“Not bad,” said Toy Carson Duluth, smiling broadly.
She and her family were on the beach Tuesday night along with a couple hundred others who had come to seine these delectable denizens of the big lake. Smelt swim into the shallows on the South Shore or up streams on the North Shore to spawn each spring.
“To eat ’em,” said Toy’s husband, Bob Carson. “My wife eats the heck out of ’em.”
Toy verified this.
“We boil. We stir-fry. We make smelt soup,” she said.
Toy Carson grew up in Thailand, where fish are prepared in many ways. She and her family have been regulars at the Minnesota Point smelt run for at least a dozen years. This year, they’ve already taken about 50 gallons of smelt in previous nights and would end up with another 35 or 40 gallons on Tuesday.
Lanterns sitting atop five-gallon pails glowed down the beach as far as the eye could see at 11 p.m. Tuesday night. Wader-clad smelters talked and joked and offered advice to those in the water with their 25-foot seines.
“Keep the net on the bottom!” a man in a white cowboy hat hollered.
Bob Carson thinks this year’s smelt run is about half over. Not many smelt have been taken on North Shore streams yet, said Don Schreiner, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources area fisheries supervisor at French River.
“I haven’t heard of anything yet,” he said. “I think we have a smelt run still to come because [water temperatures] haven’t hit the mid-40s yet.”
Smelt don’t usually come into streams to spawn until temperatures hit that range, Schreiner said.
“Park Point has been the more reliable spot over the past five years or so,” he said. “The run certainly lasts longer there.”
On North Shore streams, smelters typically swing long-handled dip-nets in streams to intercept upbound smelt. But on the beach at Minnesota Point, smelters wade far out into Lake Superior, open their seines and make the slow trudge back to shore.
Those waiting on shore eagerly trundled forward with the conclusion of each pull to see how many flashing silver bodies danced in the nets.
“Good pull!” they would cheer.
A good pull Tuesday night would net — so to speak — two or three gallons of smelt. An excellent pull might deliver five gallons, and one topped seven gallons.
The night was warm, with temperatures in the mid-40s, and nearly windless. The strength of the run varied all night.
“It’s on and off. It comes in waves,” Doug Pirila of Duluth said.
“Some pulls are good. Some are not so good,” said Dan Pease of Cloquet. “Usually, the later you stay, the better it gets. Some years, I’ve been here until 3 or 4 in the morning.”
He and a partner had netted 10 gallons in 25 pulls, he said.
Merrick Timbers and Tom Allen, both of Duluth, pointed proudly to a cooler full of smelt.
“We filled that in two pulls,” Timbers said.
And so it went, up and down the beach, under the steely glow of the Aerial Lift Bridge. In twos and fours and sixes, smelters left the beach lugging pails and coolers full of smelt.
In the light of Wednesday morning, the fish-cleaning would begin.