George and I hammered the Chinook salmon

My late twin brother, George Richey, leads a big king to net.

Years ago we had an early cool snap, a cold rain fell, and suddenly the Betsie River was awash with fresh-run Chinook salmon. Everywhere one looked were fish moving upstream, their backs creasing the surface.

Brother George and I were fishing two small holes 30 yards apart, and he was casting a wet fly while I was pitching a copper No. 2 Mepps Anglia spinner. It was midweek, and we seemed to have the river to ourselves.

George hooked a fish on a pattern he devised for dark-water, and it was called The Crick. It was basically a black fly with a bit of color, and he was bouncing it along bottom when it stopped and the line switched sideways. There is nothing delicate about setting the hook on a big river salmon. It is a happening!

Hooking two big kings was a special treat for us.

I could hear him grunt as he muscled back to pound the hook home. I took two turns on the reel handle, and a king salmon tried mightily to wrench the rod out of my hands. I urged him into a fighting mood with a hard double hook-set, and there we stood, 20 yards apart, the Richey twins, each one tight to an angry king salmon.

My fish started downstream, and jumped almost into his back pocket, and George spun around, glared at the fish heading out into midstream as his fish ran upstream away from the splash. His fish jumped out in front of me, and we both had to get moving to avoid tangling our lines.

He shuffled upstream while I moved down, and we had the two fish separated by 20 yards when his big king swapped ends, and headed downstream behind me as I scrapped with my fish in the deep hole. I stepped backwards, stepping over his line, and then we stood there, our backs almost touching, as we tried to beat up on those fish.

"Having fun yet?" he asked, knowing I was.

"Nothing better than a 25-pound king trying to rip the rod from your hands," I replied. "Waited a year to do this again."

The silence of the moment was hushed by splashing fish, and then George's fish headed upstream, and our two fish were as close together as we were, and both were struggling upstream, fighting the river current and our heavy rod pressure.

Fighting both salmon, with each going its own way, was a hoot.

"Could get a bit tricky soon," he noted. "If both of them come down together, it will be interesting to see if we can get out of the way while keeping them separated."

The Chinook salmon apparently read his mind or heard his voice, and like two submarines heading for two troop ships, here they came. One fish stayed deep and mine was near the surface, and I pulled from one side to upset his travel pattern. George and I always seemed to read each other's mind, and he did the same except he pulled in the opposite direction.

The fish hit the air, both in half-hearted jumps, and it was as if we were in a ballet on water. We reacted in unison without discussing it, and his move and mine complemented the other. The kings, reacting in a somewhat predictable manner, responded in kind. This was a battle of two twin men, working on two adult Chinook salmon of equal size, and it couldn't have been choreographed any better.

My fish cut between me and shore, spinning me around as it charged downstream. George's fish peeled around him in midstream, and now both fish were wallowing on the surface.

My fish was just half-a-shade lighter in coloration than his but it played out faster on the spinning tackle. I led the fish to shore, grabbed it by the caudal peduncle (the wrist-like narrowing just ahead of the tail), lifted it out, reached for my long-nose pliers, and twisted the treble free and released the fish.

Tailing a big Chinook salmon is easy if you know how and hang on.

I grabbed my camera and began clicking photos of George as he landed his 25-pounder. There was a bit of color in the background, and he held his fish aloft for two or three photos.

He bent over, released the fish with the dignity it deserved after putting up a valiant fight, and we were off looking for another adventure.
Those were the days when George and I lived our lives to the fullest, guided fishermen, and traveled Michigan's rivers together as we did everything else ... together, and as a team.

Today I was on the Betsie River again, and my thoughts of George were wonderful as I looked for fish below the old Homestead Dam. I found a few fish but they weren't hitting. The river water is still warm, and oddly enough, there were no people where I was at.

I cast to several fish but the fish were really spooky. One cast, and they would head into a timber-lined hole. The last thing they seemed interested in was flies or spinner, but it was a good day for remembering my twin brother.

I still think of him daily after almost eight years since his premature death, and although we hunted together as well, it was on those early salmon and steelhead trips that we became almost welded together, inseparable as two peas in a pod. I miss him, and just remembered this story today as I tried to recreate that day, and it's one of my favorites.

Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

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