Another Maine-Arizona Connection!
One thing I never got around to in Maine or New Brunswick was going smelting. I’ve eaten lots of smelts when back home, but never did my own dippin’. Here’s a cool story about a young man from Arizona, visiting his grandfather in Maine…
Read the full story here at the Morning Sentinel out of Kennebec.
GENERATION GAP
Young Alexander Juarez just raises his eyebrows and fashions a smirk out of his lean face.
Then he shakes his head.
Surely, there is no good way to explain the art of smelting to his friends back home — home being in the warm, sunny southwestern corner of the continental United States. In Arizona, there’s no ice — let alone fishing for anything through ice.
But Juarez was with his grandfather, 73-year-old Pete Wood of Fairfield, and the two were hiding from frigid and whipping winds on Thursday by huddling up in one of Worthing’s camps.
“This is actually the second time I’ve gone this week,” said Juarez, 14, visiting for the holidays before he headed back to Arizona on Friday.
Wood said his grandson is an avid fisherman.
“He’s mad about fishing,” Wood said. “He was going with me when he was five or six years old. He fishes all the time.”
Less than two hours from the end of the tide as it headed back out to sea, the two men reported slow fishing. Like a few others still working inside camps, they were hoping that the settling darkness would salvage a bucket full of fish.
“The fishing is good in the early morning, and during the night tide,” Worthing said. “Once it gets dark, the fish start rising off the bottom and feeding (more).”
Holding a two-liter soda bottle, with a large hole cut into the side to make for easy access, Juarez motions to a few meager fish.
“They all came at once, too,” he said.
They are having fun, though, even without gallons of fish. They remain busy checking lines — usually each other’s — even while entertaining guests at their shack’s door. It is suggested that they would have more success simply buying smelt in the seafood section of their local grocery store.
“It would probably cost a lot less,” Wood laughs.
Then he pauses to give serious thought for a moment. That wouldn’t be the same, he’s told.
“Nope, it wouldn’t,” he said.
I did notice that the writer made the common assumption that there is no ice in Arizona – ha!
