yummmmm....smelt.

as you can tell a smelt fry has been happening in my neighborhood the past couple of days

and i really wanted to go...but i had no one to go with so i chickened out. seeing these signs all over the neighborhood stimulated a memory i have of my childhood. when i was really young...6,7,8 or 9 maybe...my family went smelt hunting, or is it fishing. the crazy thing about smelt hunting is you don't go during the day, you don't fish with pools and it seemed like you never caught a thing. smelt hunting requires nets and the dark- well at least according to my family. I remember heading out to the river in the middle of the night with our nets in tow. I remember being so excited about getting to stay up all night long and play in the water with our rain boots on- but always falling asleep in the car. I remember how cold it was out and how frustrated us kids got when the smelt were not 'running', as my dad would call it. for those of you that don't know 'smelting' at a certain time during early spring swim ('run') up stream to find a shallow warm area to lay all their eggs. and...to catch them you sit around and ever so often put a net, or bucket, in the water and if you catch some...than that means the smelt are running. when that happens- everyone yells 'their running', wakes up all the sleeping kids in the cars and than bam....you've got buckets of smelt just like that. of course the excitement of the smelt running doesn't last to long and back to sleep in the car I'd go. but- i remember it being so much fun. we'd start a camp fire at sometimes and us kids (there was a lot of us) would just play in the water and find something to get dirty in. i remember not really caring so much about the smelt- but that's just me! not really sure if i remember everything and all the fine details...but, i do remember it being fun. i had to call my mom to make sure my memory was right on some things. she found it super funny that i was remember our smelting days! good stuff!!!!!!