Worthing’s Smelt Camps in Randolph had three of its 81 shacks on the Kennebec River on Friday. The ice was good that day, but there were ice jams and too much water in the river, so owner Jim Worthing wasn’t renting out his camps.
Worthing blames the 1999 Augusta dam removal for the ice jams. The river has been unpredictable ever since, and it has ruined his business, he said. He has had shacks for 53 years.
The James Eddy Smelt Fishing camps in Dresden on the Eastern River will not be open at all this year, Sharon Eddy said Friday. Sharon Eddy is the widow of the fishing camp’s namesake who opened the business in 1959. There is running water and just no ice, she said.
There used to be dozens of smelt shacks on the rivers of Merrymeeting Bay. Ice is abundant. It was solid in December and stayed until March. Today, fluctuating temperatures, severe storms, and less interest in smelt fishing, are contributing to the slow death of a Maine tradition.
“Last year, we only had the camps on the ice for two days before we had to transport them again,” Eddy said. The year before that, the shacks were gone for four weeks.
Once upon a time, they would have enough cold weather and ice to get 50 camps on the Eastern River. Now, in a good year, they’re lucky if they get 25 out there, he said. He had people from as far away as Massachusetts calling every day, wanting to know if they were open.
Despite warmer winters and recent bad luck, he and his son Peter Eddy, who has mostly run the business since his father’s death in 2009, have no thoughts of closing for good.
“There’s always next year,” he said.
But some have closed for good.
On the Kennebec River, the sign for the now permanently closed Riverbend Smelt Camps has a second sign plastered over it advertising their camps for sale at $50 and up.
And Jim’s Smelt Camps in Bowdoinham, on the Cathance River, has a recording answering the phone telling would-be anglers that the business will be open when there’s ice. The cove where their ice shacks are usually located near the village bridge has barely had any ice skim lately.
There is a definite downward trend in the number of shacks and people fishing and the amount of fish being taken, according to Michael Brown, a scientist with the Maine Department of Marine Resources.
The DMR checks the number of smelt camps every year in February, counts the shacks and how many fish people catch, and looks at the health of the fish, Brown said.
Part of the decline is certainly related to weather changes that have occurred in recent years that make ice formation more likely, he said, but he’s not ready to blame climate change or any other larger phenomenon.
There were more than 1,000 commercial and privately owned smelt shacks on the river ice near Merrymeeting Bay in the 1960s-1970s. There will be 93 in 2022, according to department surveys.
The smelt population is stable, healthy and found in traditional areas, but predators such as merganser ducks, seals and birds are taking advantage of the ice-free rivers, he said.
There are fewer smelts from the New Hampshire border to Portland. The population starts to increase in the midcoast and then normalizes in the Down East, Brown said.
He attributed the persistence of smelts to the removal of dams and efforts to open streams, allowing spawning fish free passage.
When smelts are in fresh water, heavy rains stir up silt, which can damage the eggs. They are also food for invasive species such as northern pike and white catfish – an estuary fish.
Business and housing developments and unfriendly culverts also affect smelts’ spawning success, Brown said.
He also noted a decline in the number of private smelt camps that normally appear in the Androscoggin River eddy below the dam and Great Salt Bay in Damariscotta.
In good years, when there’s a lot of cold temperatures and ice, dozens of shacks are set up in those spots, according to some of the people fishing there last week. On that particular day, there were only four.
In a yellow, pop-up fabric shelter Jimmy Merrill and Patty Valeriani sit jigging over a rectangular hole with short rods. On the ice, at their feet, were half a dozen smelt they caught that afternoon.
It wasn’t much, but they planned to eat them for dinner.
Merrill, a Yarmouth lobsterman, said he remembers sometimes catching more than 40 pounds of smelt in one water in the same area, which he fished every winter for years.
“But that must have been 25 years ago, or more,” he said.
Now, he says it’s hard to imagine catching even five pounds.
