Taken any smelt recently?

Some smelt like this are caught by ice anglers, but few run spawning streams now.

I was out salmon fishing one summer day last year, and while filling the inner soul with tasty food, someone finally asked a question I had wanted to answer for nearly a quarter-century.

One of the great mysteries of the past 25 years is the seemingly near extinction of Great Lakes smelt. They aren't extinct but one couldn't prove it by the successful spawning runs over past 25 years.

My first year at The Detroit News as their full-time staff outdoor writer came with a hire-in date of April 21, 1980. A night or two later I went smelt dipping at what was the greatest smelt hotspot of all time.

Tons of smelt were taken at the peak of the runs.

It was at Point Pelee, on the Ontario side of Lake Erie in April, 1980. Smelt back then assaulted tiny trickles of water flowing into the lake, and possibly millions of smelt would hit the beaches like an infantry battalion.

Ontario residents could use seines to take smelt at that time, on their waters, and two or three good men on a seine net would get so many fish with one swipe they couldn't lift it from the water. Nonresident visitors to the popular Ontario netting site were limited to the use of hand dip nets.

That was fine because anyone with a dip net could take more smelt in two hours than could be eaten in a year. My first visit found me done netting after two dips. I had 50 pounds of smelt, and some of my new co-workers at the newspaper asked me to bring them some smelt for dinner.

I did, and kept about 10 pounds for myself. A few days later I was dipping smelt at the old Singing Bridge on US-23 near AuGres, Michigan. It was the usual rowdy crowd; people getting drunk, eating live smelt, falling into Lake Huron, and in general, making complete idiots of themselves.

Smelt hotspots were many throughout Michigan and Ontario.

Again, two dips that night produced more smelt than I wanted but some neighbors were hungry for a mess. I divvied up my catch among three families, and all were happy for the fresh fish.

Smelt seemed to hang around for four or five more years, and then it was as if someone had flipped the switch. Smelt disappeared from Point Pelee, from the Detroit and St. Clair rivers near Detroit, and some key locations like the old Singing Bridge (years ago it hummed when a car crossed over it) and the AuSable River mouth showed signs of decline.

Next came Lake Michigan. The big runs off the Platte River, Otter Creek and the Frankfort piers and much farther south, tapered off, and two years later people who once dipped at Saugatuck and South Haven complained of few or no smelt.

I heard of a few good dipping nights on Lake Superior near the Keweenaw Peninsula, and some tiny streams that enter Lake Michigan near Manistique provided fair dipping. But, when compared to the great spring nights of 25-35 years ago, smelt numbers have plummeted.

I still hear tales there are lots of smelt in the Great Lakes, but if so, very few are spawning in tributary streams anymore. Where have all the huge smelt schools gone? Are they spawning in the big lake?

Lots of questions but mighty few answers.

It's a good question, and no one has a solid answer. Many blame it on alewives that eat tiny smelt. If that is so, what caused the crash of alewives in Lake Huron some years ago? That lake is nearly barren of forage fish before alewives invaded the Great Lakes decades ago.

I'm just an outdoor writer who tries to keep up with things. Many smelt disappeared before zebra mussels appeared, but many more have disappeared since their arrival. Are the lakes too clean to hold smelt? Is there too little forage for baby smelt to feed on? Are smelt in a state of slow depletion. Should the ever-unpopular cormorant take the blame?

Many dippers have taken smelt over the years, but in the early 1980s when smelt numbers were high, they were high everywhere. When they crashed, even where netting wasn't popular, they seem to have vanished.

Smelt dipping (or as some hardcore drunks called it –– smelt drinking) when a run of fish moved in, the cry went up: "The smelt are running!"
Seldom is that cry heard these days. No one seems to have a handle on the topic, but many suspect changes in water quality, the accidental introduction of foreign exotic species such as round goby, etc., and others feel smelt numbers are a cyclic up-and-down thing.

Smelt are cyclic but this lack of fish is of great concern.

Smelt numbers also seem to be down somewhat in those inland lakes where they were introduced about 100 years ago. Winter smelt fishing can be great fun on Green Lake near Interlochen, Crystal Lake at Beulah, Higgins Lake near Roscommon and other scattered inland lakes, but even on these inland lakes, the numbers seem down and the fish are much smaller.

One thing is certain: few areas attract huge smelt numbers anymore. A few diehard dippers still go out, and measure their catch as successful if they take enough fish for one meal.

If this is a cyclic phenomenon, I hope it gets it out of its system soon, and allow smelt numbers to rebound. And then, perhaps if enough old goats like me are still around, we may once again thrill to the dippers' rallying cry: "The smelt are running!"

Posted via email from Dave Richey Outdoors