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Smelt! whats that?

Started by sawmill_john, February 25, 2003, 03:40:06 PM

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sawmill_john

The smelt are running up here in the Sandy River here are some pics.  
Hey Frank if you want some let me know and I can either through some in the freezer or you could come up and get a limit.  I've got the net in my rig.
 



they sure are tasty right out of the river!

Ron Scott

Some good eating! They're not running here yet. Maybe another month.
~Ron

Tom

Ok, other than head first, how do you eat them.

They look like sardine type fare. How about steamed in oil?

Are they like mullet?  Do you cast a net and bring in 10 lbs. at a wack or do you have to chase'em down one at a time?

Smoked, fried, chowder..............?

sawmill_john

I think most people fry them up.  Smoked is good to as long as they don't get all dried out.  

I'll probably fry some tomorrow for dinner and then smoke a few, the rest are going to other people and whats lft over go to sturgen bait or fertilizer.

The run should last through the weekend, most people use dip nets, about a ten foot handle works well, from the bank is where I prefer, but guys get right out in the river with waders.
It took me about 10 minutes to fill this bucket but at times you could fill 10 buckets in 10 minutes, the old net gets real heavy when its that full. The limit is 25 lbs.

John

Fla._Deadheader

The last option sounds about right.  :D And ya'll picked on our ersters. ::) ::) :P
All truth passes through three stages:
   First, it is ridiculed;
   Second, it is violently opposed; and
   Third, it is accepted as self-evident.

-- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

Jeff

We clean em with scissors. clip the head slit the belly run yer finger through and its done. You don't bone or scale these little guys. dredge in egg then your favorite flour and spice mix and fry. mmm-mmmMMMM

Need more mmmmm's

M-M GOOD!

We also fish them through the ice on some of our inland lakes with jigs and catch the Big ones. 9,10,11 inches.  You fish in the dark with lights under the ice. That brings the smelt to the top to feed on the little wiggly buggers that attract to the light. Catch em 2 foot down in over 100 foot of water!

Favorite inland smelt lakes are Higgins in Roscommon county and Littlefield Lake in Isabella
Just call me the midget doctor.
Forestry Forum Founder and Chief Cook and Bottle Washer.

Commercial circle sawmill sawyer in a past life for 25yrs.
Ezekiel 22:30

chet

In recent years dip'n for smelt out of Lake Superior streams has been purty tough. As a kid I remember people fill'n the backs of pickups, now you struggle to git a meal.
I am a true TREE HUGGER, if I didnt I would fall out!  chet the RETIRED arborist

CHARLIE

Smeltin' is a big thing in Minnesota too up in the rivers that empty into Lake Superior.  From what I understood was that the way Minnesotan's fish for smelt is that first they had to get real drunk. Then put on chest waders and wade out at night and use nets to catch them as they swam through. Stagger back to shore and put'em in a 5 gallon plastic pail.  Lost a few smelters that got to deep or fell and their chest waders would fill with water.

They have big Smelt fries here. They usually dip 'em in batter and deep fry 'em. It's fun to get stuffed eatin platter after platter of smelt and washing it down with cold beers 8) 8) 8).  
Charlie
"Everybody was gone when I arrived but I decided to stick around until I could figure out why I was there !"

Texas Ranger

I thought "smelt" was what ya did down wind from the out house. ::)
The Ranger, home of Texas Forestry

OneWithWood

When I was about ten my brother and I would catch smelt with a fishing pole using dough balls as bait.  We would fish off the bridge of the estuary in Alameda, California.  It was a great way to spend an afternoon.  We would take our catch home , clean 'em, grind them up into a paste, add mayo, mustard and sweet relish then chow down with some bread.  We were too young to chase it with beer but if dad was home (as in not at sea - he was in the Coast Guard and they would be at sea for six weeks at a time) he would give us a pull on his beer in exchange for a bite.  Brings bacj some good memories :)
One With Wood
LT40HDG25, Woodmizer DH4000 Kiln

johncinquo

If you were in CA, then maybe you went out for the grunion run.  Sounds a lot like these guys and smelt.  On a moonlit night, you go down to the beach and they come in like a giant fish wave.  You can catch enough with just a bucket, but using your hands was more fun.  A net was overkill.
To be one, Ask one
Masons and Shriners

Mark M

Boy I haven't had smelt for a long time. When I lived up in Minnesota every spring someone would go down by Duluth and scoop up a bunch of those things and then have an all-u-can-eat smelt fry for about $5. DanG they were good.

Anyone got a good recipe for prairie dogs or gophers?

Mark

Bro. Noble

Mark,

You're beginning to make me nervous.  I can't get what you said earlier out of my mind.  What was that?  "every time a rat dies we lose something good to eat or fun to do".  
 
Well,  I'll have to admit I ate some dead turkle one time.  It was even green :o  Druther have dead pig.

Noble

PS  I'm not even going to think about the fun to do part!
milking and logging and sawing and milking

Mark M

Hi Nobel

Well you don't need to be too nervous, I was only refurin to lab rats, the kind that die from bein fed things like saccarin, caffine, chocolate, french fries etc.

Now tell me what the heck is a turkle? is that a cross between a turkey and a turtle? I hope they are easier to kill than turtles.

Speaking of eating things. I once watched a show on TV (Lonely Planet) where they visited Tibet or Mongolia, one of the out-of the way places like ND. They cooked up some marmot, just threw the little bugger whole into the fire and singed the hair off him. They didn't even skin or gut him first. It was pretty disgusting, all bloated looking like he was inflated to 32 PSI. No thanks, I need a better recipe for prairie dog.

Mark

Texas Ranger

Bar b qued a ground hog once in Forestry School.  The grill would have been more tender.  Prairie dogs, hmm, stuffed with prairie oysters, I assume.  No thanks. ::)
The Ranger, home of Texas Forestry

Jeff

I remember a Beverly Hillbilly episode where the Clampetts heard the "Grunion were coming"  Some how they got the impression Grunion were like Nazis or some other foreign invader so they all got out the shotguns and commenced to await the attack.

Thants all I 'member. :-/ :)
Just call me the midget doctor.
Forestry Forum Founder and Chief Cook and Bottle Washer.

Commercial circle sawmill sawyer in a past life for 25yrs.
Ezekiel 22:30

Ron Scott

Grunion remind me of smelt, but we didn't "dip" them with a net. We use to go "grunion hunting" at night along the beaches of California when the grunion would come in with the tide and bury themselves in the sand, thus "grunion hunting" locating them in the sand as I remember it.

~Ron

Bro. Noble

Mark,

When you talk about cross turkles you must mean those snappin turkles.  I don't think you eat those.  What I had was turkle soup from a soft shell turkle.

My head is hurtin from the images I get of 'fun things to do with a rat'.

If I were going to prepare a meal with prarie dog,  I believe it would be proper to serve red wine with it----------lotsa red wine!

Noble
milking and logging and sawing and milking

Jeff

You certainly do eat snapping turtles. Thats the preferred whitemeat!
Just call me the midget doctor.
Forestry Forum Founder and Chief Cook and Bottle Washer.

Commercial circle sawmill sawyer in a past life for 25yrs.
Ezekiel 22:30

Mark M

Yes you are correct Noble, I checked my edicut book and red wine is appropriate for prairie dogs. Says you can also marianate in it too. It didn't say whether I should be marianated or the dog, nor did it say who should drink the wine  :o

My old pappy used to like them snappers. He said there were 7 kinds of meat on them but I'm not sure what he meant, it looked mainly like turtle to me. I know they are pretty hard to kill and when he was a kid he had a dead snapper's head snap shut on his finger. The only time I had any it was still moving in the frying pan. Seems to me it was similar to roast beef.

I studied toxicology for a year and UMD in Dulooth and while I was there I got to do some research on rat spleens (yep - it don't get no better than that). I remember the rats they had had a brand name just like underpants (not Fruit of the Loom or Hanes), they were Sprag-Dawley <sp?> rats. We gave them a little wif of somthing to calm them down and them popped their heads off with a little minature rat gill-o-teen. It was pretty fun now that you mentioned it. The rats didn't really seem to mind either.

Don't know what all this has to do with smelt, probably nothin.

Mark

OneWithWood

I am sure those rats smelt real good :D
One With Wood
LT40HDG25, Woodmizer DH4000 Kiln

Frank_Pender

Hey ya, John.  Thanks for the memories.  We (myfamily) use to go out to the Sandy River and harvest Smelt by the washtub full.  We would come home with 5 or 6 tubs and total exhausted from dipping and wading.   8) 8) Then we would all stay up have the night cleaning and then baggingthem for the freezer.  What fun times.
Frank Pender

johncinquo

Turtles do have about 7 different colors of meat in them.  We had them for supper about once a week when I lived down in Fl.   I would get the strangest looks when I pulled cold fried turtle pieces out for lunch.  I ran a trot line almost every summer weekend and would catch a trashcan full of them, load them into my dads pickup and take them to Eatonville, the oldest black community in amercia. It was the farthest I was allowed to drive by myself. I would sell all them off for $3 to $10 a piece and think I was king of the world with all that money.  We used to get them to bite a piece of wood, then pull their heads out and whack em off, then hang the wood up on the clothes line.  I have seen em hang there for a week, and then you have to open em up with vice channel locks.  
Now there is a giant John Hancock building on the lakeshore where I had so much fun as a kid.  
To be one, Ask one
Masons and Shriners

L. Wakefield

   The WORST rat memory from graduate school- and thank God it wasn't my job- my friend Jane was working with a group that was doing something with some rat organ. They didn't have the rat guillotines. They ( I am not kidding)- according to her, they would take the rat by the tail, spin it around once and bash its head on the side of the table. She did it and missed a little bit and got the nose only- broke it off and the rat was- not dead.

   I think she quit that job.

   One of the more interesting ones was the electric eel lab where they would take section of  the eel at a time to work on. I don't think the eel liked it.

   It was after about 4 years of working on a PhD that I quit with an MS, worked in a different type of lab (I know what yer thinkin- it wasn't THAT kind of lab, it was for the Muscular Dystrophy Association)- and then dropped out to go homestead in WV for 12 years. Learned a hell of a lot, lost 5 out of 6 babies, didn't bash no rat's brains out, and finally got talked into going back to being a 'health care professional' because my eddication was being 'wasted'.

   BS.

   BS, MS, PhD, which I learned in nursing schools stands for (kids, cover your ears..) B*llsh*t, Moresh*t, Piled High n Deep.

   So frag it, now I do both. An eggspert in many types of BS- amount, consistency, and utility. I prefer the bovine type. Makes my garden grow and my plants happy..   lw
L. Wakefield, owner and operator of the beastly truck Heretik, that refuses to stay between the lines when parking

Mark M

Hi L_

Well you know what they say about them PhD's - you go to school to study more and more about less and less. Pretty soon you know a whole lot about nothing.

I was in PhD program too and one morning I woke up and decided 3 years away from by wife and kids was too much (they were up near International Falls and I was stuck in Duluth and only came home on weekends). I took a year off and DanG if I didn't get a job, went back to work for the Cat dealer where I had been a mechanic for 11 years, this time as the lab manager. I'm trained in chemistry, biochemistry and biology but I'am also pretty DanG good at fixin bulldozers. After 6 years I was sick of school and had had enough!

Mark

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