It was Wednesday at 11 p.m. on Park Point. Six people stood around a pale yellow-lighted heat lamp in a cold offshore wind, fishing for smelt. No moon was in the sky, and the lamp made it hard to see anything in the surrounding darkness.
Three of them stood with hoods pulled tightly over their heads and made regular trips back to the car to warm up. The others huddled around the lamp in wet waders and flannel shirts.
The night before, the beach was lined with fires and people with large seine nets, walking out of the water with hundreds of little fish. A day later it was cold and Dave -- no last name given -- and his friends were the only ones around and weren't having much luck.
"It ain't like the old days," said Dave. "When I was a kid, we picked 'em out with our hands."
Years ago, millions of palm-sized fish called smelt used to ascend Duluth's rivers to spawn in the early spring. Many, including Dave, believe overfishing has caused the smelt population to dwindle when, in fact, it is caused by the return of lake trout, one of the fish's predators, to the area.
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"The healthy predation population has controlled the smelt population," said Thomas Hrabik, who teaches ichthyology classes at the University of Minnesota Duluth and has done extensive research on the species. "It is responsible for the decline we have seen lately."
Dave and a friend came out of the cold water in insulated waders and walked toward the heat lamp. They held a large empty seine net with metal weights at the bottom.
"We've only caught 12 so far," said Dave, as he picked up a bottle of Mountain Dew buried in the sand under the lamp along with three paper coffee cups. "Yesterday was warmer. We didn't get home until 2 a.m., and we started at 8."
In the past, people would fill five-gallon buckets with these fish in less than 30 minutes. After three nights of fishing, Dave and his friends had caught few smelt.
Hrabik said smelt were abundant in the 1960s with the introduction of the sea lamprey, an exotic species from the Atlantic. The onslaught of the sea lamprey killed off much of the lake trout population.
"The smelt population exploded," said Hrabik.
Now, the lamprey population has been reduced and the Department of Natural Resources has stocked the lake trout population in the area.
For the time being, Dave and his friends will have to settle for a small catch. The glorious golden-battered fish fry that follows will also be small, but it's unlikely that the smelt fishing will dwindle in the springs to come.
