Smelt fishers battle poor ice, small catches

By Sherry Martell

Transcontinental Media

RIVER JOHN, N.S. - Multi-coloured smelt shacks are beginning to dot the ice in many areas along the Northumberland coast creating a traditional winter scene.

But the small, sliver-coloured fish are more plentiful in some areas than others, and a late freeze over has kept some commercial smelt fishermen grounded. “We’ve had a hard time getting out to the ice,” said Keith Heighton. The River John resident has been fishing smelts during the winter since he was a young boy and he has noticed several changes in the catch during the past few years. “In the spring, people would come and get garbage bags after garbage bags of them,” said Heighton. “ There’s just not as many as there used to be.”

He said his last good smelt catching season was in 1999.

Last year, Heighton did not set his nets and isn’t sure if he will this season either, based on reports of low catches from other fishermen in the area. He was told by another fisherman who had pulled gill nets up through the ice at four tide changes in a row that only about 10 pounds of smelt were landed.

That’s not an enticing number for all the laborious work involved in setting gill nets in the ice and checking them every five hours around the clock for days on end.

Wallace Bay smelt fisherman Billy Allen was able to get his bag net set in the ice during the first week of January. “We probably shouldn’t have been out there but we were,” he said about the poor quality of the ice at the time.

Through years of practice he has learned to read the ice, taking care with each calculated step.

Allen said smelt catches there this year are fair to good, definitely better than they have been in recent years. “I don’t know how long they’ll last, so we’re just taking it day by day,” he said.

At $1.50 a pound, catches have to be plentiful to make it worth their time to be on the ice pulling up the catch long before daybreak, in all kinds of weather, then spending the next few hours picking the frigid fish from the icy net by hand.

Allen said he has noticed dramatic changes in the tidal pattern since he began fishing smelt commercially in 1991. “The tides are getting higher and dropping off farther every year,” he said.