Worthing’s Smelt Camps in Randolph had three of its 81 shacks on the Kennebec River Friday. The ice was good that day, but there were ice jams and too much water current in the river, so owner Jim Worthing was not renting out his camps.
Worthing blames the removal of the dam in Augusta in 1999 for the ice jams. The river has been less predictable since then, 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 open at all this year, Sharon Eddy said on 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 Merrymeeting Bay’s rivers. Ice was plentiful. It was solid in December and stayed until March. Now, fluctuating temperatures, severe storms, and even 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 haul them off again,” Eddy said. The year before that, the shacks were out for four weeks.
In the old days, they’d 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, she said. She has had people from as far away as Massachusetts calling every day, wanting to know if they’re open.
Despite the warmer winters and recent bad luck, she and her son Peter Eddy, who mostly runs the business since his father died in 2009, have no thoughts of closing for good.
“There’s always next year,” she 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 that answers the phone telling hopeful fishermen that the business will open when there’s ice. The cove where their ice shacks would normally be near the village bridge barely had a skim of ice recently.
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 surveys the number of smelt camps every year in February, counting shacks and how many fish people are catching, plus checking out the health of the fish, Brown said.
Part of the decline is certainly related to the weather changes that have occurred in recent years that make ice formation less likely, he said, but he is not ready to blame climate change or any other larger phenomenon.
There were more than 1,000 commercial and privately owned smelt shacks on river ice near Merrymeeting Bay in the 1960s-1970s. There were 93 in 2022, according to the department’s surveys.
The smelt population is stable, healthy and found in traditional places, but predators such as merganser ducks, seals and birds take advantage of the iceless rivers, he said.
There are fewer smelts from the New Hampshire border to Portland. The population begins to increase in the midcoast and then is normal Down East, Brown said.
He credited the smelts’ stability to the elimination of dams and efforts to open up streams, allowing the spawning fish free passage.
Once the smelts are in fresh water, the intense rainstorms stir up silt, which can smother the eggs. They also are food to invasive species such as northern pike and white catfish — an estuary fish.
Business and housing developments and unfriendly culverts affect the smelts’ spawning success too, Brown said.
He also noted a decline in the number of private smelt camps that pop up usually on 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 places, according to some of the people who were fishing there last week. On that particular day, there were only four.
In one yellow, pop-up fabric shelter Jimmy Merrill and Patty Valeriani sat jigging over a rectangular hole with short rods. On the ice, at their feet, were a half-dozen smelts they’d caught that afternoon.
It wasn’t much, but they planned to eat them for supper.
Merrill, a Yarmouth lobsterman, said he can remember sometimes catching more than 40 pounds of smelt on a single tide in the same spot, which he’s been fishing every winter for years.
“But that must’ve been 25 years ago, or more,” he said.
Now, he said it’s hard to imagine catching even five pounds.