Warm weather cuts smelt season early
The warm winter weather in Maine is affecting more than just the ski slopes – after having a great season last year, some smelt camps across the state have closed-up shop early for the season, while others have yet to open.
Baker’s Smelt Camps on the Kennebec River is unfortunately experiencing the later.
For the first time in its 39 years of operation, the Pittston-based Baker’s was unable to setup any camps on the ice and announced last week that it would be closed for the season, a far cry from last year when the business had 34 camps along the Kennebec River starting the second week of January.
“It seems like people have been pretty understanding,” David Robbins, a company spokesman told The Kennebec Journal. “I’ve gotten a lot of messages from people asking about when we were going to put the camps out, but this late in the year, it just wasn’t worth it to us.”
Baker’s wasn’t the only smelt camp in the area to call the season as the Bowdoinham-based Jim’s Smelt Camps as well as Riverbend Smelt Camps both closed earlier this month, according to the Journal.
Smelts are small fish that are caught in a number of ways including using large nets at sea for commercial fishing or recreationally using small hand nets.
Smelt Camps are small shacks that appear along frozen rivers during early spring, when the fish ascend streams and rivers to spawn. Catching smelts within a smelt shack involves using weighted lures in pre-bored holes in the ice within the shack.
Some fishermen do remain optimistic, as smelting season appears to run in two-year-cycles, according to Jason Bartlett, a specialist for the Department of Marine Resources. A survey from the department in 2014 showed the lowest number of fish caught per line, per hour since data began to be collected.
“A lot of the fish returning to spawn were two-year-old fish, and last year, the fishing was better,” Bartlett told the Journal. “We could hope that in 2017 it would be a better year as well.”
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