Gman and I will hit Montrose tomorrow morning for powerlining, and return later that evening for smelt fishing. I've heard the smelt are supposed to be non existant again this year, but we're mostly going to introduce more people to it. We've smelted every year for the last 13, at 51st. st, and the planetarium usually, and the last good runs we've had were back in '97-2000.
We just took a drive down to planetarium and montrose, nothing. 5 people total at planet, no smelt. A dozen setup at montrose, everyone had nothing except for 1 group said they had 5 (which we doubt without seeing and the overwhelming negative reports).
We'll probably still camp out tomorrow for smelt anyways. As long as we catch one for someone to bite the head off. (no chads either tonight).
good luck a couple of years back went out for the hell of it and to my surprise caught about 60 i know its not much but for the way its been thats considered a good hull.I make it out at least once this year.
The smelt, they ran! We were right by the mouth of Montrose, everyone around there caught about 30 fish (all males, 2 females w/ eggs). Noone inside the harbor got more than 5 by 1am. So that was cool. Makes me want to go back out during the week to try again.
Powerlining hit nothing. We got one bite but lost it. About 2 silver salmon were caught near us, fish about 20" long. A lot of people were powerlining, about 40 lines at least. They said friday everyone was catching, but saturday was not so much.
Hit Burnham saturday night, and saw only one other group on the north wall- they didn't stay that late, I looked that way around 11, and they were gone. We tried between the docks on the west side with no luck. Waited until just before we left to pull the net- we decided to only try the one net- we had five unlucky rockbass, but managed to free them all without killing them or destroying our net. We had the perfect amount of firewood and beer, and ran out of both just before hitting the road. We stayed until after 2, and no one bothered us at all. Couldn't have asked for a nicer night to have a drink with friends, but it would've been a hell of a bonus to have one smelt for my rookie friend to decapitate.
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