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Reader Story: Memories of smelt hunting in Wisconsin’s Frog Bay

The art of smelting often requires practicing another art – that of sitting around a campfire on the beach while waiting for smelt to make a spawning run into the shallows after dark. (Photo courtesy of Jeremy Heikkinen)

Every April it was the same thing. “You should come on up with us smelt hunting,” the guys would say. “It’s a good time.”
“I’ll think about,” I said those first couple of years when I got a teaching job in Prentice. I always had things to do and didn’t have a lot of time. Finally, in 2002, I joined the smelting crew, as we called it, and headed up Hwy. 13 to Frog Bay near Bayfield to partake in the yearly tradition known as “smelting.”
After that first year, I was hooked, or netted, I suppose.

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