Although surf smelt can be found year-around at various places in Puget Sound, winter is the traditional time to bundle up the family and head for La Conner, Cornet Bay or Oak Harbor marina for a smelt dinner. Cornet Bay, in Deception Pass State Park, is user friendly and should produce smelt off and on through the winter months.
You’ll need a trout-weight rod and reel, a bucket, a smelt jig, warm clothing and a suitable hot beverage, no license required. The jigs are usually a string of seven small hooks, each with a decorative feather or other attractor, and a teardrop sinker on the end. They’re cheap and available at any tackle shop in the area.
Just cast out, let the rig sink a short distance, and jig it back with a sink-and-jerk technique. Roughly half the smelt you catch will be hooked in or around the mouth, and the others are snagged — thus the “jerk”portion of the program.
Heading south on Highway 20, look for signs turning east about a mile south of the Deception Pass Bridge. Lots of parking (may be a fee), toilets and elbow room on a dock complex. Good kid place.
These smelt are, in most people’s opinion, far superior on the table to the larger, softer eulachon net-dipped some years on the Cowlitz River. They’re also smaller, and if fried crisp, don’t need the backbone removed. Just use scissors to cut off the head and slit the belly to discard entrails. If you still want to remove the backbone, it can be done easily and quickly by dropping the fish in warm water for a few seconds, pulling out the backbone as they soften, then dropping them in ice water to firm them up again.
There are lots of cleaning videos and cooking tips online.
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