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Michael considered fate at 02:08   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

Every year around late feb. there is a gathering of might and muscle alongside the grand kennebec river in south-central maine. Great men come from all reaches to fight the cold, ignore the wet, and fish for smelt. Smelt, you see, are these small foul little fish that swim up and down the river with the atlantic tide and as is with most creatures of this fine earth there exists a group of people who would like to kill and eat them.. or in this day and age, at least kill them. This, of course, is called "Smelting" and it is done in small shacks about 10' by 6' on the river that fit between six to eight persons a shack, with a small wood stove on which to burn yourself. Your seats, while you are in this veritable ritz carlton, are either blocks of wood or small wooden stools that sit about a foot off the ground. Your apparatus for catching these little weasels is a wooden beam running along the side of the shack at eye-height with lengths of fishing line wrapped on pegs stuck into this beam every 8 inches to a foot. The fishing line, of course, has a hook at the end of it. At the bottom, below this beam, there is a foot-wide strip of open water running the length of the shack. There is one on either side of the shack, with the crew in the middle. The crew's job is to chop up bloodworms and bait the hooks, set the lines anywhere from 3 to 10 feet down into the water ("depends on where the smelt ah' runnin', doncha see?") and then proceed to get absolutely annihilated with cheap american beer. This, of course, is a challenge but somehow, every year, we manage, and on occasion we catch a fish or two.


I bring this up because this year a t-shirt is in the works: SmeltFest 2005. It may or may not have some retarded logo on the back that says "no fish left swimming, no man left standing", but it will most likely have this logo which I've been working on for the last hour or so. Bravo for technology.. now wheres the bloodworms?