem. Your flashlight batteries are about gone so you can’t see. Your feet are already soaked up to your knees and now you have lost one glove. Your teeth are chattering up and down faster than a woodpecker pecking to get a bug out of the old pine tree and every time you try to get your net into the brook, the guy behind you yells at you to get lost. You unproductively dip anyway and lose your pack of cigarettes into the brook. It’s good that they float for quite a while but not so good because you have to chase them down stream.

Other than that, all is going extremely well – I still have a 6 pack of Bud left. It’s 2:30 a.m. now and still no smelts. People are dipping and as they get their limits they nicely deposit all their trash in the woods and along the banks of the brook and pond and head home. You look around and you and your buddy are the only ones left. Finally some peace and quiet. You both scour the brook looking for some smelts and between the two of you you come up with 5 fish. What a night!

Tired, cold, frustrated and mad you head back to your truck with gear in hand. It’s too late for another beer cause you have just realized you have to be at work in 3 hours. You scrounge around for one last Slim Jim and a Twinkie for the ride home. Your buddy (who of course hasn’t been drinking) drives and cranks the heat up as high as it will go. It acts just like a potent sleeping pill and immediately your head begins looking like a fishing bobber bouncing up and down on a choppy lake.

That action continues for some time trying to stay awake. You feel a bit sick to your stomach from all the nutritious foods you have consumed and you’re still soaked. In between nods, you say to yourself, “I must be crazy! Why would anybody do this to themselves?”

You awaken to another noise that you don’t quite recognize and look over at your buddy. “Did you say something?” you ask. “Yeah!” your buddy says, “I heard someone talking tonight that probably the smelts will be running up at Mill Brook by tomorrow night. Want to go?” “Sounds like fun to me! What time you want to leave”

By Thomas K. Remington