Along with fiddleheads and dandelion greens, spring brought fresh water smelts by the thousands into the nets of local fisherman. Teaming swirls of black and shimmering silver schools of smelts swam out of Big Lake Wassookeag into the tributaries that fed the lake. The tiny fishes swam into the small coves and brooks laying eggs and spawning. Many will recall that serious "smelters" dipped smelts at Harmony Castle or Kingsbury Stream in little hamlets miles from Dexter. However, two well-known outlets on Wassookeag Lake just on the northern edge of Dexter served as local opportunities for limiting out on smelts. Still there today as they were than are Sucker Brook and Frye Cove.

Both are perpendicular to the Shore Road on either side of where Clyde Merrill Sr lived for years on the northern side of the big lake. The shimmering little fish were dipped out of the black nighttime waters with long wooden handled dipping nets much like a giant butterfly nets. The annual ritual was as much a social event as it was a means of feeding a family or two. Smelts, were measured in quarts and limited by law. But I can't attest to the amount that a dipper was limited to. The tiny fishes more often than not were bloated with yellow waxy eggs that wound up lining the bottom of the slate kitchen sink where my mother cleaned them. She showed me how to strip the guts out by squishing the little fish's innards out by hand from the back of its tail to where its head might have been before it was pinched off. Thus cleaned, they were dipped in raw egg, rolled in a corn meal flour batter and deep-fried in a big skillet of boiling cooking fat. Crispy and crunchy sans their little fish guts, smelts were a tasty treat garnished with a mess of fiddlehead greens. Deep fried smelts are a coveted treat. I especially liked the crunchy tails.

The annual springtime event attracted two distinctly different groups of people; drunks and game wardens. A certain protocol was supposed to be adhered to by the participants which was that no lights were shone into the water and no one dipped a net into the water until the frantic schools of smelts were far enough up the stream to allow everyone a reasonable chance of dipping their share. This was no small task as there might be 30 or 40 different people lined along both sides of the stream waiting for the last person in line to holler "Dip 'em" as flashlights and spot lights lit up the Maine night with the schools illuminated at just the right time revealing a stream filled with smelts. And as I mentioned earlier, many of the fishermen were several degrees past sobriety. The wardens didn't focus on the relative sobriety of the drunks so much as the specified limits and proper licensing of the dippers. The dippers so called for the method of netting the spawning fishes as much as for the not infrequent tumble into the brooks by the inebriated fishermen. A fallen splashing screaming drunk was often the catalyst that frightened the smelt back into the lake preventing them from swimming upstream. It must be one of life's cruelest mysteries to discover how smelts managed to perpetuate themselves as a species when they were stopped from getting upstream past tripping, dipping dippers?
Fred