Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You
Speaker 1: can't predict anything. The first thing to bring up this
Speaker 1: nice just flag this as interesting, is that this is trivia.
Speaker 1: This is trivia for listeners. Uh, what do you call
Speaker 1: Let let's say you're reading a hardcover book, okay, and
Speaker 1: you peel off the dust jacket. What do you call
Speaker 1: the cover of the book that is under the dust jacket.
Speaker 1: As much as I've dealt in books for a good
Speaker 1: portion of my life, I did not know that that
Speaker 1: is called the case. So whatever is un to there,
Speaker 1: which is usually nothing, is the case design. Not to
Speaker 1: be confused case sing for sausages. When someone said the
Speaker 1: design for the bookcase, I thought they meant when you
Speaker 1: buy a box of books, the book that came in
Speaker 1: the box that came in. That's not true. Secondly, I
Speaker 1: just learned Jimmy Doran told me last night that and
Speaker 1: correct me if I'm wrong. Jimmy Dorn baseball players are
Speaker 1: infinitely smarter than football players and much better paid. Guy.
Speaker 1: They have guaranteed money and smarter. I didn't say that
Speaker 1: they were smarter. That's not a quote. I think he
Speaker 1: might be embellishing just a tad. Well, you laid out
Speaker 1: that they did a much better job, that they don't
Speaker 1: bang their heads as much and stay sustain significantly less
Speaker 1: injuries bang their heads as much, and that they just
Speaker 1: sort of have over the years negotiated like baseball players
Speaker 1: collectively have negotiated better. Yes, the Baseball Players Union has
Speaker 1: done a uh well, in my opinion, a better job
Speaker 1: than the NFL Players Association making sure that they get paid.
Speaker 1: H you have you have been on the show enough
Speaker 1: to kind of know the sort of mug or the
Speaker 1: sort of lady who listens to the show. What percentage
Speaker 1: of those mugs and ladies do you feel have seen
Speaker 1: the video you showed me of the guy hitting the
Speaker 1: morning dove with the baseball with a fastball? How many
Speaker 1: women do you think have seen the picture or the
Speaker 1: video of Randy Johnson hitting a dove with a fastball.
Speaker 1: I would say it's pretty low if you haven't seen
Speaker 1: this video. If you type in if you type in
Speaker 1: the word Randy, it auto fiels the fourth the word
Speaker 1: Randy alone. When I entered Randy into my phone, the
Speaker 1: fourth down auto phil is what's his name again? Randy
Speaker 1: Johnson is Randy Johnson hits bird with baseball or something
Speaker 1: like that. Dove is I've never seen anthing like Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was very unfortunate event for the dove. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean yeah, I mean yeah, I like mourned. That's
Speaker 1: a pawn. Do you get the PUNTI mourned for the dove.
Speaker 1: I didn't get it. So never seen anthing like. Never
Speaker 1: I mean a puff of feathers exploding and done. Uh
Speaker 1: so Jimmy Doran's here then, uh Janice Poodles. Uh. We
Speaker 1: also learned some Washington state driver's license trivia. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: didn't catch all that though, but yeah, fill people in
Speaker 1: oh Tony like really got the You were right there
Speaker 1: for that, were you? She was really checked out at
Speaker 1: that moment. What's the name of the hotel? It was Westport,
Speaker 1: the Chateau Westport. The woman working the counter is really
Speaker 1: checked out on driver driver's license trivia. She's got two masters.
Speaker 1: Well one, Now, your driver's license isn't horridor. Your driver's
Speaker 1: license is printed vertically if you're under twenty one, which
Speaker 1: I wasn't aware of. You didn't know that, No, I
Speaker 1: you know how you can drink in Canada? When you're eighteen.
Speaker 1: I drank a Canada or they changed it didn't used
Speaker 1: to be eighteen, whatever it was, I drank. They're out
Speaker 1: of fake. I D long ago. I feel like all
Speaker 1: of us going up in Michigan did that go to
Speaker 1: Canada right across the board. But no, I didn't know
Speaker 1: they changed the way his friend did you guys? Is
Speaker 1: there any other significant tidbits from that little lecture she
Speaker 1: gave us on design layout of driver's licenses. What I
Speaker 1: likes something about the numbers right and the Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: how they tell if it's a fake. I D and
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know the formula of the
Speaker 1: numbers and the letters. But something adds up to I
Speaker 1: think it's your birthdate, like like the two two two
Speaker 1: and my driver's license number adds up to you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know what, something like that you're you were
Speaker 1: born plus the two numbers after the letters there you
Speaker 1: go on your driver's license number. Total hunt that's it.
Speaker 1: I think that's it. Yeah, Yeah, that's two to two right,
Speaker 1: So if you try to there was some other like
Speaker 1: doctor a license I don't remember, or doctor your own license.
Speaker 1: I learned that like when I was sixteen or something.
Speaker 1: I took a paper I d the day I got it. Remember,
Speaker 1: my mom drove me home from the driver's license office
Speaker 1: and I went up to my room and was immediately
Speaker 1: there with the eraser and a pencil. I was born
Speaker 1: in v so I turned that eight into a three.
Speaker 1: And then that day I went to a beer store
Speaker 1: about forty for all my boys solid work, you know,
Speaker 1: rock girl. There's always someone always had some darrel looked uncle.
Speaker 1: I feel like someone is always like, oh, so, you
Speaker 1: know Billy's uncle, right, and that would be the guy
Speaker 1: that would go buy people go by beer people's I
Speaker 1: was something like darrel. Like the uncle lived out, you know,
Speaker 1: lived in some storage shed behind their parents house. You know,
Speaker 1: football player, he was great in high school. They're there.
Speaker 1: Like about the lady that checked us in at the
Speaker 1: Chateau Westport is that she asked Johanna's his name and
Speaker 1: I Joanna said Joannae, and I said it's Janice. And
Speaker 1: she looks at him and goes, okay, Jannie. She wasn't
Speaker 1: buying it. She thought she thought he was lying. She
Speaker 1: had already read it, you know, as that was burned,
Speaker 1: The j was burned into her mind. She couldn't. Don't
Speaker 1: tell me what your name is. I know this young man.
Speaker 1: Next you'll tell me what you and then Tony COLAGROSSI
Speaker 1: has never been on the program before first Timer. We
Speaker 1: know each other mostly probably Mark Boordman, Cody Courdy, Louhan. Yeah, Mark, Cody,
Speaker 1: Brian actually introduced us, but Mark and Cody. I was
Speaker 1: still living. I was living in I was like struggling
Speaker 1: with Trick and ols is living in temporary housing when
Speaker 1: we met. Was that right right after that? Right when
Speaker 1: you moved here? Yeah, introduced you to Razor Clamming. I
Speaker 1: don't because the where we're sitting at right now is
Speaker 1: um would you say, like the Southern Olympic Peninsula. It's
Speaker 1: not even the peninsula southern Washington coast. You guys don't
Speaker 1: compass the peninsula. Really, what do you come be in
Speaker 1: the peninsula once you get up past like a huge
Speaker 1: township canal? Right, like this is mainland, so you gotta
Speaker 1: get up past people? Oh really see, Okay, from the
Speaker 1: I've been getting that wrong for long, So say I
Speaker 1: would say that like the from the from north, Yeah,
Speaker 1: like from the anglers and hunters like to use the
Speaker 1: terms the rivers that drain off of the Olympics from
Speaker 1: that point northward would be those are the limp those
Speaker 1: are that's the olympos so you have been making would
Speaker 1: be the south one. This would be known as like
Speaker 1: Gray's Harbor, South Coast. Yeah, yeah, Grey's Harbor County. So
Speaker 1: I've been making like a total fool of myself for
Speaker 1: the three years that I lived in Seattle. Which are
Speaker 1: which which are coming to a close? I've been saying,
Speaker 1: like out on the peninsula, but I'm not on the peninsula.
Speaker 1: Everybody's been laughing at me. If you're saying you're going
Speaker 1: out razor climbing on the peninsula, they think I'm breaking
Speaker 1: laws even up by clay Lock or mo CROs or
Speaker 1: something like that, And that would be kind of clay
Speaker 1: Locks been open for a few years. I could be wrong,
Speaker 1: but I'm pretty sure it's been closed for a long time. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So yeah, the first time, so you're in the Gray
Speaker 1: area in Grays Harbor, Grays Harbor, The first time I
Speaker 1: ever came out here was you know what, that's not true, man,
Speaker 1: because when I lived in Western Montana, we used to
Speaker 1: come out on a Friday. We used to drive out
Speaker 1: on a Friday, just to go drinking in town. Wake
Speaker 1: up Saturday morning, go out to dig steamers and shock
Speaker 1: oysters and maybe catch some flatfish from the beach. And
Speaker 1: then on Sunday, wake up and drive back to western
Speaker 1: Montana and like Canal though, and I was back in
Speaker 1: the area when we just drive places for really no reason,
Speaker 1: which is kind of like wanderlust man just insane. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Olympic Peninsula. Yes, you go back home with like six
Speaker 1: oysters in a sack on ice. Dat him. We'd eat
Speaker 1: him on the camp on the beach to eat the oysters.
Speaker 1: The western side of Hood Canal. Yeah, and in that
Speaker 1: area Hood Canal was that the rules. I don't know
Speaker 1: if they've changed. You you had to shock them on
Speaker 1: the beach because the oysters, you know, there's ten more
Speaker 1: stuck to his shell. It's like picking mushrooms. You'd leave
Speaker 1: the spore. Basically, Yes, we'd go dig Manila's or you
Speaker 1: know steamers. We'd go dig steamers, and then we would
Speaker 1: go out and shock oysters off the beach. And then
Speaker 1: now and then we'd flick out catch some little sand
Speaker 1: d abs or you know, some sort of flatfish. Oh,
Speaker 1: and then we we'd uh crab either setting pots out
Speaker 1: of a little teeny uh out of a little teeny canoe,
Speaker 1: or we would just throw them off piers and whatnot
Speaker 1: a ring get rock crabs and Dungee's crank right ring
Speaker 1: with rings which crabbing used to be epic on the
Speaker 1: canal and it's pretty much non existing. We do it
Speaker 1: right in town too, man, We do right. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you people have anymore? Really is a Northern Hood canal
Speaker 1: across from day Bob Bay, Southern I don't know about.
Speaker 1: It was warmed up, didn't warm too hot that period.
Speaker 1: Stuff happens in that canal. That's an odd place. Oh,
Speaker 1: I gotta introduce Tommy Edson, not to be confused with
Speaker 1: Thomas Edison. That's me, Tommy Edson. We met because when
Speaker 1: you honest, the long period of time, when you honest
Speaker 1: wouldn't make me my perch flies just I don't know,
Speaker 1: like air old grievances. Um he I asked him for.
Speaker 1: I believe it was eighteen months to take three or
Speaker 1: four minutes out of his day, you know, and he
Speaker 1: wouldn't do it. And I remember, in fact, and I
Speaker 1: think she was on the subject. Uh still hasn't got
Speaker 1: your flies, you know, Broti made some and Tommy Edson
Speaker 1: made me some. That's how I met Tommy. We have
Speaker 1: usually think you were a man of such a steel
Speaker 1: trap memory, but it seems like it's been failing. Didn't
Speaker 1: busted him out during a podcast. Oh you're right. I'm sorry, Greg.
Speaker 1: I think so much emotional damage had been done. But
Speaker 1: then it was like it was like a small come
Speaker 1: up and so I'm sorry to make it, but Tommy
Speaker 1: made them for me, and we want to have a
Speaker 1: mutual acquaintances in the fishing world. Yeah, the guys from
Speaker 1: the Old Northwest Wild Country Show Joel bill Um and
Speaker 1: we have fished surf perch, cropp ease, yellow perch, picked
Speaker 1: up a couple from and bullfrogs together. Oh, but to
Speaker 1: return here. So the first time I came out here
Speaker 1: as a as a responsible grown up was to come
Speaker 1: out for razor claiming. And that makes you Razor claiming
Speaker 1: makes you like proud to be an American man because
Speaker 1: the huge variety of individuals. The only thing that all
Speaker 1: those people that dig clams on a clam tied have
Speaker 1: in common is that they like there are like it's
Speaker 1: so many people from so many walks of life and
Speaker 1: out so like such a like vast disparities of outdoor experience,
Speaker 1: and they're bound by wanting to dig clams in the
Speaker 1: coast out here. When you go out to the coast here,
Speaker 1: it's like you look left and it's just the same thing,
Speaker 1: and you look right and it's the same thing. To
Speaker 1: infinity on either side, speckled with the same concentration of individuals,
Speaker 1: and the and the beach is so gradual that you
Speaker 1: can't there's no pitch to it, you know, one of
Speaker 1: the tides out up but up at like you know,
Speaker 1: more crocks at the flattest beach in the world. And
Speaker 1: it's just got the scattering of people of about Like
Speaker 1: if you imagine the hotel room, a hotel room probably
Speaker 1: have what six seven people in it, right at tideline
Speaker 1: to an infinity in one direction and to an infinity
Speaker 1: in direction, just people happily digging, digging. Razor claims, just
Speaker 1: eyes down looking for the dimples, the dimple, Like, how
Speaker 1: would you even explain the dimple? Like I don't even
Speaker 1: know how I explained it to you took a photograph,
Speaker 1: what what would you be seeing? And talking about what
Speaker 1: you'd see if you took a photograph and what you
Speaker 1: see in real time if you took a photograph, you
Speaker 1: would see that if I took it, I mean, he's
Speaker 1: golf because I know you love it a golf ball.
Speaker 1: I'm following and dropped it from what jimmy a foot
Speaker 1: off foot into this end and then but it's ephemeral. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's yeah. So so you see this little tiny
Speaker 1: dimple there, but very in real mud or covered with mud,
Speaker 1: and in real time that dimple would be thousand one
Speaker 1: moving slightly, it would be filling in slightly, I guess
Speaker 1: you say, gets suctioning down the dimple last such a
Speaker 1: short amount of time that you can't really you're never
Speaker 1: really sure you saw it exactly like it's it's there,
Speaker 1: and then it's gone with the with the water. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it would be like like a normal dimple lifespan
Speaker 1: with the Yeah, with the water, I'll be like. But
Speaker 1: I think that's the difference of being having a sharp
Speaker 1: eye for clams or just me in your average razor clamber,
Speaker 1: because there's some that are clearly like there's a clam there,
Speaker 1: and then there's some that they don't show nearly as much,
Speaker 1: but there's a clam there. So that's where the experience
Speaker 1: comes into. Every time he moves, you're tracking out, so
Speaker 1: it's sucking. So if you sit there long enough with
Speaker 1: a dimple reform and the same clam like, and then
Speaker 1: the minute later he moves again and the dimple comes back,
Speaker 1: you know, and then you get to surf washing over
Speaker 1: in the sand. And those things are fast. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know how they move once they go down,
Speaker 1: but I think they don't move, just like in a
Speaker 1: vertical colum. They don't they go, and which is why
Speaker 1: you crush and you why you want to go in
Speaker 1: at an angle. Well, we gotta explain more. So let
Speaker 1: me just say this. A razor clam is a big
Speaker 1: gass razor clam is not as big as the bill
Speaker 1: on a baseball hat. Way smaller, not way smaller. A
Speaker 1: big razor clam is if you took a regular bottle
Speaker 1: of beer and busted off the neck. Average size about
Speaker 1: that about yea big. And it's the kind of clam
Speaker 1: that when he closes his shell, it doesn't contain him,
Speaker 1: and in fact, he's sort of moving beyond his shell
Speaker 1: because he's just got a very fragile shell. And when
Speaker 1: he closes it up. It's like a thick sandwich, and
Speaker 1: the shells are sort of like the bread, right, and
Speaker 1: when you look at the one side and the other side,
Speaker 1: he's just in there like he can't even fit in
Speaker 1: his shell. He's got a big neck sticking out. The
Speaker 1: diggers always out and the digger's eyes out. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: the neck kind of like the neck doesn't fit in
Speaker 1: there very well either, those diggers, is it, Yeah, you're
Speaker 1: always out they like uh, they like they don't like uh.
Speaker 1: They're not in gravel. They're in like just fine fine sand.
Speaker 1: You know you call it sand sand. It's like like
Speaker 1: a yeah, like a tropical beach sand, like what you
Speaker 1: would want to walk on in that stuff. And they
Speaker 1: hang out around in in the littoral zone. You gotta
Speaker 1: know that word. I do not. It's where this like
Speaker 1: the sea meats of land, like the where the wave
Speaker 1: action plays out, the littoral zone. They hang out in
Speaker 1: there and you sort of follow the tide out and
Speaker 1: you got a clam gun or a clam shovel, and
Speaker 1: you study the ground for these ephemeral little dimples at
Speaker 1: form and vanish stick a clam gun, and a clamgun
Speaker 1: is like a what do you think what's the diameter
Speaker 1: on a clam gun? Are they like five inches? So
Speaker 1: five six diameter two with a hand with a t
Speaker 1: handle on it, and you jam that thumbits down the
Speaker 1: mud right on top of where the dimple. You center
Speaker 1: the dimple on the gun and then tip it. And
Speaker 1: I've heard both. I've heard tip it towards short and
Speaker 1: i've heard tip it towards the ocean. But I think
Speaker 1: you tipped towards I think tipping towards shore to not
Speaker 1: cut the clam in half with the clam gun, yeah,
Speaker 1: which happens at all too often, but you're not supposing.
Speaker 1: But you gotta keep your busters. Yeah. So then there's
Speaker 1: like this little air there's this little air escape hole
Speaker 1: and that clamgun. Because then you shove the gun down,
Speaker 1: it compresses the air and so or you know, shoves
Speaker 1: the air out and you sink it down until it's
Speaker 1: buried in the mud. Then you plug the air home
Speaker 1: pull out and that pulls the whole slug of mud out.
Speaker 1: What your cylinders about what foot and a half two
Speaker 1: ft eight you're shoving down. The air needs to escape
Speaker 1: the tube, but to make suction you just then plug
Speaker 1: it's like a little trigger hole. You plug that little
Speaker 1: trigger hole and you pull the whole kitten caboodle up.
Speaker 1: You're pulling a course sample out of the ground, taking
Speaker 1: sample time half the time. You dump it out and
Speaker 1: the clam is not there. And then you jump in
Speaker 1: and sink your arm into the up to the armpit
Speaker 1: in the hole, or you double punch, like pull up
Speaker 1: some inches there, cramped back down in there, and then
Speaker 1: you get it good. Then pull them up and you
Speaker 1: catch them. Or you jump down and sink your arm
Speaker 1: up to the armpit and area is down in there.
Speaker 1: Cut your hand on them, cut your hand, pull them up,
Speaker 1: and there he is, and you're allowed fifteen And it's
Speaker 1: the first fifteen that come out of the ground. They
Speaker 1: don't want your high grading them, and they don't want
Speaker 1: your discarding them, but people do anyway, and so pretty
Speaker 1: soon it's seagulls all over eating busted up razor clams
Speaker 1: and it's a hoot man, and they kind of open
Speaker 1: it just sporadically, like a weekend here, a day there,
Speaker 1: and it's usually the PM, the PM low tide. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the PM low tide. Have you done it in the
Speaker 1: evening with lantern because I take my kids. I've done
Speaker 1: it in the evening. It's real fun. I feel like
Speaker 1: you'd lose children at night. You have them hold the lantern.
Speaker 1: That's a good chore. Tony. We were out with kids
Speaker 1: and you had your youngest in one of those backpack
Speaker 1: carriers but not strafed in and you bent over to
Speaker 1: work or clam and the kid come out the carrier.
Speaker 1: She kept trying to reach down out of the carrier
Speaker 1: tograph the clam. So I don't come over like this,
Speaker 1: and she would. She would come out of the backpack
Speaker 1: trying to reach out to and she came out of
Speaker 1: the carrier right in the surf. Just just there's like
Speaker 1: you go out there on the rough day and as
Speaker 1: his kids washing back and forth, it's hard to get
Speaker 1: any clams because trying to pull your kids out of
Speaker 1: the surf. You gotta watch him. But then the last
Speaker 1: clam and we did the last razor clam we did,
Speaker 1: we went out and it was just like zero wind
Speaker 1: and so you weren't plagued by all the waves coming
Speaker 1: in and wiping all the shows away. You know, it
Speaker 1: was just out and then we were just limited no time.
Speaker 1: But what's funny is my kid. I tell him we'll
Speaker 1: go count him. So he goes up the beach and
Speaker 1: dumps them all out, and then all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: I see him running around screaming and pannikin because all
Speaker 1: the clams just immediately started going back into the crowd
Speaker 1: and I couldn't tell what He's jumping up and down,
Speaker 1: waving his heart and yelled at the box. I realized
Speaker 1: that all our clams are making a break, which totally
Speaker 1: shocked it. Man, he had no idea what to makeup.
Speaker 1: Did you lose anybody? Not that bad? I don't know
Speaker 1: that is. I don't think we Actually we just had
Speaker 1: to let go gram back up there trying to get away.
Speaker 1: We just kind of scooped We scoop them all back out.
Speaker 1: But that day it was so good there was no
Speaker 1: risk of running out of them. Then. Uh. The other
Speaker 1: activity that I got it out here was hold on,
Speaker 1: what's your normal preparation for those man clam strips? Like
Speaker 1: classic going to a restaurant and get clamped, but kind
Speaker 1: of like a thinking man's clam strip, not like uh
Speaker 1: where you know you picture going into restaurant order and
Speaker 1: clam strips and you get down eating them and then
Speaker 1: there's just like the bottom of the baskets full of
Speaker 1: a bunch of breading clumps, but aren't like that. I
Speaker 1: gently dust them. I take all the diggers and fry those.
Speaker 1: And then I take the remaining portion of the clam,
Speaker 1: which I don't I don't know what it's called, and
Speaker 1: I dice it and I make chowder out of that. Dude,
Speaker 1: the things you pull out of those things stomachs is insane.
Speaker 1: I've never paid too much attention to it. Well, there's
Speaker 1: there's seaworms in there, baby crabs in there. Definitely seen
Speaker 1: baby crabs. Never seen that. It's been a long time
Speaker 1: up Like they siphen up some some crazy stuff. Man,
Speaker 1: it's not like a normal little steamer. It's just like
Speaker 1: filter feeding. I mean, they're filt like they are, but
Speaker 1: they're sucking up stuff. Lots of chunks of seaworm and
Speaker 1: lots of little teeny crabs that that razor clam is
Speaker 1: sucking up, and there's a ton of meat on one.
Speaker 1: They're so good, like the little beech crabs or the
Speaker 1: sand crabs. It's just you know, it's it's a crab
Speaker 1: the size of your pinky nail. They're good hung up
Speaker 1: in cold smoke too. Yeah, they're good like that. I
Speaker 1: have a Yeah, I have a friend that does that.
Speaker 1: I've never done it, but I've eaten his and they're delicious.
Speaker 1: So what I've done with them is do like a
Speaker 1: thinking man's clam strip, which by that I mean not
Speaker 1: like that crazy Doughey. You in general don't like a
Speaker 1: batter heavy breading. Don't like batter. I like gentle breading.
Speaker 1: My buddy Henry turned me out. He using bisquick work
Speaker 1: like a change. Yeah, we're great, but not like you're
Speaker 1: not doing an egg wash, just actually quick bisquick. And
Speaker 1: then it was just yeah, and it was fantastic. You
Speaker 1: know what, we'll put that out to Henry Miller Fill
Speaker 1: put that in the show notes. Uh, Tony just sent
Speaker 1: me a nice picture of us out clam with a
Speaker 1: bunch of kids who are will in five minutes be soaked. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the crime to the dumping right before the clamity. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: would it work to just drag around a big inner
Speaker 1: tube with a kid stuck in it? Like, No, it's
Speaker 1: just too much surf. That would never work. That would
Speaker 1: never work. So yeah, I do that. I guess there's
Speaker 1: like three main things I do. I'll come on and
Speaker 1: clean them all, and you gotta get rid of the
Speaker 1: gut on him, because the guts the only part you
Speaker 1: don't eat on him. Really. Then I will put him
Speaker 1: in a vacuum bag. The ones I'm gonna keep. Just
Speaker 1: put a bunch of them in a vacuum bag and
Speaker 1: it makes the nicest little flat little pack of the clams.
Speaker 1: And I'll freeze them like that, and I have some
Speaker 1: of my freezer now and then um in vaccine them
Speaker 1: in there, and then I do them in pasta, so
Speaker 1: like you're like classic Linguini kind of right buttery clam
Speaker 1: sauce thing. And then my wife likes clam chowder, so
Speaker 1: I will make Manhattan chowder, which is red, New England
Speaker 1: showder which is white, or a combo that's kind of
Speaker 1: a little bit of both. But I prefer to on
Speaker 1: a clam I caught. I prefer to make the Manhattan
Speaker 1: showder because it doesn't like hide your clam in a
Speaker 1: white pasty glue. Yeah, I mean, because like you want
Speaker 1: through all the trouble to dig the things up right.
Speaker 1: You want to like you want to look intore and
Speaker 1: be like, well, there's the clams. Yeah. So that's why
Speaker 1: I like like the Red Manhattan showder I enjoy razor
Speaker 1: clams so much just eating him, like you said, fried
Speaker 1: in really anyway. But I felt like it was almost
Speaker 1: a waste to make chowder out of him. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: my wife like chowder. Yeah, no, I do too, but
Speaker 1: it's like there's other claims and then take the chew
Speaker 1: and make the cher I never thought of that. That's
Speaker 1: a good idea. How do you cold smoke it? What
Speaker 1: do you mean? You know he doesn't. I'm assuming he
Speaker 1: brindes them up, but I remember him bringing him out
Speaker 1: on fishing trips and whatnot, and they were just these big, beautiful,
Speaker 1: smoked up razor clams, you know, that were just intact,
Speaker 1: you know, not cut up into strips or anything. And
Speaker 1: they were nice, man. No, not as strong as an oyster,
Speaker 1: you know, more like they still they retain their flavor,
Speaker 1: you know, but there they were good. They were really good. Yeah.
Speaker 1: All the razor clams that have Doug have all been
Speaker 1: on the same couple of beaches out here. What I
Speaker 1: used to think with the Peninsula and that man hanging
Speaker 1: out in the Harvard this whole time, Yeah, kind of
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go around to my neighbors who I bring
Speaker 1: clams to coast. I'm gonna go and say, hey, man,
Speaker 1: you know what. You know how I told you where
Speaker 1: I got those, It's not where I got them. They've
Speaker 1: probably been driving up and down the Olympic Peninsula looking
Speaker 1: for a beach and all I can find is the oysters.
Speaker 1: I've only been to the one. Is it. I always
Speaker 1: call it mo Rocks, but I'm sounding Clips Clips. The
Speaker 1: town is mo Clips, the beach and beach. So when
Speaker 1: you're checking the clam tides, and yeah, you go in
Speaker 1: the rocks. If you type in like like razor clam,
Speaker 1: you're going to You're going to Google and type razor
Speaker 1: clam season or whatever. It just takes you to that
Speaker 1: page or tells you what's coming up, and it'll be
Speaker 1: like the breakdowns are simple. All the different beaches, the
Speaker 1: days are open. And we went out there one time,
Speaker 1: me and my wife and our three kids came out
Speaker 1: to hit a clam tide and stayed in that Ocean
Speaker 1: Shores hotel. And it's a big place, and I'm telling
Speaker 1: you what, like about two hours for lower tide, every
Speaker 1: hotel door opens up and people walk out of their
Speaker 1: hotel rooms and hit Boots to be a cleaning person
Speaker 1: at that hotel would be hell. Yeah, that wouldn't be
Speaker 1: a party because the amount of mud and sand. And
Speaker 1: then everyone goes down and it's like this giant tailgate party.
Speaker 1: That's the kind of tailgate. And I could get involved
Speaker 1: in people sitting around on the tailgates drinking beer is
Speaker 1: getting ready to or having just dug up clas Like
Speaker 1: I said, man, it makes you like really happy to
Speaker 1: be American to go clam digging, especially if it's like
Speaker 1: it is now and in Washington beaches you can drive
Speaker 1: on the beach, so it's nice like Oregon tons, but
Speaker 1: you can't got to pack in. But that's the thing
Speaker 1: to make it. That's kind of a that's a good
Speaker 1: point because like it seems like a low tide that
Speaker 1: waters out there a mile and then you got a
Speaker 1: park in a parking lot or a little roundabout somewheres
Speaker 1: across the dune, and then you got another mile to
Speaker 1: go with kids, you know, and the kids love it
Speaker 1: driving up down the beach. Yeah, I love it. I
Speaker 1: love it. And your part, Yeah, it's like a Walmart
Speaker 1: parking lot that never ends. If everyone from the ten
Speaker 1: Walmart's all had to park in the line down the beach.
Speaker 1: It's the only time I'm glad to see other people
Speaker 1: out doing what I'm doing normally, like someone else got
Speaker 1: here first. Yeah, but there it's like, oh yeah, man,
Speaker 1: I wonder why that is. You're right, I feel that
Speaker 1: way too. Well, there's plenty to go around. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: just so much room. So Jimmy, you go a fair bit.
Speaker 1: I've been a few times, but I've only been to
Speaker 1: the one beach that I've been mispronouncing now for several years.
Speaker 1: We don't feel too I called it mow Rocks, but
Speaker 1: it's not mow Rocks. It's so anyways. They're on the
Speaker 1: Fishing Game website. It'll it's really pretty clear and easy
Speaker 1: to navigate and get through, and they tell you when
Speaker 1: it's going to be open. Well, it's the only rag.
Speaker 1: It's the only rag in the world. It's easy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it seemed pretty simple and it's it's very user friendly
Speaker 1: that part of the red. Yeah. If you don't like
Speaker 1: to dig raised claims, you can suck it. Man. It's
Speaker 1: like it's just like just like the funnest thing in
Speaker 1: the world. Second qualifying questions, Yeah, no, I hate it.
Speaker 1: It's a lot anything not gonna be your friends. And
Speaker 1: he used to go to the beach. Yeah. Then the
Speaker 1: second thing I got into was surf perch. And then
Speaker 1: you're Tommy Edson. You're the first guy met that was
Speaker 1: like really self identified as a surf perch like fish
Speaker 1: surf perch man. I always have like these guys. For
Speaker 1: the guys that work with like your honest, I would
Speaker 1: just say my surf perch mentor oh, and they would
Speaker 1: know who I was talking about. It was just always
Speaker 1: something to do when you were at the coast, either
Speaker 1: digging clams or you know, we'd run out to the coast,
Speaker 1: like me and Tony discussed yesterday, we'd run out the
Speaker 1: coast fishing salmon or steelhead and all the rivers are punishable.
Speaker 1: What are we gonna do. We're gonna go catch a boat.
Speaker 1: We're gonna go catch cooler full of the surf perch
Speaker 1: firs go fish surf perch or that. That's kind of
Speaker 1: what we do. And then I discovered the combo because
Speaker 1: surf perch open years season fifteen surf perch to day
Speaker 1: and it's they're always there. Yeah, Like I've never had
Speaker 1: a day where I yesterday was. Yesterday was pretty sucky
Speaker 1: when I thought it, but I thought it was below par.
Speaker 1: It was below part. It was below of what I expected,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't poor by any means. We came out,
Speaker 1: We came out and surf perched on Christmas Eve something
Speaker 1: like that, No, and I thought that would be no
Speaker 1: December December, and I thought we'd come out and it
Speaker 1: would just be like llaciously nasty, which I did too.
Speaker 1: It was cold, I remember that. But walked out there,
Speaker 1: that cold, windy and you walk out and it's like
Speaker 1: the most like unforgiving atmosphere where it's just like pounding surf,
Speaker 1: salt spray cold, and you're like why and what self
Speaker 1: respecting fish would possibly be and that churning froth and
Speaker 1: you go down there and hook out um gulp saying
Speaker 1: what gulp sand worm? Or I was I threw some.
Speaker 1: I threw some razor clam next that morning, I was saying,
Speaker 1: I think razor clams were good with bait like that,
Speaker 1: as you end up getting crabs too, and the crabs
Speaker 1: will just pick at your stuff because you do pull
Speaker 1: you do crabs. The gulfs work really will. But to
Speaker 1: flick out into that churning, god forsaken froth and fish. Yep, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's how the knocking on the door. Yeah, yep. The
Speaker 1: big ones are just like a little miniature takedown in
Speaker 1: your hand. They just kind of hit it and don't
Speaker 1: you know, they grab it, turn its went away. I
Speaker 1: got um the bait. I've only ever used one thing
Speaker 1: for bait because it stays on you. And I've experienced
Speaker 1: with all kinds of stuff. What's the bag? Say, what
Speaker 1: do you mean on a gold sand word? What's the bag? Fishes,
Speaker 1: everything else that wishes, live baits, fishes, all other baits Bayeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're good and they're durable fishes, all other bait. Well,
Speaker 1: clearly this is the bait for me. You can, you
Speaker 1: can seriously go spend a very minimal amount of money
Speaker 1: on bait and tackle and have enough to get through
Speaker 1: the entire day of surf perch fishing. It's not snaggy.
Speaker 1: You're not gonna donate a bunch of gears. No, But
Speaker 1: I'll tell you what I'll tell you. What does happen
Speaker 1: is you know, when you're uh squid jigging, I'll lock
Speaker 1: my line off because like, oh, on your reel yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll check this out. So you squid jacken and you
Speaker 1: lock your line off, and uh so that way, when
Speaker 1: you open your bail, your squid jake drops too, like
Speaker 1: inches above the bottom when you're off appier because the
Speaker 1: minute it hits the botmyb're gonna snag. Would I imagine
Speaker 1: to be a carpet of other squid jigs that are
Speaker 1: I think there's one rock and then adventure that rock
Speaker 1: grows into a carpet of squidg It's just a coral
Speaker 1: reef of squid, and so you can't touch the bottom.
Speaker 1: So I lock all my reels off, especially with my kids.
Speaker 1: So you just open the bail and when the line stops,
Speaker 1: the line stops where it's supposed to stop, and it's
Speaker 1: safe to start your stroke there. Well, it was squid
Speaker 1: jigging season, and so I rig everybody up. Um, I
Speaker 1: rig everybody up. You know, you have two ounces of lead,
Speaker 1: one ounce of lead on your surf. Perro and me
Speaker 1: my two brothers kind of spread out, you know, I
Speaker 1: walk one way, they walk their way, and one goes
Speaker 1: down below, and in no time we're all back up
Speaker 1: re rigging. Because the minute you fire that, you fired
Speaker 1: out lead and comes up against that lock off. All
Speaker 1: that stuff just keeps going. And they had to me
Speaker 1: twice yesterday. Man, I did one cast. Yeah, I did
Speaker 1: one cast where my my braid was knotted up by
Speaker 1: my spool re rigged came out into our cast. One
Speaker 1: of those ones where you accidentally were somehow it hooks
Speaker 1: onto something like close your bail up and sent my
Speaker 1: rig off into the outer space it arrived in Japan.
Speaker 1: I used to do that to a lot of giant
Speaker 1: nightcrawlers and then my granddad would fuss at me, what
Speaker 1: do you mean because it would just be out pan fishing,
Speaker 1: you know, and instead of clipping off an inch or
Speaker 1: two or whatever you need, and you know, on a
Speaker 1: small like size six hook, I put on like a
Speaker 1: eight ten yeah night color, you know, and as a kid,
Speaker 1: probably didn't weave it on there properly. And then my
Speaker 1: hook would go about eight feet and that night the
Speaker 1: nightclor lands out on my zone. Yeah. That's a big
Speaker 1: kid thing. I think too, is like time they cast,
Speaker 1: like it'll land in a while later the mouth that
Speaker 1: the worm comes touching down somewhere else with. But the
Speaker 1: ones here are red tail, surf perch tail surf purchase
Speaker 1: and it's funny, man, it's like one of those things
Speaker 1: that enough guys go and if you go look online,
Speaker 1: there's like information, but it's not satisfying to research surf
Speaker 1: perch fishing online. No. I don't know if that's the
Speaker 1: thing about guys just stayd tight lipped about it because
Speaker 1: maybe they don't want the company, or it's maybe just
Speaker 1: like lack of interest overall. I don't know, but people
Speaker 1: should be doing it because I mean, we've all seen
Speaker 1: how many miles and expanses of beach there are here.
Speaker 1: I know that's the like I look at like emails
Speaker 1: that come into us and it's just so many guys
Speaker 1: just being like dude, there's so many people and this
Speaker 1: and that and I lost my spot and then no no,
Speaker 1: but then there's like certain things to do like fishing
Speaker 1: surf perch where And I would say that it's not
Speaker 1: fair to say it's an unexploited resource, and it's not.
Speaker 1: I don't know if it's fair to say under exploited resource,
Speaker 1: but it it's just that yeah, right, yes they were
Speaker 1: served perch fishing, and you know, another guy come out
Speaker 1: and give it a take a couple of pokes. There
Speaker 1: was there was a few people out there, but it's
Speaker 1: just kind of concentrated around three or four other guys
Speaker 1: out there. I think I saw a total three dudes
Speaker 1: taking a poke somewhere in the vastness of the beach
Speaker 1: for some brief period of time. But it's not they're
Speaker 1: just not getting pounded. And that day when it was
Speaker 1: really good, and on days out there was really good,
Speaker 1: and you just stay in one spot. So you have
Speaker 1: this beach that goes for you know, miles, miles and
Speaker 1: miles and miles and miles, and you cast out and
Speaker 1: it's like there's no way there's a fish out there.
Speaker 1: And you cast out like there's another one. Do you think, like, man,
Speaker 1: there must be a lot of them. But you can't
Speaker 1: just take them. You can't just cook them like, um,
Speaker 1: they're not as forgiving as a lot of fish. They're
Speaker 1: a little delicate and they're like you just got to
Speaker 1: take a little more care. Like they don't like you
Speaker 1: can't just fry them up like you can rock fish
Speaker 1: or cod or anything like that. You can't like carelessly
Speaker 1: hurl it into a bucket of hot oil and think
Speaker 1: it's gonna be good. It's too delicate, and you talk
Speaker 1: about people like to steam them. Yeah, I did that
Speaker 1: kind of kind of a steamy poach thing. One I
Speaker 1: found the two ways I like to I made the
Speaker 1: mistake one time just sautan them and butter and then
Speaker 1: putting them on pasta with my clam so it's like
Speaker 1: a clam surf perch on pasta and they just fell apart.
Speaker 1: And then my kids didn't like it because they're all
Speaker 1: falling apart. They wanted to pick the fish out, but
Speaker 1: they couldn't pick the fish up because the fish disintegrated.
Speaker 1: Then what I started to do is I would take
Speaker 1: them and take the flames and brush them and olive
Speaker 1: oil season them, put him on a on an oil
Speaker 1: bacon sheet and put them in a four degree of
Speaker 1: and let him sitting there until the edges are starting
Speaker 1: to crip potato that's in. Take my spats them right off,
Speaker 1: and those sons of guns are good. Or what we
Speaker 1: did on Christmas Eve, no Christmas dinner last year is
Speaker 1: scaled him, gutted him, left him a hole, cut scored
Speaker 1: him like caught a caught a the fishes sitting in
Speaker 1: horizontal like the way he belongs. Cut three or four
Speaker 1: vertical gashes in them, fry tholes and peanut oil until
Speaker 1: they're until the fins are just crispy, crisp, crisp, And
Speaker 1: it made like a tide dipping sauce. That sounds that
Speaker 1: was good, and everybody liked that. I bet that was good.
Speaker 1: You end up with all those crispy edges on him, man,
Speaker 1: that's good. Then you just pick it for your kids
Speaker 1: and you get to like it. I like anything whole
Speaker 1: fried like that, especially like surf perch, yellow perch, anything
Speaker 1: like that. Whole fried. Man, if I can whole fry it,
Speaker 1: usually that's what I'll do because I just love eating
Speaker 1: them that way. It's like it's something like picking up
Speaker 1: like a turk legger a drumstick when you get them right.
Speaker 1: I mean, granted, some fish are just too big to
Speaker 1: do it, but some of the bone structures too, Dell
Speaker 1: gills and sun he's and cropp ease and you know,
Speaker 1: smaller surf perch. They all taste the same, man, you
Speaker 1: just gotta keep more of them. Yeah, that they do.
Speaker 1: But then the only problem is some of them the
Speaker 1: bones are too. Yeah, Like I remember the writer Ian
Speaker 1: Fraser was explaining to me, Uh, eating row schad, not
Speaker 1: the role, but American shad, eating whole cooked, whole baked shad.
Speaker 1: And he equated, uh to trying to fix your watch,
Speaker 1: picking the bones like that level of you know, a
Speaker 1: watch apart. It was pressure cooked and it was good,
Speaker 1: but it was like any other fish you would put
Speaker 1: in a pressure cooker, American shad. It would have been
Speaker 1: cooked for I don't know how long in a pressure cooker.
Speaker 1: A friend of mine goes down and catches lots of them,
Speaker 1: and he loves them. Dude, the eggs out of the
Speaker 1: out of a row shad are unbelievable. I think that's
Speaker 1: why I call roll right. Yeah. Well McPhee, John McPhee
Speaker 1: has that book, The Founding Fish, the story. It's the
Speaker 1: traditional way is to just take the whole sack out.
Speaker 1: So I've caught in my life three American shad. One
Speaker 1: happened to be a row chad fighting. One of the
Speaker 1: fighting is fishing out there. This is this in the
Speaker 1: Delaware River. And if anyone knows your Revolutionary war history,
Speaker 1: but this is far above where we're Washington cross the
Speaker 1: Delaware crabbab cha or phenomenal crab baby, oily great crab baby. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the book. Mcfee's book, John mcfee's book, The Founding Fish
Speaker 1: is just sort of like an American history, but about
Speaker 1: that fish, sort of the degree to which people on
Speaker 1: the American coast relied on the shad fishery. And there's
Speaker 1: things in Daniel Boone's biography even where so Daniel Boone,
Speaker 1: someone came and notified, uh knows Daniel Boone's and this
Speaker 1: came from Boone's son later told Daniel Boone's son was
Speaker 1: later interviewed and he was telling a story about his
Speaker 1: father and mother, and the story was that the shad
Speaker 1: were running in Pennsylvania when Boone's family was still in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1: And I'm trying to trying to remember how this goes,
Speaker 1: so so I get it right. And they caught baskets full,
Speaker 1: They netted up baskets full of American shad. Had they
Speaker 1: had so many that one of the kids was dispatched.
Speaker 1: I think it was Daniel maybe was dispatched to go
Speaker 1: to a neighbor's and tell the neighbors, come get fish,
Speaker 1: we have so many fish. So he does and comes
Speaker 1: back and somehow Daniel Boone winds up being asleep by
Speaker 1: where they're fishing, and the two girls are sent over
Speaker 1: to get fish and they see Boone's sleeping and they
Speaker 1: dump a bucket of fish guts on Boone's face as
Speaker 1: a prank, and Boone gets up in cold cocks one
Speaker 1: of them and they run home to tell on them,
Speaker 1: and the mom comes over to give the what for
Speaker 1: to Boone's mom, and she says, well, you better teach
Speaker 1: those girls some manners frontier justice. Uh. But the traditional
Speaker 1: way as you take the you you basically like very
Speaker 1: gently sawte the fish's egg sack in Bacon, Greece. This
Speaker 1: how it's done is yeah, Yeah, we've been known to
Speaker 1: go down and catch a bunch of them, just have
Speaker 1: a bunch of crab bait throughout the summer. American same
Speaker 1: introduced him out here. There's tons of them in Columbia,
Speaker 1: and I remember hearing the history about how they were introduced,
Speaker 1: but I don't want to talk about it because I'll
Speaker 1: probably get it wrong. But they were. It's a it was, yeah,
Speaker 1: But there's literally millions of them in the Columbia River.
Speaker 1: And you go down an anchor up a boat and
Speaker 1: put back little dick knights and bring lots of snacks
Speaker 1: and kids and like kids really all day. It's just
Speaker 1: a small little shaver spoon. Heard of a dick night?
Speaker 1: You've never heard of a dick night? No, I thought
Speaker 1: you were. I thought you were using like a euphemism. No,
Speaker 1: they're called a dick night. It's like we did, oh,
Speaker 1: because we would use just these little little red white
Speaker 1: jigs like a little Yeah, you can use those. While
Speaker 1: you look so while you look so unhappy that we're
Speaker 1: talking about surf perch and and uh American American Chad,
Speaker 1: I look unhappy. I'm cool. Really, you're fine, Yeah, anything
Speaker 1: like that. Any questions to come up? No, I'm tracking
Speaker 1: so far. Is it just that? Is it just that
Speaker 1: because you just don't have a lot of experience with
Speaker 1: surf perch, I have none with shad a little bit
Speaker 1: of surf. Can you tell me what your impressions are
Speaker 1: of surf percha fishing yesterday? I'd like to hear, because
Speaker 1: you've never been before, and there you were there, I
Speaker 1: was standing there in your chest waiters on a lonely beach.
Speaker 1: I was thinking earlier how it doesn't seem like how
Speaker 1: driving all over the beaches messed the beach up at all.
Speaker 1: But there's probably things that happened that you don't see
Speaker 1: sut or something. But it's like, if you're gonna drive
Speaker 1: on a beach, that's the beach to do it on.
Speaker 1: Things basically made out of concrete. Yeah, although someone's uh
Speaker 1: sunk right in about five minutes after we got there.
Speaker 1: But that that beaches a different. That beach is a
Speaker 1: little teeny different than Morox. Yeah. Yeah, it's when you
Speaker 1: enter the beach out here, it's pretty soft. I don't
Speaker 1: think you should be driving your astro van out there.
Speaker 1: They were they were too And if you do, you
Speaker 1: better come in hot and get to the hard stand. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what what other? What was your what? What other things
Speaker 1: you have to add? There? You are? You in your
Speaker 1: chest laiters probably be an American. Well, you know, it's
Speaker 1: always nice to be in a position doing something you've
Speaker 1: never done before. You know, well, challenge coming out, Yeah,
Speaker 1: something you to learn and uh, it wasn't a very
Speaker 1: good day of fishing though that day it was. It
Speaker 1: was tough, but you know ended up being fine. You know,
Speaker 1: worked out for me because I just started looking around
Speaker 1: and going all right, what what am I going to
Speaker 1: do differently than we're doing? And try to catch fish
Speaker 1: and end up finding a little rip current and just thinking, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, I'll fish because everyone gleaning from what everybody
Speaker 1: else is saying, like a little drop is good, current
Speaker 1: break is good, and just sort of looking for something different.
Speaker 1: I found this little rip and ended up catching six
Speaker 1: fish out of it. So did you get six? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Worked out pretty good. Yeah, I think I let to
Speaker 1: go and kept four. Surf perch master all he kept
Speaker 1: one or two all day yesterday. You know, surf perchas
Speaker 1: and razor clams too. I'm thinking earlier. While I like
Speaker 1: surf perching and raisor clambing, shad fishing, all those things,
Speaker 1: it's different from most other things I do, such a
Speaker 1: steel head fishing or hunting, because you can walk out
Speaker 1: on the beach and you'll talk to the guy that
Speaker 1: you see, Like you said, you don't mind seeing people.
Speaker 1: You're like, how you doing. He'll say I caught three
Speaker 1: and you actually believe them. Yeah, Or you raise your
Speaker 1: clan and you're like, oh man, i'm loading up here.
Speaker 1: I got two limits. You believe them. You're like, this
Speaker 1: is a good spot, I'm gonna stay here. You go.
Speaker 1: Shad fishing people are like there willing to share the
Speaker 1: information about these fisheries, right, like such as you were
Speaker 1: willing to share the information with Steve about the star perching.
Speaker 1: You go to a boat launch it up on the
Speaker 1: Peninsula rivers. You asked somebody about steelhead they caught that day.
Speaker 1: It's been a slow day day. I mean, you don't
Speaker 1: know what happened, honest answer out of anybody from Hoquium
Speaker 1: to Fork. Yeah, why do you think that is? I
Speaker 1: don't know. I think it's a lot of it. It's
Speaker 1: like they want to preserve something that they feel it's
Speaker 1: more special to them than anyone else or I don't know,
Speaker 1: and they don't want more. We already got enough people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, we don't need any more. People don't talk
Speaker 1: about it, and it makes me upset and be honest
Speaker 1: with you, because guys just want to fish, you know.
Speaker 1: Guys just want to get out and catch some stuff, man,
Speaker 1: you know. And besides, when you talk about a fishery,
Speaker 1: whether it be surf perch, whether it be steelhead on
Speaker 1: the peninsula, if you're going to name a place, it's
Speaker 1: kind of a good thing because then it's bringing money
Speaker 1: to it, attention, you know, and those are management keeps
Speaker 1: you know, and and it's there's no ownership for those
Speaker 1: guys that are fishing those rivers. You know, a lot
Speaker 1: of people get ticked off when even people come from
Speaker 1: the west Side, you know, I guess they called the
Speaker 1: east side to the west side to fish these rivers
Speaker 1: out here and so on. Uh, it's kind of like
Speaker 1: this territorial thing. And it's unfortunate because I think, you know,
Speaker 1: it's obviously a resource we all have to share, and
Speaker 1: it's everybody has the same right to it. So people
Speaker 1: want to keep hush hush to try to keep people
Speaker 1: away from it. Like it's like it's theirs, like a
Speaker 1: honey hole, you know. So it's just protecting there. You know.
Speaker 1: They don't want you to think it's good because you'll
Speaker 1: come back tomorrow. You're gonna bring more, bring more people.
Speaker 1: And to like to that point though too, Like you
Speaker 1: go out to the peninsula in the wintertime when steel
Speaker 1: head seasons in full swing and look at license plates. Man,
Speaker 1: you'd be surprised how many dudes are from Montana. The
Speaker 1: guys are out there fishing and want to want to
Speaker 1: catch a steel a on a two hand and flower Well,
Speaker 1: that's a recent development to which is the guiding operations.
Speaker 1: You know, these guys they go they guide all the
Speaker 1: trout rivers, uh, all all year long, and then they
Speaker 1: come over here in the winter and guide. But that's
Speaker 1: kind of what you doing that though, fishing these rivers
Speaker 1: out here for Sam and both of you. Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: That's another thing that like kind of got me with
Speaker 1: like another notch in the surf perch belt is like
Speaker 1: it wasn't what it was, or it isn't what it
Speaker 1: once was, you know what I mean with a hey,
Speaker 1: look at me, I got this great big fish. Is
Speaker 1: what it's become. Like those were like such fond memories.
Speaker 1: It just as a kid going to those almost sad rivers. Yeah, man,
Speaker 1: it almost hurts to see what they've come to. In
Speaker 1: a sense, you can kind of love it to death.
Speaker 1: And it's like I love it so much that I'll
Speaker 1: just step away from it because I don't want to
Speaker 1: see it hurt anymore, and I'll go stand on the beach,
Speaker 1: I'll go fish cropp ease. I love fishing croppies. You
Speaker 1: know that. I'm right there with you. I mean, I
Speaker 1: used to pound these rivers up here, and when I
Speaker 1: just love going to them. When I'm talking to do
Speaker 1: how much time have we spent talking to me? Talked
Speaker 1: about me spending time to fish and steelhead or salmon,
Speaker 1: because I just don't much anymore. That's when I meet people,
Speaker 1: when I when I meet people that know Tony, they
Speaker 1: always want to tell me about your reputation as the same.
Speaker 1: And steelhead guy spend a lot of time out here,
Speaker 1: but not recently. And it's like him, It's like I
Speaker 1: don almost just rather step away and just not be
Speaker 1: one of the crowds and just kind of like, hey,
Speaker 1: you guys, enjoy it whatever. And I don't know if
Speaker 1: that's remember maybe fish you've kind of done it. I
Speaker 1: don't want to say I've been there, done that like
Speaker 1: it does, but it's it's like I've caught my I've
Speaker 1: caught my shirt of steel and I've got some really
Speaker 1: beautiful fish. Um, I'm happy floating that river. I'm happy
Speaker 1: floating the wheats and through the rainforest and not catching
Speaker 1: a single fish. And I will take far fewer fish,
Speaker 1: far fewer fish over beauty. I will take far fewer fish,
Speaker 1: maybe even not even one for a season, and beautiful
Speaker 1: scenery over crowds and limits. And I really will I'll
Speaker 1: hike into arguing people are. It gets kind of ridiculous.
Speaker 1: People just yelling at yeah, you know, right through a
Speaker 1: water whatever. It's like, Man, there's a stump over here,
Speaker 1: there's a long jam over here. I got nowhere else
Speaker 1: to go, you know where I gotta go. You know,
Speaker 1: it's just it's just it's crowds and it's it's uh,
Speaker 1: you know, people being territorial and thinking you should be
Speaker 1: off the river. Whatever it is, I don't know, it's
Speaker 1: just kind of gotten to a point where it's got
Speaker 1: it's a little ridiculous. Now. It must be something that like,
Speaker 1: it must be something that's like a steelhead thing, because
Speaker 1: it is I went through years of being maybe people
Speaker 1: feel so lusty for steel him that it brings out
Speaker 1: the worst of them, because I went through a few
Speaker 1: years of being really really into fishing steel head in
Speaker 1: the Great Lakes, like into it, into it to the
Speaker 1: point like making hash marks on the roof of my
Speaker 1: van too mark like comedy got you know what I mean,
Speaker 1: Like golf clicker mentality about oh my god, I landed
Speaker 1: forty two you know in April May or whatever, um
Speaker 1: like that kind of into it because I had kind
Speaker 1: of like quit mostly quipped fur trapping and hadn't found
Speaker 1: something that because when you trapped, you like your trap
Speaker 1: every day. So when I quit doing that, there's a
Speaker 1: couple of years there. Yeah, I quit doing that. I
Speaker 1: was twenty two and there was a couple of years
Speaker 1: there before I moved out west, and uh, you needed
Speaker 1: something to fill that, like every danis. So I got
Speaker 1: way into fishing steelhead and I would the only fights
Speaker 1: I've been in. I got in one fight on a
Speaker 1: river Montana, which I'll tell you about, but all the
Speaker 1: fights were always like fighting steel with steelhead guys. I remember,
Speaker 1: like it was so like so combative. I remember a
Speaker 1: guy one time saying, asked me what my name was.
Speaker 1: I said, Steve. He goes, well, Steve, I think I
Speaker 1: hooked your waiters fishing that tight where a guy hooked
Speaker 1: my waiter on his drift. Yeah, just elabowing people out
Speaker 1: of the way getting there, because if you're if you're
Speaker 1: in a spot and you're hooking a couple of steelhead,
Speaker 1: other dudes just are like it just it makes them
Speaker 1: feel sick. They want in their soul bad. I mean,
Speaker 1: especially if you come in there after them. Yeah, I've
Speaker 1: seen like people people act that way for pinks, which
Speaker 1: is which is like, I don't know, maybe, and I'm
Speaker 1: sure a lot of it's just people that don't catch
Speaker 1: a lot of fish, so they don't understand, like they
Speaker 1: probably just don't have any appreciation for like quality of
Speaker 1: it of their fish or their querry or whatever it
Speaker 1: may be. But they I mean, I've seen scenarios where
Speaker 1: you'll be lined up on a river and then people
Speaker 1: are hooking waiters. You'll be waited out in the water
Speaker 1: knee deep and say your twenty ft from let's say
Speaker 1: you're twelve feet from the from the rocks, from the gravel,
Speaker 1: from the gravel bar, and somebody standing on the gravel
Speaker 1: bar casting over the top of you. Yes, I've seen that.
Speaker 1: That's another That's just another reason why, man, I just
Speaker 1: don't just see. Yeah, there's always gonna be those those Uh,
Speaker 1: it's just locations where you know it's an easy access
Speaker 1: point and you know what you're in for. You know
Speaker 1: you're in for battle fishing. It's an easy access point.
Speaker 1: It's a place for people to go have a good
Speaker 1: chance at catching the steelhead if they drawn have a boat.
Speaker 1: Not everybody has a boat. Um, you know, in recent
Speaker 1: years there's just been more and more boats. It's gone
Speaker 1: from seeing three trailers out of take out to seeing
Speaker 1: you know, twenty trailers and just leap frogging down rivers
Speaker 1: and all that. So you know, you're always gonna have
Speaker 1: a combat fishing, and I just think everybody needs to
Speaker 1: be yeah, understanding that, Hey, every person on that river
Speaker 1: has the exact same right to the catching a steelhead
Speaker 1: as they do, no matter where the heck you're from.
Speaker 1: From Montana, I know, Washington, wherever it is, there there
Speaker 1: is and but there, but there is the dispute I
Speaker 1: got into. Yeah, I want to hear the Montana story. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was coming up. I was with my old I
Speaker 1: think I was fishing with my old roommate, j Nichols,
Speaker 1: who wanted becoming a he want like having a whole
Speaker 1: career in fly fishing magazines and fly fishing publications. We're
Speaker 1: fishing one of the upper forks of the Bitter Roote
Speaker 1: and um wade fishing. Picking my way up river, and
Speaker 1: I come to a spot where a where a guide
Speaker 1: who's doing who's doing a dave float has this little
Speaker 1: like this, this cute little lunch set up on the
Speaker 1: beach for his sport, for his client, right down to
Speaker 1: a checkered tablecloth. I've seen that. Yeah, shore launch, nice
Speaker 1: shore lunch for the client. Yeah, but it's almost like
Speaker 1: it's a little too it's a little too much. It's
Speaker 1: like it's just like really, really really, that's what this is,
Speaker 1: what has come to in this world. You can't just
Speaker 1: sit on a rock and eat something sandwich, so chair, tablecloth,
Speaker 1: table every Yeah, I got buddies that runching every single time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there there gets a barbecue out and make you a burger.
Speaker 1: That he did that, I would have been like a
Speaker 1: cool he's making it on a burger. But it's just
Speaker 1: like a little cute, see little set up. It sounds
Speaker 1: like it was a little too cute for you. It's like,
Speaker 1: are you there to fish or not? Right? Right? I
Speaker 1: get that. I can see you sit on a rock,
Speaker 1: stand around, kick rocks, I don't know, eat whatever. That's fine.
Speaker 1: I can accept that. But anyhow, it didn't that. That
Speaker 1: was just an observation I had that I thought was
Speaker 1: a little much. It was a little much. A tablecloth,
Speaker 1: checkered tablecloth. Yeah, I can see why Why did you
Speaker 1: do that? Did you like it? I guess because you're
Speaker 1: just you're just trying to impress a little bit. You know,
Speaker 1: you're out there working and I don't know, I guess
Speaker 1: in the case, it was a slow day, right, at
Speaker 1: least the lunch will be nice. Report was the table used?
Speaker 1: Was it checkered? Yeah? It was green and white. I
Speaker 1: think I still have it somewhere tucked away for years.
Speaker 1: And tablecloth? What was the spread? Sometimes I'd washed that
Speaker 1: thing every day in the washing machine, and a lot
Speaker 1: of along with my No, it's a lot of my
Speaker 1: clothes at my house. But uh yeah, nothing worse than
Speaker 1: about our tablecloth that already had catchup mustard. So when
Speaker 1: you're guiding, your guiding for an outfit, but it's up
Speaker 1: to you to do all that stuff. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: they had like a base level that they wanted you
Speaker 1: to follow. You had to have a table in two chairs,
Speaker 1: for sure. It's a very minimum. I think they asked
Speaker 1: that we had a table cloth. You'd pull over a
Speaker 1: little roll top table, hopefully under a shade tree, and
Speaker 1: you put a tablecloth down and he set one out
Speaker 1: for him, depending on the on the year and who
Speaker 1: was doing the lunch catering. But it was most of
Speaker 1: the time. Some sort of sandwich and you know, some hides,
Speaker 1: cookies and soda, pop water, pretty simple, nice macaroni salad
Speaker 1: maybe in there for you with your sandwich. Didn't matter
Speaker 1: how cute they were, sounds kind of good man woman,
Speaker 1: didn't matter. It didn't matter. Just just gonna do it
Speaker 1: as I got. As I got um, I guess more experienced.
Speaker 1: And I had the clients that I took year after year.
Speaker 1: If they weren't into it and they wanted an actually
Speaker 1: thirty minutes of fishing, because that would buy them, I
Speaker 1: would just pull over underneath the shade tree on and
Speaker 1: sit in the boat and you know, wolf it down.
Speaker 1: Like so you would have clients who would say yeah,
Speaker 1: you would say like that's a little much. Yeah, a
Speaker 1: little much. I'd be that guy. Let's just keep fishing. Really,
Speaker 1: but it's like really really, I've said this before that
Speaker 1: I had a lot of clients who used me a
Speaker 1: lot because their wives like fishing me. And there were
Speaker 1: guys that were like, well, I get to fish more
Speaker 1: since my wife is into this. I'm gonna use this
Speaker 1: guy because he's like his trucks tight, you know, lunch
Speaker 1: is tight, attractive, he's got it like I doesn't have
Speaker 1: a potty mouth out there. You know, my wife's not
Speaker 1: always going like jeez, can't believe Mill's talking about that again.
Speaker 1: So I could picture you being like the guy that
Speaker 1: a dude would get because you're gonna be nice to
Speaker 1: his wife, and then you roll that little tablecloth out.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, all right. So what happened was so there
Speaker 1: I was picking my way up river. Oh you guys
Speaker 1: having a little dip up. I'll get back. I'll get
Speaker 1: back to my real quick, which I might have talked
Speaker 1: about the past, But can we talk about this a
Speaker 1: little bit? Uh, Tony, You've been trying to quit chewing tobacco,
Speaker 1: but then here you are, you running to Tommy. He's
Speaker 1: died in the woold man. I'm a dipper man. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I love it. I really like And you started dipping
Speaker 1: down from exposure to him. No, no, I can't blame
Speaker 1: it on him. I thank you for not blaming you
Speaker 1: have told me I just quit, I'd be like, no,
Speaker 1: you may not have a cheer since February twelve. And
Speaker 1: on the way out here, I knew it was gonna
Speaker 1: be a long drive, and I know it's going fishing,
Speaker 1: and that's one of those things you just other dippers,
Speaker 1: do you guys case dippers a spoofy kind of joke.
Speaker 1: May not? I mean, I just it's you associated with
Speaker 1: certain things, right. But I was like, I'm gonna be
Speaker 1: in ther time. What do you guys refer yourself? What
Speaker 1: is one who likes to like a smoke or everybody
Speaker 1: knows that. Yeah, I'd be like your self identify as
Speaker 1: a chew I self identifies trying to tell me about yourself,
Speaker 1: you'd be like mature. I know, not the first thing
Speaker 1: I throw out there, but yeah, so go ahead, Tony.
Speaker 1: So here you are. You know you're on a long
Speaker 1: drive and it's gonna be chewers pick up. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I go to the gas I shouldn't fill up And
Speaker 1: I walked inside to grab some snacks and was big
Speaker 1: and it was called my name. Yeah, a lapse self control.
Speaker 1: And I purchased my first candid shoo since February twelve.
Speaker 1: Our man Dirt myth uh. We were down in South
Speaker 1: America and he was trying to quit and he gets
Speaker 1: home and I asked him how it went, and he
Speaker 1: said the same thing. You fill up your gas tank.
Speaker 1: You can't buy a gas there it is, and you
Speaker 1: walk into the gas station, I would suggest he just
Speaker 1: pays with a debit card and buys his groceries elsewhere,
Speaker 1: because the minute he says, I can't go into a
Speaker 1: gas station because when I go up to the counter there,
Speaker 1: I am faced with it and it talks to strong definitely,
Speaker 1: because like he said, who goes inside to pay for
Speaker 1: gas anymore? Well, inside of a gas station? Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: So if he did, I'm saying from people, you're probably
Speaker 1: in there public gas and you're like, I know, what's
Speaker 1: about feet away from through one door one door through?
Speaker 1: It's not Yeah, like the fact that dippers need to
Speaker 1: go in there to buy snacks. It's like you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: all you're buying is a container to drink real fast.
Speaker 1: You can spit. Yeah, that's right, because that's right. That's
Speaker 1: why I bought that green that green thing I bought it.
Speaker 1: I'm like, uh, that's wide mouth, how this thing about? Yeah?
Speaker 1: This crazy? I mean not that I'm gonna if I
Speaker 1: did counter and there it was saying saying, um, that's
Speaker 1: good point, because it's like guys, cheers, they're trying to
Speaker 1: quit going to the gas stations with single people say
Speaker 1: I'm going to the bar, you know, like you're going
Speaker 1: to the bar. Yes, but that's not where you're really
Speaker 1: looking to get out of this this other thing you're hacing.
Speaker 1: But you you, you, you know, so when you're going
Speaker 1: to get a snack at the gas station. So there
Speaker 1: I am walking up this fork of the bitter Root,
Speaker 1: and I stolen across this guide. He's got this very
Speaker 1: romantic little setting going on, and I make the mistake
Speaker 1: in his eyes of fishing the hole that he's camp
Speaker 1: that he's having his lunch at lunch hole, but he's
Speaker 1: not fishing it. The dude comes undone, undone, the guy
Speaker 1: or the client, the guy, the guide in front of
Speaker 1: the client that he's trying to woo with this little
Speaker 1: setup with a tablecloth. And I come back and take
Speaker 1: a couple of pokes through there, just fishing trout. It's
Speaker 1: not he's like making a living out here selling this
Speaker 1: meat or something. So fishing trout, and come through, take
Speaker 1: a couple of pokes. The guy comes undone. We later
Speaker 1: had a reckoning in Charlie's Barn, Missoula, Montana. Not not
Speaker 1: at the takeout, you weren't. We had a fight and
Speaker 1: then and and then it was funny because later we
Speaker 1: wound up kind of drinking the same place I would
Speaker 1: see him. I've been there, you know, And we later
Speaker 1: had a reckoning and he had and uh, if I
Speaker 1: remember correctly, I feel that he admitted his wrongness, and
Speaker 1: I might have admitted a little bit of my wrongness
Speaker 1: for responding in such a strong way to his criticism.
Speaker 1: But I feel I still today feel like if you're
Speaker 1: if you're eating lunch and not fishing, that you do
Speaker 1: not have a legitimate claim on the whole. How do
Speaker 1: you feel about that? You honest? What's the guide's perspective?
Speaker 1: It's kind of dependent on probably on how much pressures
Speaker 1: on the river, you know. I mean, if it's like
Speaker 1: a river where you've been waiting for two hours you
Speaker 1: hadn't seen a person, and then you got just you know,
Speaker 1: unlimited water past their boat, that's kind of that's kind
Speaker 1: of like this. It's like that sounds like the spot.
Speaker 1: You might as well just skip it and kind of
Speaker 1: move on as much for your own personal experiences. That's
Speaker 1: a lot like this. That's a lot like the spot. Actually,
Speaker 1: I agree with Yeah, I wasn't the wrong. I think
Speaker 1: I'll always think some I was saying, if it was
Speaker 1: it was like a busy river, then one around around. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll probably skip that one, Steve. I think if you're
Speaker 1: in a boat and you're floating down, you're like, okay,
Speaker 1: you're here, we're gonna have lunch, and then we're gonna
Speaker 1: fish this whole. And if it's trout stream, you know,
Speaker 1: you're kind of just letting it rest. Maybe a boat
Speaker 1: went through, you're letting it rest. If you're gonna have
Speaker 1: lunch there, like you're kind of claiming that run for
Speaker 1: a period of time. I think I think at minimum
Speaker 1: it would have been worth it. Hey do you mind
Speaker 1: if I fish this round? That's the thing you just
Speaker 1: gotta Hey can I It's like when you get when
Speaker 1: you walk up to where you want to fish and
Speaker 1: there's a guy in there? Do you mind if I
Speaker 1: step in? Then you're gonna do you think about that? Jeez?
Speaker 1: I don't know you ever been a guide? Never? You
Speaker 1: guys have all guid I'm definitely not. You never guide
Speaker 1: a time, No, sir, I probably would have just asked
Speaker 1: or there's lots of holes I would want them. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't want an audience. I just keep moving. But that's
Speaker 1: just me. But it didn't contest him causing a scene
Speaker 1: at the same time, if he wasn't really making me reconsidered,
Speaker 1: because it's like obviously scarred me because I bring it
Speaker 1: up all the time. It sounds like this is something
Speaker 1: from way ago ended up my wife. Yet that's how
Speaker 1: long ago this was. I mean, there's so there there's
Speaker 1: a couple of you. If this was also a place
Speaker 1: where that you were walking in and then there's a boat,
Speaker 1: that's true. Is that true? I was walking in and
Speaker 1: they had a boat. They were in a boat. So
Speaker 1: here I'm a lowly walker. That's different too because they
Speaker 1: have the ability to fish this whole stretch river And
Speaker 1: you're like, man, I just hiked a mile and a
Speaker 1: half of my leg, Like this is where I was
Speaker 1: planning to, you know, And if that's a well known
Speaker 1: is where people do hike into, I would never stop
Speaker 1: there to have much fault as a guy. So it
Speaker 1: could be yeah, so it could be completely very circumstantial.
Speaker 1: You're cooling all this table class, You got anything to
Speaker 1: add on surf perch because we still need to talk
Speaker 1: about today, which was lights out, the one of the
Speaker 1: top days of the fishing I've ever experienced my entire
Speaker 1: life like the most gorgeous day I've ever had on
Speaker 1: the Washington coast. It is concluding thought on surf perch around.
Speaker 1: I would do it again. You know, I had so
Speaker 1: much fun anytime I go back out there right now
Speaker 1: the other time and go make take a few pokes.
Speaker 1: Let me tell you why it's better than the winter
Speaker 1: in my opinion, this this is why it's This is
Speaker 1: why I clam digging is nice because it's a winter
Speaker 1: spring thing. Is when you're out there in the winter,
Speaker 1: this it's like you're out there and you're so happy
Speaker 1: that there's something going on because it's the time of
Speaker 1: year when nothing's going on, Like February. If you're a hunting,
Speaker 1: fishing kind of fella, February can be you know, the
Speaker 1: dog days. There's nothing else. It's like you might not
Speaker 1: be like kicking tons of as season. And so then
Speaker 1: you go out there and it's like, wow, like a
Speaker 1: productive fishery in the winter. But to be there in
Speaker 1: the summer, it's still fun. But you're you're sort of like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: I could be, I could be. We could also go.
Speaker 1: It's got a different kind of joy in the wintertime too,
Speaker 1: because like you said, it's this desolate, hostile place and
Speaker 1: here's you get this like bright spot of this fresh
Speaker 1: fish that you're like, oh man, yes, it's like it's
Speaker 1: it's a it's it's a little bit of a buzz.
Speaker 1: If you like having the place all yourself, that's a
Speaker 1: good thing. That's the best time to you out there.
Speaker 1: Your people look at funny and the fishing can be
Speaker 1: great in the winter. Dude, should be doing it. You know,
Speaker 1: it's bigger one tuch a little bit. All right, now,
Speaker 1: you're cool on that because I want to get into
Speaker 1: the world's greatest day of fishing. It was pretty amazing.
Speaker 1: Lights out go along with that something I never do now, yeah,
Speaker 1: I shouldn't say that I rarely do, but almost want
Speaker 1: to do more of because of how much you learn,
Speaker 1: which is go out with a go out on a charter,
Speaker 1: go out with a guide. And I'm kind of down
Speaker 1: on it because it's never like not down on it,
Speaker 1: but it's never as much fun as because you're not
Speaker 1: solving the problems yourself. And so a lot of what
Speaker 1: I like about hunting and fishing is solving is the
Speaker 1: problem solving and thinking that goes into it and like
Speaker 1: the teamwork right, and when you're out with the guy
Speaker 1: just's kind of like you're not catching the fish. If anything,
Speaker 1: you're just like hindering the operation. Like that they would
Speaker 1: get you know that everything you're doing, they would do better,
Speaker 1: and they're the brain behind it. And you just stand there,
Speaker 1: you know, with your ye know, your hand, uh, while
Speaker 1: this person is plotting and figuring and they've gotten the
Speaker 1: bait together, they put the plan together, they know what
Speaker 1: to do, and you're like staying, oh, do what you do,
Speaker 1: what you do and all those things like all right,
Speaker 1: dropped down, Yeah, and you've done nothing nothing, Yeah, you
Speaker 1: haven't even tied your own stuff on. So when people
Speaker 1: are kind of like, oh, I caught a blankety blank,
Speaker 1: you know, I caught an ex pound blankety blank with
Speaker 1: a guy, and I'm like, the guy had caught it,
Speaker 1: like he'd let you reel it in and everything, but
Speaker 1: it wasn't like your fish. Yeah. In the world of salmon,
Speaker 1: a steel head and the oarsmen in a in a
Speaker 1: drift about the oarsman's usually takes, in my opinion, takes
Speaker 1: credit for most of fish. And he's a guy that's
Speaker 1: putting you on the fish. All he's telling you to
Speaker 1: do is cast over there. The oarsman is a guy
Speaker 1: exerting the skill. You know. I mean that your thing though,
Speaker 1: with with hiring a guide, what it does, do the
Speaker 1: positives of it if you don't have like if it's
Speaker 1: not readily accessible, it's great for shortening a learning curve. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then this case, uh, what's what's the name of that?
Speaker 1: Operations and saltwater ch charters, All rivers and saltwater charters.
Speaker 1: The dudes were solid the skipper, and they made it
Speaker 1: a good day. We only got into what we did,
Speaker 1: yet they only made it a good day. Is that
Speaker 1: those guys wound up being like dudes out fish with anyway,
Speaker 1: and treated us like dudes, like they were good enough
Speaker 1: actors or gine. He felt this way, where like the
Speaker 1: interaction was was like everyone on equal footage. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: they're like, we clearly like to fit catch fish. They
Speaker 1: clearly still like to catch fish. I say still because
Speaker 1: imagine some day it goes away when you die too long,
Speaker 1: I asked he, And on the way back in, I
Speaker 1: was like, what do you do in your spare time?
Speaker 1: Because I know when you guide a lot, a lot
Speaker 1: of times you don't fish that much in your spare time.
Speaker 1: And he's like, I go fishing. So he job. They
Speaker 1: like to fish. They like to talk about fish, catch fish. Um,
Speaker 1: we showed up dressed through the parts too. We didn't
Speaker 1: look like, you know, we just got off the plane. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so they're probably like, Okay, we're not gonna be like
Speaker 1: getting hooks out of people's hands all day long. And man,
Speaker 1: was that fun. My arms tired. You need a vessel
Speaker 1: because we went out. We're fishing twenty miles out. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: but it was so smooth. If you snapped your fingers
Speaker 1: and could freeze it solid, you could ice skated on it.
Speaker 1: It was much smooth, so much smoother than the baby's bottom.
Speaker 1: So my kid, uh, my youngest kid. You've got a
Speaker 1: parallels swim shorts that have the built in underwear. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and somehow like it most not like it must irritate
Speaker 1: them a little bit or something when he's like wet
Speaker 1: with that mesh on him, because now he runs around
Speaker 1: making everyone he pulls his pants. That makes everyone. It
Speaker 1: just butt really, so he'll laugh, my laugh, he'll laugh,
Speaker 1: my laugh. It's got like it's just butt cheeks and
Speaker 1: he kind of just like gets all dreamy looking at
Speaker 1: bints of fall asleep. Really, it's like scratching love this
Speaker 1: butt cheeks scratch with his own fingers because he likes
Speaker 1: to luxuriate. Man, he wants to get a nice spot
Speaker 1: where you can lay down with his butt in your face,
Speaker 1: you know, and you start like scratching his butt cheeks
Speaker 1: a little bit, looks like you're scratching a dog on
Speaker 1: the and he just likes to like passes out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: then you quit and you kind of like jolts away
Speaker 1: so much smoother than the baby's bottom. And I'm saying
Speaker 1: that with where with where I have knowledge of what
Speaker 1: that feels like. Um, and in a lot of places
Speaker 1: like lin Cod. So if if you go to people
Speaker 1: in the know on Pacific saltwater fish, Lincot have your
Speaker 1: reputation as being one of the one of the greats
Speaker 1: upper echelon bottom fish for sure, like one of the
Speaker 1: table table table fair man. They're like top few. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're great, They're delicious. Yeah. People that know are like sure,
Speaker 1: you know a lot of people like Halib because halibit
Speaker 1: is very approachable, you know, it's like reliable, It's white, dense, flaky, mild,
Speaker 1: you can do anything with it. But like link, COD
Speaker 1: is kind of a better version. Yeah, definitely, kind of
Speaker 1: a better version COD, but more royal. Yeah, it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're delicious. They're whether you want to put them on
Speaker 1: a grill, whether you want to beer, batter them up
Speaker 1: and fry them, anything you want. The answers, yes, they're delicious.
Speaker 1: They don't hold together on a grill. It does. I
Speaker 1: don't think they're still they're still. They're definitely worthy, but
Speaker 1: they're yeah, yeah, they're great, They're good. I love them.
Speaker 1: They rag them out like the REGs very so much so.
Speaker 1: In Southeast Alaska, you know, there's you know, people have
Speaker 1: bottom and limits like everything, right, it's gonna be like
Speaker 1: over x inches. In some places they have a slot,
Speaker 1: like out in the San Juan Island where my buddy
Speaker 1: Pooter lives. The slot is to thirty six inches. So
Speaker 1: those are the ones you can keep, you're allowed to keep.
Speaker 1: It has to be a minimum, but it has been
Speaker 1: under you know, if there's a different term when it's opposite.
Speaker 1: Because in North Carolina, for red fish, you can keep
Speaker 1: them up to seventeen and then over seven. Man, I'm
Speaker 1: sure there's a term for it, but I don't know
Speaker 1: what it's like a reverse. I'd like to kind of
Speaker 1: like the REGs on like if if a guy wanted
Speaker 1: to keep a large mouth bass in a lick. I
Speaker 1: think it's still referred to as a slot limit. No
Speaker 1: slot is only when there's a when there's a bottom
Speaker 1: and top cap, like you gotta fall in the slot.
Speaker 1: So we're out. I caught uh. Last year I went
Speaker 1: out and caught one, because you're hat one a day
Speaker 1: up there, you lot to a day here, no slot
Speaker 1: limit up there. North of here, you're not one day.
Speaker 1: So last year I went out, caught one, it hit
Speaker 1: the slot. This year ago caught one hit the slot,
Speaker 1: and I dubbed myself the slot tickler. So my wife
Speaker 1: thought was a repugnant term, but I just thought was like,
Speaker 1: I like, can tickle them right in the slot on
Speaker 1: the slot size on that right, just speaking just link.
Speaker 1: But here you're allowed, Yeah, you're allowed to per person
Speaker 1: in this zone too, per person, no size limit. And
Speaker 1: we motor out and first stop, I think something like
Speaker 1: what the seventeen miles out? I think he said twelve
Speaker 1: to catch, twelve to fish bait, and we got little
Speaker 1: rigs with a like eight ounds lead ball. And there's
Speaker 1: a couple look like oversized croppy jigs with a little
Speaker 1: bit of squid squid tentacle, And dropped down and caught bait,
Speaker 1: and we caught twenty flounder. That we're not twenty flounder
Speaker 1: the size of the size of your hand. And there's
Speaker 1: a handful of species down there. Little flat fish. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was, I had. That's when the good time started. Man,
Speaker 1: I was having fun doing that. Oh man, my kid
Speaker 1: has stayed there all day, fished up for bait. So
Speaker 1: fished up a bunch of bait and what what put
Speaker 1: twenty in alive? Well, and then motored out a ways more.
Speaker 1: And like normally when you're fishing link Hod, you're fishing,
Speaker 1: they're like the tops of stuff, So like the tops
Speaker 1: of very sharp ridge lines, the tops of underwater spires,
Speaker 1: the tops of underwater peaks, like the tops of stuff,
Speaker 1: and rock fish tend to like the sides of stuff.
Speaker 1: But out here, he said, there's so little structure that
Speaker 1: any little feature will hold fish. And we were on uh.
Speaker 1: He was saying, just like any discrepancy in the bottom,
Speaker 1: or it could just simply be that like we were
Speaker 1: fishing on the feature. There was only a couple of
Speaker 1: feet higher than the surrounding stuff, but it was like
Speaker 1: like it was like an area that was a harder bottom.
Speaker 1: There was a little bit of a rise up like
Speaker 1: maybe some old rock down there, but still pretty smooth.
Speaker 1: He said, any feature will gang them up, that's what
Speaker 1: he said. It totally blows me away that you can
Speaker 1: have this like so uniform bottom and there's one little
Speaker 1: hummock or hill in it and that's all it takes.
Speaker 1: And they must have been piled. It must have been
Speaker 1: because we made what how many passes? Do we make? Three? Three?
Speaker 1: Three passes over getting at one or two? So we
Speaker 1: had six dudes, five grown ups, my older boy, and
Speaker 1: so we're allowed to put twelve lincod in the boat.
Speaker 1: And yeah, there's maybe a few passes, four passes, and
Speaker 1: you bring that flounder like you put a hook through
Speaker 1: his lip, run the other hook around back by his tail,
Speaker 1: put it in there, drop it down and boom. That's
Speaker 1: kind of what it sounds like. If you could hear it. No,
Speaker 1: if you could hear it, I think it would sound
Speaker 1: like it would sound like um right, all right, all right,
Speaker 1: nah right, what exactly that I think they because other
Speaker 1: places just right, the only word I could think for it,
Speaker 1: I don't want to say the word I could think
Speaker 1: for how Lincoln normally hits. I was gonna say, be
Speaker 1: slap it, like they be slap that bag right here,
Speaker 1: they mouth it, kind of pick it up, they mouth it.
Speaker 1: Then all of a sudden, he's just going I'd like
Speaker 1: to see it. Toads, big toads, dragons, dragons, Like you
Speaker 1: could take both the fists. You can take both your
Speaker 1: fists together. How big was the biggest one we had,
Speaker 1: say sixteen pounds, I would just less than eight ninety
Speaker 1: at the top. You can take both your fists knuckle
Speaker 1: knuckle and stick in his mouth without touching the teeth
Speaker 1: and fully flared out like that. We should talk about teeth.
Speaker 1: I think that's why people call him dragons is because
Speaker 1: the mouth he could you could like you do when
Speaker 1: you fold your socks right, how you could like take
Speaker 1: your mom your sock and like jam it, reverse it.
Speaker 1: It's almos Like you open that mouth up. It's like
Speaker 1: you could put the fish back through the mouth. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you could. Like you can cut him off at the
Speaker 1: gills and then turn around and in his his corpse,
Speaker 1: his carcass back through his mouth problem. Remember the sculpting family.
Speaker 1: Just an amazing fish in a pectoral fin that doesn't quit.
Speaker 1: A pectoral fin the size of your hands spread out, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the size of a grown man's hand, completely spread out. Snaky.
Speaker 1: It's one of those fishing people. I was like, Oh,
Speaker 1: he's ugly, and I'm like, yeah, but in a beautiful
Speaker 1: sort of way. In a beautiful kind of way. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And they get like the females get that big old
Speaker 1: belly on them, you know, that big old link cod
Speaker 1: apple bottom kind of just back there by their vent.
Speaker 1: They just get this big swollen belly and they're just
Speaker 1: pretty when they come out of the water. They're cool
Speaker 1: looking with their blotchy uniforms kind of colors on them,
Speaker 1: and they're really really cool. I think they're super cool. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think there's those predatory ambush Predator fish are really cool.
Speaker 1: I mean they fishing them off the jetties and stuff
Speaker 1: back in the Sound. I mean they just they hide
Speaker 1: in the rocks and you just work a swim shad
Speaker 1: down over the rocks and and they just hang there. Man,
Speaker 1: they wait for bait to just come and they're just
Speaker 1: that's that's so surprising of you guys talk about it.
Speaker 1: Where I was associated with hunter plus feet of water,
Speaker 1: I didn't know they'll come up shell. I've I've got
Speaker 1: him in Lesson ten. I've caught him right out here,
Speaker 1: not far from here, in Lesson ten on the opener
Speaker 1: on the sound. We just fished the jetties. It's like
Speaker 1: just you you hit the rocks and just work it
Speaker 1: down the rocks. Jetty. Yeah, I'll be standing on the
Speaker 1: jetty fishing like the foot of the jetty. Basic. It's
Speaker 1: a formidable looking fish man freaking fangs in there. There's
Speaker 1: too Now, there's some footage that you can find online
Speaker 1: where there's a there's a couple of spires in southeast
Speaker 1: Alaska where they've closed it as a study area. It's
Speaker 1: called like Spires Marine Park at sun or another just
Speaker 1: a very small area. But he's he's like these sea mounts.
Speaker 1: They call him Sea Mounts. They were just like a
Speaker 1: small seamounts. They've closed the fishing just for research purposes.
Speaker 1: And there's some submersible footage that came from a submersible
Speaker 1: that went down to one of these spires to film
Speaker 1: what's going on down there. And there's link cod down there,
Speaker 1: giants laying touching side by side, so like laying on
Speaker 1: the rock where they're actually making body contact with another
Speaker 1: with each other, just like spooning. And there's link cod
Speaker 1: that are laying stacked sideways on them, on each other,
Speaker 1: criss crossing each other. You mean, like no, just everywhere,
Speaker 1: laying all over land that's like stacked into the good
Speaker 1: little spots. It's just like it's just not what you
Speaker 1: picture when you picture what's going on down there in
Speaker 1: the bottom of the ocean. Everybody, what's the best fishing spot? Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's Yeah, they crowded in like steelhead fishermen into the zone. Man,
Speaker 1: it's like whatever the current brings stuff behind it doesn't
Speaker 1: want to be in the spot. Yeah, And so pretty
Speaker 1: quickly we had bam bam, bam, bam bam. We had twelve. Yeah,
Speaker 1: those fish are like ten years old, pretty fast. I
Speaker 1: don't know grow I don't know much about that. Rock
Speaker 1: fish grow really super slow. Yeah, they have those slow,
Speaker 1: super slow growers, I know that. And the way they
Speaker 1: regulate here too. So like I said, it's like north
Speaker 1: you here, you go out and fish Lanecount you're a
Speaker 1: loud one a day. It's a six week season, you're
Speaker 1: allowed one a day, and he's got to be between
Speaker 1: twenty six and thirty six inches. Here, you're allowed to
Speaker 1: a day. But what they do is they open certain depths,
Speaker 1: so like early season will open you gotta be a
Speaker 1: you can't fish any deeper than what one twenty something
Speaker 1: like that. And then you get to a certain date
Speaker 1: and they'll stagger it out and let you go down
Speaker 1: and fish to like I don't know what, I don't
Speaker 1: know what it is right now, but they'll let you
Speaker 1: go to the next depth out and fish to like
Speaker 1: an unlimited depth or like another another chunk of depth
Speaker 1: in order to spread out people's pressure angler pressure as
Speaker 1: you go out. But man, just like judging by like
Speaker 1: the very anecdotal stuff of what happened today, it does
Speaker 1: not seem like it seems like a pretty well managed fishery.
Speaker 1: It would be like that, because then the minute we
Speaker 1: get done going after link cod, we go to get rockfish,
Speaker 1: and that was unbelievable. Some of the best I've ever seen.
Speaker 1: And rock fish, I think it's like in the Pacific,
Speaker 1: I think there's thirty two different species of rockfish running
Speaker 1: around upper twenties, just even in Alaska waters, and they
Speaker 1: regulate them up there where you have like pelagic and
Speaker 1: non plagic rockfish, So some rockfish or bottom dwellers that
Speaker 1: associate with a certain feature and don't move around the
Speaker 1: whole ton. And then you have your plagic rockfish which
Speaker 1: roam around in these big schools. And we're getting onto
Speaker 1: plagic rockfish where we're in two feet of water, but
Speaker 1: the school is suspended fifty below the boat from fifty
Speaker 1: seventy below, and holy ship, that's especially compared to the
Speaker 1: ones that we're catching up at your place. Usually the
Speaker 1: yellow eyes are big, but the average quill back and
Speaker 1: whatever else we catch maybe, but like a big dusky, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know you're right, quill backs not nowhere in your
Speaker 1: tube your average pound. Yeah, But then a yellow eye
Speaker 1: will beat some bruisers. You know, fourteen would be big,
Speaker 1: I mean not big, but like a normal day out,
Speaker 1: if you got one those thirteen fourteen pounds, that's a
Speaker 1: big one. You hear of them, and I think there
Speaker 1: used to be a lot more of them. It would
Speaker 1: be you know, thirty pounds, thirty five pounds. You hear that,
Speaker 1: But like typically if you get a fourteen or it's like, wow,
Speaker 1: that's a bit right. These today we're what on average
Speaker 1: the rock fish yeah, ohee five gray and yellowtail ye
Speaker 1: black black rock fish and yellowtail rock fish and beauties beauties.
Speaker 1: Though some of those yellowtail rock fish had shoulders on them. Man,
Speaker 1: they were nice. Yeah you want a picture, man, there's
Speaker 1: shaped like a um you imagine like the body shape
Speaker 1: is like a souped up beefy lineback or small mouth
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, small mouth bass yeah, not as like uh
Speaker 1: like wide, let's say, as a large mouth, like wide.
Speaker 1: If you're looking down at them from at the top
Speaker 1: of their back, they're not as wide as a large mouth.
Speaker 1: But they're built, you know, profile wise a lot like that.
Speaker 1: But yeah, man, and they're cool too many drop Yeah,
Speaker 1: you drop it down through the school, and you got
Speaker 1: two hooks on and you drop it down through the school,
Speaker 1: and as soon as you put the brakes on it,
Speaker 1: then most of the time you're pulling up doubles. We
Speaker 1: had more double the day. I was shocked how many
Speaker 1: devils we had. I mean quick, like, you drop it
Speaker 1: down through that school, you get a bite and it's wham.
Speaker 1: I think you get that first one, and as you're
Speaker 1: reeling it up, that little flies dangling or whatever it is,
Speaker 1: buddies going nuts now flies up there dancing around, and
Speaker 1: the other one's like, oh, what's that? Yeah, don't mind
Speaker 1: if I do. We voted forty plus rock fishing under
Speaker 1: that many minutes. Probably yeah, it was definitely, yeah, I
Speaker 1: would say, oh for sure. And then there you haven't
Speaker 1: where you got a hundred plus pounds of you got yeah,
Speaker 1: hundred plus pounds of rock fist laying there. Seven rock
Speaker 1: fish per person a good limit to linco Man, Yeah
Speaker 1: that was probably what was that a hundred quart uh cooler? Yeah? Right?
Speaker 1: Did he had back there? Yeah? What's bigger than that?
Speaker 1: It's a little bigger than not, I think when Oh,
Speaker 1: maybe I'm wrong. Yeah, so we got twelve and a
Speaker 1: hold on ice. And then we had that giant cooler
Speaker 1: completely full of rock fish. You ever see Cheaching Chong's
Speaker 1: the next movie, Yeah, where it's all about how they
Speaker 1: got that big duffel bag of weed, the roaming around
Speaker 1: the army duffel bag full of weed, and someone asked,
Speaker 1: somebody's gonna do with it all? And he says he's
Speaker 1: gonna smoke something sell something, parties, party with some it's
Speaker 1: like that much fish man. Yeah, smoke some Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna sell smoke something. Some smokes them, eat something,
Speaker 1: party with something. I'm gonna give some out to my neighbors.
Speaker 1: Got a couple of neighbors. Yeah, I don't give them
Speaker 1: like crazy stuff that's hard to deal with. But like
Speaker 1: if I go to my neighbors and uh bring them
Speaker 1: like a like a link cod fil a, but not
Speaker 1: the whole thing, like enough for their family to have
Speaker 1: a feed off of, that scores big. I get it
Speaker 1: all ready. That's that's a big thing. My old man.
Speaker 1: It was like, you know, giving away fish and game.
Speaker 1: He do be really care to give it away? We
Speaker 1: have to bring it to neighbors around when I was
Speaker 1: growing up, you know, and to give it away in
Speaker 1: like table ready form, ready to cook. Yeah, you don't
Speaker 1: like go over and like dump a meat game bag
Speaker 1: full of hair. You gim a fish some hair in
Speaker 1: a bloody meat bag. You know, you get all nice,
Speaker 1: man and like it's like to go to your neighbor
Speaker 1: with a hunk of fish or a deer steak or whatever,
Speaker 1: be like this is ready to prepare. Yeah, and what
Speaker 1: you want to do is do this and this. That's
Speaker 1: the way to get neighbors on your side. I've actually
Speaker 1: seen seasoned a filet of fish before for a neighbor
Speaker 1: that just, you know, it's not accustomed to cooking fish.
Speaker 1: Throw this on the grill for this many minutes or whatever.
Speaker 1: It's just easy for him. I get some elder than neighbors,
Speaker 1: neighbors that are working on some hunting permissions with them.
Speaker 1: Shelled some shrimp last time during shrimping season. They'll definitely
Speaker 1: beginning shell shrimp, shell shrimp heads off shelled. But these
Speaker 1: in the pants tam they'll be getting some link maybe
Speaker 1: seasoned it. Yeah, it slow rolling it. It was. It
Speaker 1: was almost surreal. It's nice to give stuff away, man.
Speaker 1: I was like called like it like venison diplomacy man,
Speaker 1: because you can just picture like my neighbors don't hunt
Speaker 1: or you know, barely fish. He pictures someone like brings
Speaker 1: up like, yeah, I'm damn hunters. Right, They're probably gonna
Speaker 1: be like, I don't know, I live one next next one.
Speaker 1: He's all right, brings me all kinds of Yeah. It's
Speaker 1: like the dudes at work, they're like, oh, Tommy Hudson, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's the one that's always bringing in that pepperoni. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's got some good pepperoni, makes good pepperoni. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: good like that. I know a guy like yeah, huts
Speaker 1: bring pepperoni, pepperoni sticks work. You know, it's like, I
Speaker 1: don't know image block. I used to live on Never.
Speaker 1: I love this time of year because I had a boat,
Speaker 1: and I would every time I go out, I dropped
Speaker 1: four crab pots, go out and I'd fish for coho
Speaker 1: and chinook and come back with salmon filets. And then
Speaker 1: you know, you can only eat so many as good
Speaker 1: as Dungeoness crab a is, you can only eat so
Speaker 1: much of it. I'd shell it form, bring them a
Speaker 1: little baggy and dungeoness all they got. Oh man, crack
Speaker 1: it up, cars. I gotta do it for my family anyway,
Speaker 1: crack it up. Giving my in laws just sit there
Speaker 1: and just go to work. Man, are you one of
Speaker 1: those dudes? I gotta ask you something. Are you one
Speaker 1: of those dudes that shells your crab up and then
Speaker 1: you eat it as we can maintain our friendship. But
Speaker 1: my my, my in laws, they paid like the thirty
Speaker 1: nine dollars a pound for shell crab. So when I
Speaker 1: get a bunch of it to a store, they go
Speaker 1: down to Pike Place mark it and buy the shell
Speaker 1: dungeoness crab for forty bucks a pound or whatever it is.
Speaker 1: It's ridiculous. So when I get a bunch of crab,
Speaker 1: I cooked, holding cooked crack out of the you know meat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they do do They do a good job of picking
Speaker 1: it or you still get little chunks? What do you
Speaker 1: mean when you buy picked crab meat? Still it's pretty clean,
Speaker 1: but you still there's some frag and there you get
Speaker 1: some f every once in a while, you do get
Speaker 1: some frag. Yeah. My kids when they're eating crab cakes
Speaker 1: and they find chunks of shell, they always like to
Speaker 1: point it out to me. You'll get it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like getting it. It's like getting a egg shelling
Speaker 1: and omelet. You don't get any frag. Never heard about it.
Speaker 1: You pick a clean but you gotta hear about it
Speaker 1: every time. I uh, I like to. I don't mind
Speaker 1: picking a little bit of it and freezing little vacuum
Speaker 1: sealed bags of vacuum sealed bags and pit crab. What
Speaker 1: I did last year, what someone turned me on too,
Speaker 1: was and I did an experiment. They said to pick
Speaker 1: your crab, put in a jar and pour milk over.
Speaker 1: I don't know, Lord knows why poor milk over and
Speaker 1: freeze it, so freeze it in a mason jar in milk.
Speaker 1: So I froze some of that stuff for a year
Speaker 1: just to see, and recently, uh thought it out drained.
Speaker 1: It made some crab cakes. It was almost as good
Speaker 1: as if you would yeah, very well, very well. I
Speaker 1: have heard visiting visiting out of town relatives. I've heard
Speaker 1: the same thing about guys freezing spot prom tails. It's hard.
Speaker 1: I don't like freeze the freeze them. They freeze them
Speaker 1: in milk, like you're saying, Yeah, I'd like to try it,
Speaker 1: because the key to freeze in those things is to
Speaker 1: wash them very thoroughly. Because any of that little rust
Speaker 1: colored gut liquid that when you pull his tail off,
Speaker 1: that's stuff. I don't think they freeze that well. But
Speaker 1: I would be interested in trying another strategy. When I
Speaker 1: get a bunch of those in the freezer, I go
Speaker 1: through them quick. Yeah they're deliciou us go through them
Speaker 1: quick now, this fish. What I'll do is I'll I
Speaker 1: used to like I used to be down on vac seals.
Speaker 1: I used to be down in vacuum bags. And I
Speaker 1: don't know if it's from using a lot of like
Speaker 1: low quality vacuum bags, but I'll be down on vacuum
Speaker 1: bags because I found it so often. I would vacceal
Speaker 1: something and then a month later, look and it wasn't
Speaker 1: vack sealed anymore. And I used to think that the
Speaker 1: bags were bad, that the seals gave out. And what
Speaker 1: I now realized is that I was treating them too rough,
Speaker 1: digging around on the freezer in a braiding the bags.
Speaker 1: Or I would be up in my fish shack and
Speaker 1: we would vac seal fish. And then I just throw
Speaker 1: it on into a cooler right and let it jostle
Speaker 1: around and check it out an airplane and bring it home.
Speaker 1: And I'd be like, oh, the vacuum bag, they've lost
Speaker 1: their seal because what you're doing is like banging it
Speaker 1: around and it makes holes and stuff. And once I
Speaker 1: realized that, um, once I realized that you can eliminate
Speaker 1: that with careful handling, or to put when you're packing
Speaker 1: them in a fish box of cooler, put a layer down,
Speaker 1: Put a layer of newsprint or something down. Put more
Speaker 1: in there. I never had problems with it anymore. Now
Speaker 1: when I have accial something, I don't know, something like
Speaker 1: a better quality bag or what. But when I have
Speaker 1: actual something out, that thing stays back seal. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: definitely in different levels. We've used some knockoff brands and
Speaker 1: the Western ones that we're using now, I was seemed
Speaker 1: to be a lot, and I used to mess around
Speaker 1: where I had, you know, like I don't know, man,
Speaker 1: like little rinky dink rinky dink bad Steelers that didn't
Speaker 1: pull a seal. I've definitely had that happen. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: you end up with the old whatever brand that's been
Speaker 1: sitting in somebody's cupboard that you borrow. Isn't happened to
Speaker 1: me for a while. And I tried to get through
Speaker 1: a deer one year by doing it because it was
Speaker 1: just in. It just didn't work out. Yeah, I love
Speaker 1: the one. The one I got now, it's like I
Speaker 1: keep it on a high shelf, so it's like a
Speaker 1: they called the Yeah, well it's no. I got a
Speaker 1: chamber ceil. I got like a Western chambers here, which
Speaker 1: I love at my fish shack. But I just have
Speaker 1: like the model which is heavy right like I keep
Speaker 1: it on a high shelf and it's like you're getting
Speaker 1: it down. What's this big heavy thing? But I'm telling
Speaker 1: you what, man, that thing it cranks. I love him now.
Speaker 1: So what I'm getting at now is I'm gonna take
Speaker 1: these fish home and I'll pad them dry, like I'll
Speaker 1: rinse it, give it a light rents. I'll actually pat
Speaker 1: that thing dry and get those things already and uh
Speaker 1: put them in those serving sized things. Zapp him in
Speaker 1: the seiler lamb in the freezer, and it just looks
Speaker 1: beautiful when you get them all lined up. And I
Speaker 1: don't freeze fish and water. I used to freeze fishing water.
Speaker 1: I don't freeze the water. Now. You gotta dry him though,
Speaker 1: Pad him dry, gotta dry, you know, pad him dry
Speaker 1: and freeze them. And I find that you can get
Speaker 1: away with freeze them longer. Uh freeze fish long with
Speaker 1: the skin off. Why do you think that? Because I've
Speaker 1: just discovered over time, I think there's a lot of
Speaker 1: slime in that skin. And so when I I oftentimes
Speaker 1: freeze fish skin on. And I found it when you
Speaker 1: pull if you let a fish go too long in
Speaker 1: your freezer and you pull it off and you're like
Speaker 1: like I'm always thinking, like will my wife flag this
Speaker 1: as skanky? Right, like the way salmon doesn't last that
Speaker 1: long in a freezer. If if if you pull it
Speaker 1: out and it's a little skanky, like do a Pepsi
Speaker 1: challenge and take a skin, a skin salmon, flay, skinned,
Speaker 1: wall I flay, skin link cod flay whatever it is.
Speaker 1: And one one with skin off, one with skin on,
Speaker 1: vaccine and both put him in your freezer for five months,
Speaker 1: pull them out and with them and I'm telling you, man,
Speaker 1: that skin one there's there's a layer of fat, and
Speaker 1: there's some slime and maybe there's like it better, So
Speaker 1: you're gonna pull it out, and that one with the
Speaker 1: skin is gonna be skankier than the one without skin.
Speaker 1: I can see that. I dry the heck out of
Speaker 1: my skin though, like I yeah, I mean I go
Speaker 1: through rolls of paper towels. If I'm vacuum seeing on
Speaker 1: a bunch of fish with skin, and then I put
Speaker 1: meat to meat, so you have skin out, skin out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't want skin on your flesh. The reason we'll
Speaker 1: do that you have that and see that a long
Speaker 1: time I keep I'm still eating co hole from last June.
Speaker 1: That's good. The reason will do sometimes we'll freeze salmon
Speaker 1: like that meat to meat skin out is because if
Speaker 1: you don't have time to pull the pinbones, the pinbone
Speaker 1: can braid the vacuum bags that you pull a good
Speaker 1: suck on it. Pinbones, Well, you can poke a hole
Speaker 1: in your back bag and then you think you gotta
Speaker 1: sweet looking salmon your freezer, and then a week later
Speaker 1: it's not because the pinbone ruptured the thing. Yeah, any bone,
Speaker 1: you can do it careful. But I have a pair
Speaker 1: of nine dollar Japanese bone pickers. Like the world's greatest
Speaker 1: book I ever made. I can't tell you what it's called.
Speaker 1: I can't read Japanese. My broody brought me a Japanese
Speaker 1: fish cleaning book from Japan. There's not a fish on
Speaker 1: the plant that's not in this book. I'm surprised to's
Speaker 1: not how to clean a whale shark in this book.
Speaker 1: Like everything is in this book, man from everything is
Speaker 1: in this book breakdown on how to do it. And
Speaker 1: I noticed this guy is always using these like special
Speaker 1: bone picking players. So I bought these these souped up
Speaker 1: Japanese bone pickers for nine bucks. I love those things
Speaker 1: where but I found him on Amazon. They just got
Speaker 1: They're just like a needle nose with just flatten. It's
Speaker 1: like a fingernail clipper but not but strong. And it's
Speaker 1: why you can pluck two three out of time when
Speaker 1: you're pulling po Yeah, and I keep that in a
Speaker 1: special corner of a special drawer. How does jes needle
Speaker 1: know this? But that sounds like it's no, you need
Speaker 1: that Japanese bone pickers? Anything else? Good stuff? Now? Great day,
Speaker 1: you got any dad? You didn't say any about our
Speaker 1: fishing trip. You didn't have any fun? Oh my goodness, gracious.
Speaker 1: Trying to take care of my arms from all that cranking,
Speaker 1: all that cranking, that's my that's my one great because
Speaker 1: I only like to use light tackle because it because
Speaker 1: because the sports like it. Sure, but I wouldn't have
Speaker 1: I would have liked to have my own jack and
Speaker 1: rod where I like, where there's a better It was
Speaker 1: a little bit thicker, right, just a little heavier, a
Speaker 1: little bit heavier, maybe just a touch. Big freaking dragons, mane.
Speaker 1: You know you're out them out you're two of water.
Speaker 1: And that's that reel is kind of twisting. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: kind of want something I can really get some purchase
Speaker 1: on with my with my hand up front, I feel
Speaker 1: like I'm sneaking my hand up the up the blank itself,
Speaker 1: off the grip on the front, try to get some
Speaker 1: torque on that thing, and like change up my grip,
Speaker 1: like I just need I need some purchase up my
Speaker 1: main jigg and rod. The widow Maker has front. The
Speaker 1: front grip on the widow Maker is like holding the
Speaker 1: beer bottle. And man, you can horse up some fish
Speaker 1: with that thing, man, because it's it's got a soft
Speaker 1: foamy thing. And then you got a big handle like
Speaker 1: a dial. Hand. I got this like a like a
Speaker 1: dial with level wine that you can grab onto that
Speaker 1: and you can grab that grip and when it's time
Speaker 1: to get it done and get a fish up off,
Speaker 1: you know, sucking them up off two water. It's just
Speaker 1: very comfortable. How long is it? Wong? Yeah, Like I
Speaker 1: feel like I'd like to mention the name of the
Speaker 1: charter guys again because again, yeah, yeah, I know they
Speaker 1: were dialed. I like those guys quite a bit, man. Yeah,
Speaker 1: They're just good. It's great boat and great places. It
Speaker 1: seemed like it might be a little underutilized. I don't know,
Speaker 1: all rivers and saltwater saltwater charters, all rivers and saltwater charters.
Speaker 1: And it was Ian and Nick. Yeah, And I don't know,
Speaker 1: like if those dudes couldn't go, I don't know that
Speaker 1: I would uh say, like, don't only go because like
Speaker 1: you have to you kind of think that that you
Speaker 1: like the hope that the company in general Foster's that
Speaker 1: kind of absolutely like I don't know, maybe it was
Speaker 1: a fluke that those guys are so cool to hang
Speaker 1: out with, but you like to think that the company
Speaker 1: in general Foster's that kind of relationship because it was
Speaker 1: like fishing with dudes that you would normally fish with exactly.
Speaker 1: It wasn't something blow hard, you know, screaming at because
Speaker 1: you had some sunscreen on your hand and touch his
Speaker 1: rod or something that we had the other boat pull
Speaker 1: up next to us and you know, talking on the
Speaker 1: radio with and and uh yeah, they weren't catching nearly
Speaker 1: the amount of fish that we were catching, but they
Speaker 1: were trying to do something different. But they were having
Speaker 1: a great time. They were had a good time, but
Speaker 1: they were trying to salmon snea. Yeah, they were rock. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they were doing a combo trip, salmon, rock fish. But
Speaker 1: they seem like they totally looked like they were having
Speaker 1: a good time though. Yeah, So I think regardless is
Speaker 1: just a good operation. Yeah. If I was gonna tell
Speaker 1: someone in this zone, like if I was gonna tell
Speaker 1: someone within a day's drive or whatever, if they want
Speaker 1: to do like a meat run, yeah, very good meat run. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would be like I would go out and say,
Speaker 1: like I would go out, hope for the right weather
Speaker 1: and go out and do the line cod, rockfish. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Far as far as having like you know, years worth
Speaker 1: of fish tacos, we got that covered. Like you can
Speaker 1: catch salmon and steelhead and all that stuff and rivers.
Speaker 1: If if you want closer to home, man, you're gonna
Speaker 1: run to the coast man, take a rock fish, my
Speaker 1: little boy, he's like nowhere. Once you realized you can't
Speaker 1: like see the beach. Yeah, And we saw an ocean
Speaker 1: we forgot. We saw an oceanic sunfish that was and
Speaker 1: a seal that was having some issues, a dying seal,
Speaker 1: baby seal blind fishing trip of his life eight years.
Speaker 1: I take a little bit offense to that. Uh, he's
Speaker 1: had some good days on the water. He really liked it. Um,
Speaker 1: I liked it. Seeing the oceanic sunfish is cool. So
Speaker 1: it's like a big weird fish. They're like round with
Speaker 1: a fin on top of the bottom. They kind of
Speaker 1: lay on their side or lay up right and cruise
Speaker 1: the world's ocean feeding on jellyfish at the surface. I
Speaker 1: did not I always wondered what they're on the top.
Speaker 1: They were like and that Like, yeah, that fish could
Speaker 1: turn up in Hawaii. Yeah, that's amazing. They just roam around. Man,
Speaker 1: they gotta get hit by boats all the time. So
Speaker 1: that was cool. Saw a seal that has some seri
Speaker 1: his problems, like an emaciated baby seal not quite totally
Speaker 1: close to death, but maybe leaning in that direction eventually
Speaker 1: he's he was weird. I've never seen a seal with
Speaker 1: barnacles on it. Like. He wasn't doing too good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was just kind of rolling around. Anything else any
Speaker 1: other highlights, No, just good company, always good traveling. Lots
Speaker 1: of fish, but none was knighte. So the dude had
Speaker 1: to clean all that fish. Yeah, he was a rock
Speaker 1: fish and he was pretty handy. But I mean I
Speaker 1: felt bad. I just like stay. I don't like I
Speaker 1: get uncomfortable staying around watching someone work. Yeah, I do too.
Speaker 1: That's an awkward situation. So here he is cleaning. He
Speaker 1: was handy with that. Those situations. They'd rather have you
Speaker 1: out of their way than trying to help. So yeah,
Speaker 1: and he'd rather, I think, do the work and make
Speaker 1: the extra extra cash. Yeah, then you're trying to pay
Speaker 1: him thirty eight. Bam, you cleaned four? Yea four? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Probably why brings one flame. Yeah, there's anyway. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: noticed they had to sign up to that said if
Speaker 1: you lost your ride, you gotta pay for it, which
Speaker 1: could have hit me and Jimmy darn here. I guess
Speaker 1: you paid for that one though. We were out trolling
Speaker 1: salmon on uh Jimmy Darren's boat on July three. He
Speaker 1: keeps the boat moored in Seattle, and he had bought
Speaker 1: his wife, his girlfriend. You gotta marry her more than likely. Sure,
Speaker 1: I think you should. I've met both. I've met both
Speaker 1: of you, alright, I met both of you. And she's
Speaker 1: very tallerant. Let's just put it down. So he for Christmas,
Speaker 1: he buys her fishing rod, which she doesn't want anyways. No,
Speaker 1: it's barely if there's any weather at all, she's just sick.
Speaker 1: So he's like, you know, I really thought about us
Speaker 1: and thought about you, and I've been thinking a lot
Speaker 1: about what you need, you know, what I can bring
Speaker 1: to this. And I botched his fish pole and we're
Speaker 1: fighting to fish and look my kids there. It's a
Speaker 1: little bit chaotic for a second. And he's working on
Speaker 1: a rod and lays the rod on the roof of
Speaker 1: the boat that moved it out of the way, and
Speaker 1: I just laid it on the on They just trying
Speaker 1: to net this. He's trying to net a king that
Speaker 1: we had and all of a sudden, net rod into
Speaker 1: the drink. Done. So he's like gonna jump in and like,
Speaker 1: no digitility lost it? Or do you just so, how's
Speaker 1: my fishing rod? And she's not gonna ask. Oh, it's fine,
Speaker 1: it's right there because I gotta go up to John's
Speaker 1: and everybody Jimmy high and I've been looking high for
Speaker 1: the fishing rod you purchased me for Christmas and me
Speaker 1: and my girlfriends are going to go on a trip
Speaker 1: next week. Yeah, but it's a sucky feeling to watch
Speaker 1: a few hundred bucks sink to the bottle and here,
Speaker 1: you know that thing had never even been on a
Speaker 1: down rigger. It had never been fished. I had rigged
Speaker 1: it for the very first time that day because I
Speaker 1: was having additional people on the boat, and it was
Speaker 1: just irony. And it's the calm of it all, because
Speaker 1: let's be straight, I was, you know, it's Christmas, and
Speaker 1: I was a little jammed up. And we've been together
Speaker 1: long enough to buying presence has become fairly problematic because
Speaker 1: we've already bought everything. And and I saw the fishing
Speaker 1: around him, like she's not gonna give a shit about
Speaker 1: the thing, but like, but it's just more wrapped up
Speaker 1: crap under the tree, and I'm trying to keep it
Speaker 1: even because she just goes so overboard every year with Christmas.
Speaker 1: Oh you're trying to stack it to make it look
Speaker 1: like you bott It's like when I thought, well, maybe
Speaker 1: she might use it. I mean, at some point, you want,
Speaker 1: if we get a day like we had today on
Speaker 1: the water where it's just nothing, sure she'd you know,
Speaker 1: she'll go fishing with me if it's if we have
Speaker 1: conditions like we had today. But you know the reality
Speaker 1: was like, hey, you know, pressure have backup brought on
Speaker 1: that bone. You know, a yoga mat. That is the
Speaker 1: perfect perfect now that italy on the head, So yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm definitely not gonna let her listen to this one.
Speaker 1: Yeah it was. It was a good day. We cough
Speaker 1: fish awesome. Yeah it's it's one of the greatest things
Speaker 1: about where we live is you know, in Seattle, it's
Speaker 1: I could be on my couch and I like, I
Speaker 1: keep my boat more than sheeld shoal, and I could
Speaker 1: literally be on the couch some many calls where I
Speaker 1: get a wild hair, and I could have down riggers
Speaker 1: in the water and thirty forty minutes. Yeah, when I
Speaker 1: was trying to I was trying to talk you into
Speaker 1: moving back to Montana with me. You said that they
Speaker 1: don't troll salmon. You don't know. My boat won't do
Speaker 1: a whole lot there. I told you can go there
Speaker 1: and troll big old nasty brown's up out a reservoir. Yea, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a big old nasty muddy taste and brown pretty
Speaker 1: good lately, I'll tell you that much. You got any
Speaker 1: final thoughts, I didn't make correction before someone emails in
Speaker 1: about my reverse slot. I think I'm just tired and
Speaker 1: I was thinking backwards because We had a day last
Speaker 1: year where we were catching on both sides of the
Speaker 1: slot and having to throw them back because you weren't slot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was a slot. So it's just eighteen and twenty seven.
Speaker 1: You gotta be within the slab. No sea sickness today
Speaker 1: for you. Yeah, I took jama mean, but you know
Speaker 1: it looked like you took something. Yeah, but you can't.
Speaker 1: Today is not a day to test that. I can't
Speaker 1: say it worked because it was so slick. It was
Speaker 1: like being out on a lake in Michigan. You know,
Speaker 1: I lost, like we talked, was four but fishing with
Speaker 1: you out when you've had sea sickness, I find myself
Speaker 1: like usually just have nothing but love for you. And
Speaker 1: every time I look at you, I'm like, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: but that day watching you all like disinterested and sick
Speaker 1: and everything I looked at smn like kick you off
Speaker 1: the boat. I just like I was like one of
Speaker 1: those people that relies on uh, I like need your strength,
Speaker 1: and seeing you at that and then seeing you at
Speaker 1: less than that, it wasn't like love came up. That
Speaker 1: was like, yeah, I can only I realized that my
Speaker 1: love for him is very shallow, very shallow, and it
Speaker 1: relies on him being like eager, eager, attentive, anticipating what's
Speaker 1: gonna happen next. But to see him just like weak
Speaker 1: end and all sick and not paying attention. He was
Speaker 1: had a fish on and he wasn't even aware of
Speaker 1: it at one point, I think, and I was like,
Speaker 1: oh man, yeah, get out. It's like you make me sick.
Speaker 1: Your sickness makes me sick, Tony any final thoughts, I
Speaker 1: don't really feel that way about Yah. I mean I
Speaker 1: did for a minute, but then I caught myself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I got it. That was a great day. I mean,
Speaker 1: we couldn't have hit a better day on the water.
Speaker 1: So fantastic. I know we're telling people, we're telling all
Speaker 1: these blugs to go out, like telling people you should
Speaker 1: go do this trip. Watch like just like yeah, everybody's
Speaker 1: still Yeah, you gotta put it stuck to your hand.
Speaker 1: It does not get any better than it got. Today's
Speaker 1: too rough. Yeah, it's too rough to piss, so you
Speaker 1: gotta go on your pants. Yeah. Yeah it's great. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's excellent. Great place. You're looking to dig into that
Speaker 1: grizzly I am. I guess my concluder is to this
Speaker 1: so nice. It's like, maybe it's not so nice for
Speaker 1: the people live here in Westport, but it's mill of
Speaker 1: July summer and it's quiet here. Yeah. Great. It feels
Speaker 1: like like used to have more activity than it does now.
Speaker 1: It did when I was, like, we spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time camping here as a kid man. Like even
Speaker 1: just driving down the main drag of this place is
Speaker 1: like a like a trip past year old high school,
Speaker 1: like camping with my folks and donate and tackle on
Speaker 1: all the local jettys and running my old man out
Speaker 1: of five dollar bills for extra tackle. It's just like
Speaker 1: it's crazy, and like I remember mornings. I've said this
Speaker 1: a couple of times on this little trip, but like
Speaker 1: I remember mornings where you go down to that little
Speaker 1: main drag where all the charter boats were and it
Speaker 1: was shoulders shoulder, guys, it was just just hustle and bustle,
Speaker 1: like it was afternoon. And now it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: you guys saw it this morning. There's a few people.
Speaker 1: It's sleepy, you describe. Yeah, you know, we we all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just not what it once was. And it's like
Speaker 1: why do too? Part of its kind of sad, Yeah,
Speaker 1: part of me sad, you know, and in a selfish way,
Speaker 1: I like it, I agree, But part of me sad
Speaker 1: because I knew what it once was, and like how
Speaker 1: many different even charter boat companies there were for the
Speaker 1: big boats, and it's like now they're down to two.
Speaker 1: I think I think there was at least five or six.
Speaker 1: Now they're down to two companies. You know, probably I
Speaker 1: don't know handful of boats commercial, but it's right, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's and I don't know what it's co credited too,
Speaker 1: but it's like I don't know, Like get your bus
Speaker 1: to Westport. Yeah, take your asses, fishing man, it's worth it. Remember,
Speaker 1: like move and out in this area, you know. And
Speaker 1: my wife, you know, because you know, you'd like to fantasize.
Speaker 1: Oh maybe we'll buy a cabin wherever. I remember her
Speaker 1: being like, oh we should get a cabin out in
Speaker 1: the sand. Muans I'll be like, screw that, man, go
Speaker 1: out to the coast and get a place. Coast coast, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the coast coast coast, the real one. Yeah, anything else, anyone,
Speaker 1: do you have anything else? I can't wait to get
Speaker 1: home and eat some fish. Man. I'm gonna make some
Speaker 1: killer fish tops tomorrow when you're sitting back in Montana,
Speaker 1: far from the ocean, half your house, half your house,
Speaker 1: missing work on your big where you work on your
Speaker 1: big addition, eating some fish, cooking on the camp taste
Speaker 1: of the ocean. I've been camping out, you know, So
Speaker 1: I've been making a lot of meals that make a
Speaker 1: very camping in his house, you know, small footprint, right,
Speaker 1: Like somehow I got talked into making pancakes the other
Speaker 1: day and then I just freaking battery everywhere. I'm like,
Speaker 1: who was thinking about this? Not thinking about doing the dishes,
Speaker 1: but so I was like frying ship was off off
Speaker 1: the table, but not anymore. I'll pay for the extra dishes.
Speaker 1: You gotta grill outside. It's the prep like breading and
Speaker 1: you know, you know, dealing with the oil afterwards. Remember
Speaker 1: are you still doing that? By the way, And do
Speaker 1: you feel like it's paying off filtering your oil? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've been filter mile and it's it's paying a huge difference,
Speaker 1: huge difference because I run peanut oil and you start
Speaker 1: feeling like a moron filling that friar up with peano
Speaker 1: and when you gotta yeah, man, I get it warm.
Speaker 1: Five seven bucks of gallons. I bring it up warm
Speaker 1: enough to where I like to break down the viscosity
Speaker 1: a little bit. I don't know why. How do to do?
Speaker 1: Get it warm? Run it through that Uh, that synthetic
Speaker 1: filter comes out looking like I don't know, light honey,
Speaker 1: lighter and light honey looks like urine hydrated. You know,
Speaker 1: I don't started putting that cookbooks. I get some piss
Speaker 1: colored oil, all right, thanks for joining