This year was our eighth year of doing Smeltapolooza, and we managed once again to do it on Valentine’s Day weekend.  We were remarking this year that this scheduling tradition is possibly one of the few great decisions the Monsters of Fishing have ever made.  It eliminates the necessity of taking the significant others out to fancy expensive dinners somewhere and buying all sorts of expensive flowers and gifts for Valentine’s Day.  It’s a way for us guys to get away and really just say to our significant others “honey, we don’t need an overly commercialized phony holiday to show each other how we feel”.  “I care about you so much we don’t need to celebrate on one chosen day, I love you everyday”.  “See you when I get back Sunday”.

Despite the fact that we haven’t caught a smelt the
last few years, and only a small handful ever, we dutifully baited all the
hooks, lowered all the lines down into the water, and at that point proceeded
to declare that the fishing had officially ended for the trip.  It was actually a good turnout at the smelt
camps that night with many of them occupied and folks milling about visiting
from shack to shack and standing around socializing on the ice. No one was
catching a thing and it all confirmed what we have been suspecting now for a
little while;  that smelts actually
became extinct a few years ago and nobody said anything.

Cheers!
MOF

That of course will not dampen our efforts in the
least though, oh no. We will be back next year and perhaps we won’t  bother to put the lines in the water from now
on I don’t know,  but tradition is
tradition and Smeltapolooza will carry on…

There are no smelts in Maine.  It’s all a big fat lie.

Ok, Ok, that’s not true. Reports indicate that there has been some action this year with the best seemingly on the larger Kennebec River.  However the overwhelming response this year, so far as I’ve seen from those fishing the smaller tributaries where the bulk of the smelt camp operations are, is that… this year is bad. In fact, over the course of the last 7 or 8 years we’ve been doing Smeltapolooza, it seems the catch rate has steadily dwindled.

..."not a creature was stirring, not even a smelt"...

Some claim that, at least this year, the warmer winter and late ice is the cause, while others say that the tides have been running too big or that freezing then thawing ice is creating weird currents that are clouding up the water. None of this though would explain why some I talk to say that the smelt fishing just isn’t what it was a few years ago.  Perhaps it some cyclical thing that happens every number of years and coincides with the New England Patriots draft picks or something. Or, maybe it’s best to leave it to the biologists to figure it out and we’ll scour the internets for any news from them.

In the mean time, we carried on the tradition again this year and tackled the Abagadasset River in Bowdoinham, Maine.   MOF members equaled four, smelt caught equaled zero. And the dozen or so camps along the river bank with us were coming up empty handed as well on the five hour, night time, outgoing tide.  We did eat well, except that the lack of a menu coordinator meant that somehow each of us brought sausages….lots of sausage,…sausage 6 ways sausage. We will review menu planning procedures for future trips.  

 Dean brought his bear repellant pink flamingo (see First Big Spring Trip Roundup) to guard the shack and, although black bears are hibernating in Maine in the winter, Dean’s from down south originally and probably thinks where there is frozen water there has to be polar bears wandering around. 

I’m seeing and hearing of guys using Sabiki rigs that they bring themselves and jig with instead of relying on the single lines provided with the camps. Next year we’ll rig up a few of these with little glow in the dark krill-like jigs and work them with handheld jigging rods… you can see an early attempt we did with a single rig from the post in Monster Tech Tips called the Smeltslayer Model 2010 prototype..  

Between now and then though, the MOF will be preparing for First Flys Out in early spring…. and anything else that comes up before then…