Smelting season

Origins of a spring tradition and the character of a mighty little fish

By Jennifer Trudeau

When the days again become longer than the nights, when dusk falls after 5 p.m. for the first time in months, thoughts turn nostalgically, wistfully, toward spring. The snow will probably melt, one muses; it always has before. The ice will break up. Temperatures will climb. There will be grass, maybe flowers. Things besides snowmobiles will move around outside; remember robins? Remember morels? Remember smelting season?

Ah, smelting season! Once upon a time, “smelting” was the principal harbinger of spring’s arrival. Back in the day when the smelt run began, little fish in tremendous numbers moved out of the depths of the Great Lakes, swimming inland. They first darkened Lake Michigan’s coastlines, then the rivers. When creeks and streams ran black, the clarion call to an annual celebration went out across the land.

Overnight, vehicles lined highways, dirt roads, pathways and riverbanks near rivers, streams and creeks fluttering with fish. Nets and hip waders were suddenly everywhere. For the haul, one used whatever vessels were handy: full-size trash cans, laundry tubs, gallon jugs, those big metal milk canisters and hip waders, removed for the purpose. Barrels and 5-gallon buckets brimming with fish were wedged into pickup beds, arranged into formation like gigantic six-packs. Some folks filled the very truck beds, right to the tops of the wheel wells.

In the Beginning

There was a time the annual smelt run used to kick off community-wide festivities. During the glory days, so dense were the waterways with fish that people liked to say you could walk across on them to the opposite bank without getting your feet wet.

Everyone participated in the seasonal doings: grandparents, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, cousins and dogs, out there in the dark because the smelt run best after 7 p.m., up into the wee hours of the morning.

Melvin (“Mel”) Manty, from Rock, was born in 1935. His earliest memories of smelt season date from about the time he was 10 years old, standing on the dark riverbank with a flashlight. He went “smelt dipping” every year for decades, eventually taking his own family.

“We went every year, usually on the Days River,” he said. “You’d take a net and a bucket. We’d all be out there at night, lighting bonfires. People burned old tires. Didn’t take maybe five minutes to get your fish. Sometimes you couldn’t lift your net out of the water. First smelt of the season you were supposed to bite its head off, right there.”

Cooking and cleaning happened right beside the water. Although, fish were sometimes fried whole and eaten — guts, tail and all. Manty liked his fish cleaned. For those fortunate enough to have refrigeration, there might be fish for weeks. The Manty family got a refrigerator in 1949, but until then, their smelt had to be eaten fresh; what they couldn’t consume went into the garden as fertilizer — a common practice. Most people ended up with more smelt than they could eat.

Manty’s earliest memories coincide with the greatest period of regional activity around the spring smelt runs. The Michigan DNR estimates that from about 1950 through the ’60s, the smelt spawning run had essentially become its own holiday: community events were hosted locally in various locations around the Big Bay de Noc and tributaries, wherever smelt ran heaviest.

Beginning around the 1950s, Rapid River hosted “Smelt Festival,” an event lasting a week or more, which drew people from all over the area. Live music, bonfires, socializing, boozing and, of course, fish fry after fish fry everywhere you turned. Similar partying was going on all along the coasts of the Great Lakes (up here, some called it “smelt drinking”): in Minnesota near Duluth; in Wisconsin and Canada, even along the shores of the Chicago area, where fish ran every bit as heavy as in the U.P. Those days of plenty sustain their party-like atmosphere even now, in memory, in- cluding Manty’s.

“Sometimes the fish were just an excuse for a party; people went out there to drink.”

Be Fruitful and Multiply Smelt, smelt everywhere for a couple of weeks, as easy to dip from the tributaries as the water itself. There was no limit, and perhaps the jubilee-like community atmosphere fed the common practice of pulling fish in greater numbers than could be cleaned, shared or even eaten. The predictable result was overfishing –taking smelt faster than they could reproduce.

Rainbow smelt (they’re colorful in the sunlight underwater) are forage fish, introduced to Michigan in the early 1900s specifically as a food source for another introduced species, Atlantic salmon. The smelt went into Crystal Lake, an inland body of water south of Traverse City, and escaped from there into Lake Michigan, then established themselves in the rest of the Great Lakes. They were first spotted in Lake Superior in the early 1940s.

Forage fish like smelt make up a critical link in the food chain, feeding on plankton and even smaller fish (including, famously, their own young). In turn, smelt are eaten by predator game fish like salmon, walleye, lake trout and steelhead. Birds like gulls and Mergansers also like them. A large rainbow smelt might reach 10to-12 inches; average is 4-to-6, with females larger than males.

Everywhere in the natural world, empires fall eventually. It wasn’t as if the smelt would have just dominated unchallenged, ruling the spring rivers and water-routes explosively forever — they have regular workaday troubles of their own. For example, only when water temperatures get into the low 40s can the spawn begin. The temperature doesn’t stay in the ideal range for long; a week or two, possibly three at most, if they’re lucky. If there’s too much spring rain, well, that’s no good, either; it messes with water temperature range and feeds into the spring currents, and that’s a whole other kind of problem.

There’s the actual swim inland and upstream, contending with wind and wave action. Storms off the Great Lakes bring more wind and waves, which affect the preferred laying waters for nurseries along the shorelines, affecting egg-laying behavior as well as the safety of the eggs.

Smelt are just trying to make a living like the rest of us, and human pre- dation added a significant complication to the smelt equation. If numbers have fallen a little in response, what with this, that, and the other thing, well, that’s not really such a surprise, is it?

By the Numbers

Manty’s final smelt-dipping trip was with his youngest son, then 3 or 4 years old (he’s 42 now). It was the early ’80s. Smelt had been less numerous for a while by then, Manty remembers, but that year they’d netted only one fish. Smelt were still there, but getting increasingly harder and harder to find.

Some Mid Pen seniors in the late ’80s remember pulling them up with nets by the bucketful, but by then, you had to really want it, and the hunt had become as much a part of the process as the dipping. Manty’s experience is reflective of many others from the same period. By the mid-’90s, the tradition was fading fast.

The Michigan DNR cites multiple factors influencing the declining Great

Lakes population: preying on larger fish which were smelt predators, and that was one thing; then came Zebra mussels, those sneaky ubiquitous creatures, pigging up the plankton supply, which is the preferred diet of smelt all through the Great Lakes, and that was another.

Fish populations naturally fluctuate from year to year anyway, under the best circumstances, same as grouse, rabbits and deer. There isn’t one cause.

Factoring in these and other varying conditions of the spawn itself, with the current state of smelt fishing (yes, it still does happen every year, it’s just a shadow of its former majesty), and the end result is a population which is actually not so much in decline as, simply, in balance.

These days, hook and line smelt fishing is open year-round. There’s a two-gallon limit, though, and while net dipping is still popular, you’ve got to want it; the results are likely to teach you something about humility. But the greatest loss with the disappearance of smelting season is human and social.

Manty’s favorite smelting memory is of the year he and his uncle built a dipping net by hand from old car parts. They bent a long brake rod around a tree trunk to fashion the hoop, attached something forgotten for netting and rigged the whole busi- ness to a tamarack pole. It served the purpose. Did they clean up with smelt that year? Probably, he says; they always did. He doesn’t remember the fish. What he does remember from that year is the afternoon they spent making the net.

He was 10 years old.