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Speaker 1: This is the meat Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten in my case, underwear listening Hunt podcast. You can't predict anything presented by on X Hunt, creators of the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store. Nor where you stand with on X. All right, I'll tell me again what you're reading about. Oh, I got doing all my deep dive research for the week. It came across this Kansas City Star article about a guy who was, like many Americans right now, exploring our national parks. You've been to several of them, and appears he was picking up natural mementos from from each park. Um, no, I got no problem. Yet. He was driving through Yellowstone and a park ranger flagged him down because he had on strapped to the top of the vehicle, some like nice branches that still had pine cones on them. You know, like people steal this stuff to make like wreaths and center pieces and things like that. Um, but it's illegal to take out of national parks. And the guy, hey volunteered the information. He's like, oh, whoa, you know, I'm just on my way home. I've been traveling National parks for three weeks. And the ranger was like, really, well, could I look inside your vehicle for any other natural objects? And the guys is like, yes, but just so you know, you're gonna find some stuff. And it was definitely not from other national parks to clear before you left. And so like she pops the hatch on this uh tahoe Chevy tahoe, and you know there's like the giant uh pine cones from like National Park. Right. She's like, well, obviously these came from and then uh had you know, petrified wood and uh ten large pine cones, five pine cones with seeds, five large pieces of petrified tree, sixty three rocks, a black and blue feather, a live plant with roots still attached. Uh, seven pounds of marijuana, a large bag of psilocybin mushrooms, five thousand dollars in cash, two handguns. Um, he's ready for He's ready for a cross country trip. Man. And I was just laughing, thinking this is a good story for everybody to keep keep in mind the next time they get stuck behind some vehicle that's like blocking both lanes of traffic mysteriously taking pictures of like a prairie dog or something. They're like, what could be so interesting? We had a guy. A guy wrote in with a good weed story where this like he says, a big fan of the show, big fan of the podcast, big fan of the show, and he wanted to send a story about his mountain lion sighting. So he's in. He's close to the Ohio Michigan line, and he points out that lately they're building a quarry and doing a lot of dynamiting and a quarry, and so he feels that this dynamiting and this quarry is displacing wildlife. And he explains that him and his brother we're up on the roof shooting pop cans out towards the woods, which they like doing a lot, and his brother had been smoking a lot of weed, and the sun setting and his brother is so high that he thinks that his eyes are playing tricks on him. But his brother says he notices a naked man run on all fours across the backyard by the tree line. They both get freaked out and they want to go investigate. So he grabs his Henry twenty two and his brother grabs a wood splitting mall and they go out to the tree line and sure enough, here's a mountain lion. They get stricken with absolute fear. He fires his twenty two in the direction of the mountain lion and um doesn't think he hit it. And then he ran off and he asked, you guys heard about any large predators in the area. So there's a that's how, that's how, mother, there's a mountain lion citing That would be uh an interesting T shirt design right where it's like, if you think you see this, it could be this naked man on all fours mountain lion, probably a cougar. So Oliver and Eyes here first time on the show. Absolutely, I'm glad to finally meet you. Came in from California. I didn't expect to be here. Tell people what your groove is real quick. I got another news item I want to share with or a story that you'll appreciate. My groove go fishing a whole bunch. I fish a ton a lot, and uh just try to find a new adventure, uh, no matter where I am. So whether that's back home in California and trying doing things that are out of my comfort zone or floating the Yellowstone River for the first time and trying to throw a big plastic fish. So you were trying to fish. You were taking your large mouth, your California large mouth bass tactics. Yep, did you catch giants? I got bit and the line broke. Sure wasn't a rock or something probably was, And I mean, who knows though, So so you didn't you didn't You didn't take a fly pole and try it at all? There was a fly rod in the but apparently I set up for disaster because there was like some kind of like backlash that was like wound over it or something. So Karnina was like struggling with it at first, and then yeah, you're like a like a river rat now. So no, I didn't get a chance at you pick up the fly rod, which I was excited to try because I've only done it a couple of times. But I did also want to see what was potentially swimming in that river with a really big lord that I'm sure they've never seen before. A good way to do that, and I've just recently discovered this is you get a snorkel mask, just go down the damn river. Right, you find out everything? Right, you find out all the secrets, absolutely all the secrets. Yeah, I fished with the people know where there's holes that have fish, but the dude that goes through the snorical mask knows where in the hole, like with with alarming specificity, right, like what is going on in there? Yeah? I got that perspective fishing on the Sacramento River for big stripe bass this past winter and one of the guys spearfishes them, so he same deal. He knew, he knows exactly where they where they go. He's like, you know that one rock, well to the left of that one rock, and about six inches back they like to hold there right, you know what is up? So why didn't we bring a snorkel? Oh? That's how Like we were talking earlier about how I figured out some years ago where those big ones holding the rapids, That's exactly how that happened, really was snorkeling through and being like, holy sh it, that's a huge fish sitting right at the bottom of that rapid. If I was a boat builder, I would build a maybe's so hard to not get scratched up. I would build a glass bottom boat. That would be that would be a sketchy property drift boat. And then i'd be very very careful about where I wrote it, and I would know all secrets. I mean, I think I don't know if i'd go full see through bottom like how a little replaceable window, because you're gonna scratch it up. There's no way you're gonna not you could have a recessed fish. I like Deely smack on there. I like to find out what is going on everywhere you went, Oliver, you'll appreciate the story. A guy, So, just a guy writes in he lives on a pond, and pond is managed for trout, but some some derelict introduced large mouth bass into the pond. Everybody the ponds all mad. So when he likes to eat them, he likes to eat the big large mouth because you're if you catch when you're supposed to kill it, because it's supposed to be trout. Um. They used to have brookies and browns there and the trout in the bass kill them all. Then they put in rainbows and now they're trying to kill all the bass. Anyhow, if it's big, he eats it. If it's small, he fires it up in the bushes for raccoons or whatnot to eat it, and he says he catches one in the other day and goes to fling it to the bank, but it slips out of his hand mid stroke, hits the hornet's nest, falls into the water, and then the hornet comes down and attacks him. Was his name Bill Dance? No, he doesn't say what his name, but that's like some weird karma ship right there. Hit the hornet's nest with a bass and then the bass got away. Anyway, Um, I think we talked about this earlier. Got to touch back on this. Some dudes found Do you hear about this? Some dudes found at Elk School. If I was you, I would be reporting on this in Cal's weaken review. This is dudes of Michigan found Elk School. Yeah, And it was like I was like, oh, some guy threw it in there modern time. I don't know, perfect skull, like a perfect six by six bull years old. And they they they're saying it's an Eastern elk native Michigan extinct species, southern native elk from southern Michigan. Two years ago, Big ass Bowl. Yeah, I was debating there day. Just yesterday I was debating someone who was pointing out like, how could wed list wolves when they're not recovered, when they're only recovered across such a small bit of their range. And I pointed out that we've only recovered elk on about fourteen percent of the range. Yeah, big horn sheep is like six Yeah, and no one says we shouldn't be chasing after elk. Yeah, Southern Michigan, big ass bowl, mature bill. Yeah, No, that was that was quite quite the fine that that really uh solidifies that saying of like, well, I like fishing here because you never know what you're gonna get. So was it a in a riverbed? Was it that kind of in a lake? I like how they already got a theory what happened to it? Got stuck in the got stuck in the mud? Oh man, yeah, on the ice, Yeah, I mean there's so many ways that could have gone. Yeah, so anyways, I don't know, I got stuck in the mud. They also by a car. Guys driving his car in Tennessee gets hit with a white bass. Uh. The State of Tennessee is like, well, we don't see a lot of these types of wildlife collisions where they happen someone threw it at him. Well, here's the best part, right, They're like, well, our theory is that an eagle fought in osprey over your car and the osprey had to release its fish to get away and then it fell and hit your car. That's valid, Like, of course there has to be a It can just be a fish fell out of the talents, of which happens all the time. But it's like there was an air to air combat scenario over your vehicle. To be fair, though, I used to see that all the time, guiding osprey and grab a fish out of the river and the eagle is just waiting because osprery is such a better predator in the river, and the eagles just hanging back and be like, I'll wait for you to do the work and then I'm gonna steal it from you. So that does happen. Happens a lot, a lot. I've seen in L A L A. A little more on this. Sell real quick, what the hell is the lake dude was moving an anchor for a swim float, got hung up on the anchor. Sold in lake Your fent in Michigan came hooked on the anchor of a swim platform, drawing up the anchor and here it is. Yeah, Dad is now in the same little piece I'm reading they did donate it to uh some kind of local museum. How to hung up my house hard time. I would have a very difficult time because I have a very difficult time doing the I think, now, buddy mine he I want to let me touch on this real quick. In the same piece. So they also recently in a riverbed. They're uncovered too vertebra from a baileeen whale. What and the only thing they can think is that they were they were brought in that like the Hopewell culture one of the you know, they were brought in as a thing that was cool when I was I think I mentioned this before, but um, when I was doing research on the historic range of Buffalo in the US, you want to talk about something this barely dudes ran into Buffalo and Washington, d C. New Orleans had him New Orleans, the Texas coast. Ah. Now that's something I can see getting stuck in the mud. You know, people had counted a thousand of them in what is now an Asheville. I can see that they don't have yesday protection that's now these bailing Anyways, when I was working on looking at trying to map out that range, people used to include New York as historic range New York State, and it comes that inclusion I think, you know, it dates back to the discovery of two skulls in New York. Both had cultural markings on them. People now think that someone has brought someone thought they were cool. Yeah, So these bailing whale verdebro were like some kind of you know, the best explanation being some kind of trade item. I mean, so many artifacts from animals and critters wound up doing that, right, Like I think I think a good example that when I was digging in on freshwater drum and they were finding those the odor lith bones, like all the way on the other side of the country where they're not even close to have they've they've never lived, there's no evidence they've ever lived over there. But in archaeological dig sites they often find those odorleth bones from freshwater drum mixed in maloney shells in the interior. Assuming that it was some form of currency or a talisman or something. What was it getting at about these vertebra was this some other thing I was gonna talk about? I mean, from what I read, I think I think that's it. You know, it could have been just a cool trade item, could have been used as like some sort of a vessel um. But I don't think that's the only whale. Uh. I don't think that that's the only like whale evidence that there is in that part of the country too. That's the other interesting part for people dragon stuff home. Yes, But and then there was something about whales making it up rivers to a certain degree to not there, man, no, not there, no, no, no, not there. But like if you look in and getting strand and die in way up rivers. Yeah, like Maine has a couple of circumstance, says like Orca is going way up river. California has some whales that have gone way up river into into desalinated water. What I was gonna mention about keeping hoarding stuff for yourself, for giving its museums a body mine. I thought he was on public land, okay, and lo and behold, he looks in the river bed and here's the mammoth Moehler. Then he looks in about thirty inches away, here's another mammoth Mueller, both facing up, and he's like, what are the chances of that? And then he's like, oh my gosh, it's like the whole you know, it's the whole damn skull. But what's sticking out of the two molars? He said it was about like he just I can't remember how he described something like the tip of his one cam on his bow to the other cam on his bow apart. Then he gets to really scrutinize and on X and realize in fact, he's not on public land. So he's in a little bit of a conundrum, and eventually goes in. The landowner was saying, you know, I was kind of accidentally on your property. It couldn't help, but notice it wound up in the museum like that guy was cool about it, like donated it out of hoard of that. This friend of yours that you speak of, though, is like the mother Teresa of people who find cool ship and leave it where it's supposed to be, Like he has. He's one of the he's not that old, you know what I'm talking about, But he's got like a photo album of like, oh do you like dinosaur teeth? Just like he's a magnet. He's a magnet for crazy ship. Dude finds more crazy ship. I don't know. He's like some people got an eye for it, you know. Yeah, he's got like a fine tuned crazy ship detector in his brain. Oh man, it it just you spend a couple of minutes looking at that book and like, I'm just gonna live in a trailer here in eastern Montana and wander the earth. Quick couple updates on the ass movement. This is the anti surface shitting movement. Some people wrote it in as we're talking about it. This is a guy who, like crusades, He's made it his life mission to crusade against um, taking a growler out on the surface of the earth and then doing nothing to masquerade and nothing to tuck. You know, I'll say that in areas where there's no fire damage, I feel the epitome of courtesy is to dig a cat hole, defecate in the cat hole, then burn the tp. But you gotta be careful about fire danger. The only thing that I've been meaning to say on this is there are certain places on Earth, basically in most of your western state. It's where the microbial layer, the ability for things to be broken down in an efficient manner, can be very very close to the surface of the Earth just asked that elk school. Yes, Yes, digging a cat hole sometimes beyond four inches, um, is gonna preserve. You're gonna You're gonna end up being the author of a preserved specimen that somebody can go look at a hundred thousand years from now. But yeah, so that's just something that like, that doesn't mean he can't flip a rock and burning the teath. In certain environments. Even flipping a rock, you're probably gonna make out like a copper light. Yes, booper light is the word. I am more concerned with the aesthetics. Absolutely. I don't think there's anything inherently ikey about a buried human feece. But I think that there's something icky about a surface human fece. This is coming from a man who has had collections of animal feces. But I don't like the human ones. I don't like one. Some dogs, I don't like one. Some people running this dog around right now where you know you got a curious puppy. Phil has had this experience, Um, like you some of the trailheads, river access sites around here, it's like you gotta sprint that puppy through, you know, the ship zone where people feel comfortable, like sneaking into the woods and like get down to the river really fast because that public's gonna find it needed and lick your face exactly their crems face. Uh. Anyways, a dude route. In a couple of pieces of feedback about anti surface pooping anti surface shipping is a guy wrote, instead of calling a cat hole, it's like you should call it an asshole anti surface ship in hole. That's pretty good that it's a good joke. Now, another guy said, I had mentioned who like for every anti there's a pro Oh come on, Well, I'm just I was just saying, like, is there actually a pro surface shitting movement there? There is like an organized movement And George, no, not they're not organized, but he says George and Alabama he knows, he doesn't. He says, he gets he tries to get distance from these people, but he knows them. He knows of them Turkey hunters and Georgian Alabama, who use taking a growler in strategic locations as a way to discourage competition. Oh so they might go to like a little park and trailhead area and duke it up real good, thinking that it just sends people elsewhere Oh, that's terrible. It's primal terrible. I was thinking in territory, it's terrible. So you remember, um, we got some beta on a black tail spot and there were no real black tails there when we're hunt in Alaska the last time, and they're like, yeah, but I'm pretty sure. And then like in the spot where we were kind of anchoring the boat and canoeing in, there's um there was some like very much like yes, somebody has been successful here. It was like bailing twine and a pearl vest or something like yes, this means yeah. Nowadays it's kind of a shame. But nowadays it's those damn latex gloves. Man, Yeah, people got something. They put those gloves on because they're like it's icky, and then they leave the gloves land. I like the latex glove thing as as far as a tool, because I'm terrible at washing my hands. Way better these days with COVID, sure, But then I go the opposite way and I'm washing my latex gloves for like, um for a long time. It's yeah, I keep them around, and then I have cooking latex gloves too, for like mixing burger and doing stuff like that. In the kitchen, and I always wonder if those two gloves ever met. The last bit of follow up on the assid movement guy from Utah. He works in the therapeutic wilderness industry and he they call him surfys. Surfeys um in his industry is a lot of surfys because you wind up with kids that are too lazy, scared, uncomfortable to use the group latrine. They get spooked off the group latrine. And I can tell you that my five year old doesn't like the outhouse at our fish shack. And when he he doesn't, he'd rather go out and dig a cat hole if you force him to use the like the our thing. It's like a classic outhouse with no doors, so you're just looking out into the rainforest, which is nice. And then we got a barrel that we cut in half, set the barrel down on the hole, so you got the plywood with a hole cut right. Then you got a half a barrel cut, plastic barrel, half the barrel cut and laid on there a hole cut in the barrel, and on that is screwed a toilet seat. Nice one um. He'll make you sit there with a stick and wrap that barrel till the ever last and last fly comes out of there, like he does. He is deathly afraid of sitting on that thing with flies in there. So you'll come up and just beat that barrel to get all the flies out, and then he'll sit. So I know what he's talking about. Like some kids don't want to. They don't like group of the trenes. So he'll say, they'll go out, they'll sneak off and go lay a surfy. Then you gotta go out and find them all and round him up. He says. At night they call. When someone does that night, they're called a night panther, he says. He says, one it's real cold, and you just get up out of your bag or whatever, sleeping bag, and you go out and you do lay a night panther. He'll actually put a stick into it like a little flag, no a handle, because it freezes overnight. If you put a stick into it, not only does it market, not only does the market's location freezes at night. You go over and just grab the stick and then you can haul it over and get yourself a good place to put it. That's pretty smart, he signs off. I say, and don't let the don't let the night panthers bite now, not for that? What uh? What now about latex gloves, I didn't mean to be down on him. I wear them. I had some on the other day because we're butchering cariboan. The gnats are so unjust like you can't even like backs your hands. You can't even like you could be like, oh, you know, there's no thing you could say to describe the gnats. There's no like clouds, like, there's no just it's just horrible. And I put latex clothes on because they like your knuckles so bad. So just for terminology's sake, are we talking about the little bite and flies like the white sox? No talking about the no seums. No, these are no seums, but you can see them. These are no seums the size of skeeters. I don't know. There's you know, there's so many like regional names for black flies, white sox nat definitely like a slashing lap dip hair. Okay, in this when you can see it, when you can skylight them, you see him all around your damn head. They skylight they they look like a mosquito that big, but they bite like a no see um but they're a slashing lap fly family. I don't know caribou all around their eyes. I don't even know how they can see. All right, I got you. That sounds miserable. And then you're in the tustics. You know what tustic. So the tustics here got a relief of like from the moss to the top of the tustic. And you shoot a cariban, they just they land down in the so they're like, you're actually working on them subsurface. There's no way to get him out of there where you're if you're standing on a tussic, you're like bending over down to try to get and it's just wet and hot. It turns like otherwise a pleasurable experience, it's just the worst. Like it's always such spongey ground. When you like you can't get any good purchase. He's like, yeah, I got interesting caribou related fact for you, right, I mean it'd be um it's from that Farley Moap book that old old Dirt gave me. Oh you mean his like classic never cry Wolf People, the Dear People. Yeah, So like I wrote like twenty four books I've read a hand it's so funny. They just like fall in your lap every ten years or so. That's why it's been for me anyway. Um. But he's talking about how the Eskimo group that he's living with up in the barren lands, the food that they consume is awful. Some gut and the front shoulders. I know, but I just I didn't know. Yeah, I was just saying that that way so people would track what you're saying. Yeah, uh, you know, uh probably won't surprise you. But I do get beat up over the way I talk and pronounce some certain things. But yeah, you cover you, um, try to get the definition thing. But you headed off at the pass by saying like I probably yeah, mess it up. Uh. So they take the shoulders for their own personal consumption, like and then the hind quarters, like the big hams are what the dogs get to eat. M hm and um. And it goes as far as to say that like the hams aren't going to sustain a person in the barrens. But then uh, not enough connective tissue and collagen or whatever. They don't like it because it's not chewy. Yeah yeah uh, and I mean neck meats, older meat, slow slow cook stuff is awesome, but you know, obviously, um flat iron steaks are fantastic too. We had a guy um Yanni and I had a chupick Eskimo. I think I talked. I talked about this for tell Us that his favorite part, you know, the giant tendon, the hooks to the like the the thoracic process. What is it called. Yeah, like on a vertebra, the big ass thing that shoots upwards, but it's not a fin Is it a process or is it a I knew this at one point in time. There's a name for that. I don't. It's verteb Brothers like that. It's big, you know, they're like eleven twelve inches long on a bis and moose have huge ones. Anyways, the tendon that holds the head up so when you're skinning something you find that big yellow He's like, that's good, that's nice and chewy. It's like, I'll say, I bet it is. I can't. I've ever got down on that one, not talking about things being tender. That's good. Chewy is good? Yeah, all right, good. I want to I want to follow up because on this this this we all almost went down the latex gloves thing, and I genuinely have this question because Kyle was talking about using them in the kitchen, and I have used them for butchering animals. I've used them in that context. I get why they fit there. But you're talking about mixing burger and mixing sausage. And I've always just washed my hands really well before I did before and after doing the thing. Is the extent of it burgers and sausage for me. Um, I mean washing your hands well as Gonn is going to do it, as long as folks cook their food pretty much for any circumstance. But my hands are always beat up fairly dirty. And then when I'm really in there mixing sausage, especially if you're using like iron ingredients. Um, like I toasted up a bunch of coriander for that sausage I gave you, and then and turn that into a powder before I mixed it in there, And you got to like mix like hell in order to distribute that stuff, especially because I had fat into the sausage too, So it's real tacky. And I can just feel like if I didn't wear gloves, I could just feel the hairs on my hands getting sucked off into that sausage and like whatever, skips and should I have protect the sausage yourself. Correct, As we've talked about many, many times. That's the number one thing I give away is sausage, like even though it is very expensive, a giant pain in the ask to make, but you know people are going to use it though it Yeah, and you don't want your little hairs and fingernails in there. Um, I'll tell you hot tip. Those same chupic dudes. They because you know it's like twenty below thirty below hunting muscos out there in March. They bring um wool liners an oversized latex gloves to butcher. Yeah. That ship man is nice alright, so good on gloves. Yeah, I don't like, I'm not I don't like. There's something unappetizing to me. You know, nowadays every food service person, even when you're watching like barbecue shows, Like if you're in a place like in the gym and they got the TV and there's no volume so you never know what's going on. You can contract the TV show, um, and they're doing making barbecue. Even they wear those giant plastic food service ones, not the ones that fit right, but the giant clown hand ones. It's just not appetizing to me, I'd better have your damn hand in there. Well. Plus, like, the the environment that's going on between your skin and the glove is never an appetizing thing. You always like, yeah, it's just like it's just looks so medical. Yeah yeah, I mean when you describe it as an environment that really like that, that calls up that wet super images and the whole Here's the other thing, too, is the whole glove thing. Everywhere in all the food service people wearing gloves now makes it that when I have someone over for dinner and I go to like dress the salad, I like to give it a good hand toss, right. So now they're sitting there, you know, and maybe it's someone like a work person, I don't know that. Well, I'm hosting an out of town guest and they're sitting there and I want to do my salad and I'm like, listen, I'm not gonna tongue this subit just because you're here. I'm gonna hand blend it. Are they like you know what I mean? I feel like that's are they so used to the whole glove deal that then they're like, why are his hands in there? Like that, who cares. I don't believe that you care. Well, did occur to me? I wouldn't be talking about it. Fair's just like I feel like the special, the Salad Special, because it's got some of Steve's skin flakes. My hairs and skin flakes. I want them. All Right, we gotta move on. What we spoke of you, Tomboat Doss Boats season two. Yeah, we're gonna talk about it. We did it, Miles, Do do for me. Do for me a recap of dost Boat season one, season one, like, tell what it was? What is it? What is it? All right? Uh? For those of you who don't know, we wanted to make a fishing show that didn't feel like every other fishing show, and we we all have this love for old boats, particularly old aluminum boats. Like most of the folks I know, I certainly did. I think most people in this room got their starts fishing and old, relatively crappy aluminum boats. But that represented, once upon time was called a boat exactly. It was just a boat. But that little boat rabat image. I'm calling them, David, because I don't know, I can imagine what it looks like. But we didn't care if they were nice like that. That boat was your passage off the shore. And as a young kid angler like that was a huge jump forward. So we decided to make a fishing show that featured an old, relatively crappy illuminum boat. And we went and legitimately this was there was no artifice to this. We bought one of the worst illuminum boats we'd find a site unseen off of Craigslist, from a very interesting dude named Tony in central Texas, and uh, and then we took that boat and we sent it around the southeast with different anglers to different fisheries, and we gave them each a day to try and do some kind of modification on that boat to make it better for the fishing they wanted to do. And then they had to try and figure it out, fixed it up like the Dickens. Yeah, I mean some better than others. That they weren't all entirely successful, because I mean we were. You had you had a day. But it went from I went from having like kind of like a barely running motor oh that was effectively inoperable, it's night and day. That boat is sweet now, I mean from all the things we did from from reinforcing the trans and putting on a new motor. Building out the casting deck, which which Cal did a fantastic job on. We put a polling platform on there. We uh, we got some electronics on there. Oliver put a very nice trolling motor on that thing. Uh Honda for stroke. Yeah, I got a Honda four stroke on there that ran beautifully. And then that was a successful repower when I can look down at the hole and watch it waving like a water bed. Okay, we're bogging. And by the end we actually had that thing tricked out with the center console and like it's it's a sweet boat now. And then we auctioned it off to raise money for Cal's special project. Well I didn't. I helped select the special project, but it is well you are, you are. You brought it to attention a special land access project Shiloh Pond in Maine that Cal identified as needing a boost to get across the finish line, basically purchasing a UM purchasing a piece of land that has historically been open to access, but it was never UM, never made official long term. It was a private chunk that provided access to whoever wanted to go out there, and there was a group that wanted to purchase it outright, make it forever public hunting and fishing location. So we sold the damn boat. Yes, and what was the final I think it's fourteen grand I felt like that's like a break even amount for the boat got steel. Yeah, I know. No, No them against the guy that bought it. He's a real nice guy. Should have raffled it. Yeah. But the problem with the raffle, like we looked at that, the legal issues of trying to hold a raffle across all the different states. We're daunting. But I now have reason to believe. I now have fact based info. It suggests that suggests for something like that you will do four x oh. I believe it on a raffle. I believe it and worried me and Cal are involved one right now, Cal, do you know where that's sitting right now? I don't think we should just show you with my space, show you with my fingers. Yes, that's where that sits right now. Manat raffle. No, Man, I wish we could have and I would have liked the fact that they would have given everybody an equal chance and not just the highest bidder. Got it, not no nothing against who got it, and I'm very happy. I'll give m a BackRub. But I like the egalitarian nature of the Raffi raffle. Yeah. So here's so season two that that was all based. How do you define where season one was based? That we're calling at the southeast, but that's not entirely right. It was it was Texas, Florida and Georgia South Fish Southeast Dish. Yeah, and and and picking our spots based on you know, interesting people, interesting fisheries, and interesting stories. We really wanted to focus on not just you know, the same old spots everybody's been. We had some of those, and some of the species that you're expecting, but we also wanted to like get something that has more some more layers of interest to it other than like, hey, we went and caught a fish, because you can find that on any fishing show. Season two takes place in upper Midwest Great Lakes. Yes it does. Could say, yeah, the boat. So the boats are very It's personal to me because I I kind of explained the story in the show, but I'll talk about this boat a little bit. My my old man was born in uh, the south side of Chicago, Little Italy, and he got older and got into hunting and fishing and stuff by mostly by going off to fighting the war, and then always dreamed of going up and like getting the place in the wilderness, which happened to be like, you know, four hours north. It's all relative, and at the time it was, you know, it was a kind of a wildly sort of place. And so before I was born, my mom and my old man go up to um look at this house that I was born, and my mom's the lizard today. And the way my old man tells it, he he goes a look at the house, but there's no one there. So he looks around at the house and there's happens. No one's living in the house. There's a summer cottage, and there's a boat out front, and he takes the boat out in the lake, and as he tells it, as he tells it, he caught a five pound large mouth, which a monster for that. Well, here's that's the thing. We used always tell the story. But now I'm like, how could it be that the only five pound bass ever? After thousands of days, thousands of days of fishing that like spring, summer, fall, winter, everybody we knew. Okay, my mom has been in that house the forty six years I've been alive. How come that was the biggest bass that ever got caught? Like, why would it be that that that? You know what happened to him? So? I don't know. I think it was a nice bass. I think he caught like a twenty bass, and it seemed like a five pounder could go five poundstically, if he said four, I would be like wow. But anyways, anyways, I don't know, we caught a big like oliver what um? You know this little length charts, which I know we're off right because we do them on hot We like do the length weight thing on a halibit and then we actually just weigh the halibit totally. And I've done with other fish too. But what's a five pound bas supposed to be? How many? It really depends on their building. I think the large mouth bass are probably the worst fish to try to plug in any of those formulas because there's so many varia because their fitness varries absolutely like what they're eating varies in density of weight, Like a fish from Clearly At California is probably like twice as heavy from the mercury content in the water alone. But like they really like youn't pick up a fish and be like, oh man, that's a nice three pounder and put on a scale and it's almost five You're like, what the like? That doesn't compute. So when they I see all these tapes and measuring devices with the formula like, oh twenty or is a five pounder? Maybe? Maybe? And chasing big bass across the country, now, really well built large mouth in California is going to go yeah, because it's all girth like they got the fat deposits on the top of the tales are thick, like they're literally maxed out. And then I go to Texas and hammer these giant fish with these monster heads, but their bodies are like wind socks. So I've got like a twenty seven like huge bass, like looking at its side profile wise, and you're hanging on the scale and it's like seven half pounds. What the I feel robbed because weighing all these damn bass, I have to That's that's the unfortunate thing. You know what, I don't think he caught a five po mass. Well, we're working on our Walleye spot trying to figure that stuff out. That big one that I caught in the spring, Yeah, I taped that very accurately, waited it with, you know, with my scale that I weigh everything with. So that's kind of my baseline. I'm sure you could poke holes and whether or not that's accurate. And then I caught one that was three and a half inches shorter here a week ago, and there's only um, uh, just shy of a pound difference between seven and a half inch fish and a fish, and I thought, well, that kind of seems not quite right. How's do how fat he is? How built out? So the old man catches his bass, and then in the tell, you know, every story becomes like an epiphany story. Over time, he has an epiphany and buys the house that I was born in. Down the beach is another World War two veteran, kind of named John Gary. And I say kind of only because he got stationed in Canada during World War Two and all he did was shoot deer. It sounds like it's like he spent World War two shooting deer um in Canada. And uh, he had this boat that was built. He had a StarCraft bass Master Olive Green built in nineteen seventy three, so the year before I was born, and John Gary was like all the kids around the lake the fish. It was like John Garry's like the fishing mentor. He had a net to catch beach minnows, sand mintos, had a beach sand he hung up. You could go down there and get mentals with John. He'd like rig your rod up, he'd untangle your ship. He um. He kept list of all the books he read. He read a lot of like John grisha By type stuff. He keep a list of. He got two lists, a list of all the books he read, and then all the days he fished. And he would log on a minimum a hundred and seventy usually over two hundred days a year. A lot of people like to say they do that, but not mean people actually do that. He'd fish two hundred days year. It's a lot of time on water. He would fish so reliably that when I was trapping snapping turtles, I could go by his house at eleven and get fish heads. It was like he just knew that he fished, and he knew that he had fish heads, and he would he just he He lived his wife and then she passed away and he would fish more than he could eat. Like he'd cook large moles like he he'd play large moles and cook them scales down on a grill. He'd soak them and milk and cook them scales down on the grill. Yeah, they'd go out and fish perch and bluegill. Him and these old guys, and he hung out a lot of old drinker. He was a big drinker two um. And they'd sell the flames because there was a fish market in our county and they would illegally sell. And he fished that the fish market owner could plausibly legally have. And since there was like perch fisheries in Canada and aquaculture facilities that they blew gill, he could be like he could have cover for that. So they would a lot of times sell their fish to the fish guy. And man, they just fish their asses off u. And he always had his boat and he had on a haul out and we used to actually go. He had a you know those cranker things you lift your boat out of water. And he had his own boat ramp, the only private boat ramp on the lake. He had the first mink I ever caught. I caught. It was muskrats had built a den under the boat ramp, and I caught my first mink out of that. And anyhow, just a very like influential figure growing up, and that's whose boat it was. He died and he got sick. He's almost dead. Anyhow, we bought his boat and it went to live in my mom's pole barn and sat my mom's pole barn for I don't know, fourteen years. She started to get a little nervous because she had been registering it the whole time because she didn't think she thought it was bad to have an unregistered boat in your barn, and she eventually wind that boat out of there, and it was right at the time. I was like, daha, we'll use it for season two. So that's the boat. How old were you when you started fishing out of that? Oh? You know, I was always around. Like we used to catch more than we fished in it. We would catch bullheads out of the bricks, out of the bricks that the boat haul out sat out. But like it was just all the boat was always there, Like you know, you'd go out with John in the boat and you show you how to catch crop ees. Just around. It was always around right, And that's the boat. That's such a great story. It's a huge upgrade. Can I say one last tid bit about John Gary. He would cut up oranges and freeze him the wedges, so then when he came home from fishing and poured a glass of vodka, he would then fill it full of frozen orange wedges. Those guys a lot man. He called his uh his He had his fish shack and stuff on the beach and he called it the Redneck Riviera because they sit out there and finished getting drunk, finished getting drunk after fishing. That's beautiful. That boat was. I mean, you guys will all see it when you watch the show. But that boat was was a whole lot of fun to work on in the fish out and just see it. And here's what I think compared to the one before, it's smaller, which there was a little tighter quarters. It's a real small boat. Like it's narrow and short. It's it's real tight quarters. But I feel like fourteen ft, yeah, fourteen feet and and also like again extra Narra, I didn't measure the like gunald Gunda, but there's not much there. And but I feel like that forced people to be a little bit more efficient in how they set it up when they fished out of it. Like the other one, there's enough space that you can just kind of blow up and there was just ship everyone. This year it seemed like everything, wait a minute, we don't have any space. So they had to be more thoughtful and they had to plan it out better. It just seemed to work out. Like the interactions with the boat were good, absolutely great season one, but I feel like they were in better season two. Like everybody who left those man, I love this boat. I'd want to fish out of this boat. I think a great takeaway from being on both seasons and seeing the differences in those two platforms is I had the perspective of a lesser craft that made me appreciate just a little bit of an upgrade as far as that new platform represented. It's like, oh I can it was hard enough last season. This my job just became a little bit easier. And I think that's the opportunity with this whole like Doss boat like theme and concept, is to show that there's learning opportunities from fishing in a piece of ship, because when you get into something that's not then you don't have any excuses anymore, I may I may do with crap. Like my boat was a two two purchased off Craigslist up in Big Bear, covered in pine needles. I don't know how I got that trailer home down to the l A area, but like that feeling of getting off the bank was a real thing. Now that whole new world has opened up to me, and I learned how to fish out of a piece of crap with just a trolling motor getting blown all over these lakes when the wind picks up, this down a third. So when I'm in a bass boat, even if it's like a small eighteen nineteen foot or old like two Ranger or something, I know what it's like to fish out of a legit piece of crap, so it doesn't phaze me anymore. And it's just like you're complaining about the wind, Like, dude, this thing is like an aircraft carrier. So I think people that jumped straight into nice platforms and vessels and boats, like straight out of high school or whatever, like good on them. But I feel like they're getting cheated because they don't know what it's like stuff with it. Yeah, right, it's hard to appreciate what you end up having or even no like learn how to. I feel like the learn all the learning I did about how to get one of those old boats to be an effective fishing tool is super useful now, even in a nicer boat, because I can think about, like, all right, how do I how can I set this up to be more efficient? How what changes can I make? What can I easily do even though it's already great compared to what I'm used to You've had to figure all that out in the past. I think I think most people who fish seriously have come through that, and it's like, yeah, all right, I know how to kick out this boat. I know that the things I need to do, and that's part of the satisfaction in the fun, especially to bring it out for many, many different fisheries. Yeah, I'm just your main home stretch. I'm gonna be buying some raffle tickets for dose boat. Yeah there's something about that thing, because if you can I don't know if that might be too sad, it might be too like heartbreaking for me to see it go for a grown adult, like running the tailor back there, if you throw your weight around like you can, turn can help turn the boat. Yeah, well that boat flies, and so there's something about that where I was like, God, maybe this is the design to put a jet on this thing, and it could be can maybe like a fort peck gets some big water on it and then also run up the river to maybe I don't know, that boat goes thirty his life gone. It feels like you're going so fast, it's so fun. So Joe, Sir Mellie's here, He's here, but not here, it's virtually here. Yeah. I was gonna say man as a as a doss boat rookie because I was not around for season one. Um having watched the first one, I was very nervous going into our mission with the new boat. But I gotta say me and Tim land where who we fished in and fished within my episode, both walked away from that going this boat is freaking awesome, Like I personally would like to have that boat. And I saw one here about a month ago. I've never seen that boat in my life. That that the exact same boat, StarCraft bass Master. And there's a river in North Jersey kind of in like a shady part of the area here if we pike fishing and there's these old shacks and these weird houses back there. It's kind of like the hills have eyes, and people just pile old pontoon boats and jet skis back there, and we're coming around the corner. Sure enough, man, same exact boat, only with a center console at the wheel wheel in the center. Ye tell people about the fisher you went and checked out for season two, and I'll tell you this. I want you to know now, I fished for smallmouth in that river, including right below the secret dam. Okay, so when I go turn it up there, don't act like that I stole it from some stupid show. This is a classic fishing conversations. Let me establish microdentials here. I know where you're at. I've been up there forever. Yeah. Now, so we we fished the man Nominee River in northern Wisconsin, on the border with the with Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and um, I feel like we got off really lucky because on fabrication day it's like, well, we have to float this thing down a very shallow, rocky river. So fabricating meant just get everything the hell off of it, just strip it down to absolute bare bones. And um, miles, you were talking about how it gets narrow in the front, like it's got a weird beam and that weird sort of choke point in the front of this boat. We didn't even have to bolt the yetti down, man, just just shove that thing right in there. It locked into place, and that was our aur rower seat. Um. But we we went in. We went into it thinking like, there's no way this is gonna work. And within a couple of miles it was. It was cumbersome to row that thing. It didn't respond at all. You couldn't like, you know, crab crawl it and crab walk it. But um like, no trouble And for just two guys it was awesome to fish out of. We had like all the room in the world. It was. It was. It was killer you guys, cause the biggins we did and it was it was slow by the standards of the dudes we were fishing with. Um. But I mean they were some of the biggest small mouth I've ever caught on the fly. And it's in the super shallow clear water. And uh, they call them passive feeders, So you think of these small mouth as being aggressive all the time, and they throw basically big dry flies foam chernobyl ant type things they call wigglers, and they're like, now you just keep putting it out there and it'll get over top of one. And it's just such an easy meal dragon fly whatever he thinks it is that these these big fish on the bottom will just say, oh, I can't pass that up, and they just come up and just nip it. So you're watching these twenty in plus inch fish coming up and just sipping these tiny flies. It was. It was some of the most badass small mouth fishing I've ever done. Why what makes it a what's that term? Passive feeder? I mean, how passive are you went up and eat something off the surface? Well, in other words, like they're just kind of not in kill mode. They're not chasing bait around, they're not particularly in an ambush spot, um, you know, and they're just kind of laying there lazy. But there's so many dragonflies and damsels and stuff out there that it's like you're laying in bed and someone comes by the appetizer tray. Yeah, like you it's exactly what, just try some meat on it. Yeah, same deal. And it's been cool because I learned a lot and I've since done that with fish here and caught fish that way out here. So so Joe, real quick, were you imparting any motion to those to those flies or were you just straight drifting them? No? You you move them, but but barely. And uh, you know, it kind of translates over to poppers too, because a lot of guys throw foam and wood poppers, like the biggest thing. When you slap down one of these foam wigglers are a popper, those guys are like the slap is pop number one. So people like to lay that stuff out and just pop, pop pop and can move right away. It's like, no, the slap is pop one. So with these wiggly bugs, you'd slap it down and let it go, and they would just say just move it barely. So they have these long rubber legs coming off the sides, and you would just twitch the line, I mean, move the rod tip an inch two inches just to make it move forward and just let those legs flex. And that's all you would do to your drift ran out and pick it up and put it down again. Down all these soft banks. Now, when you guys are out there fishing, um, you mentioned how you kind of credit them with these are dudes at all, went out you know, grew up in the Midwest, went out west to be trout guides and ship and they learned about drift boats and throwing flies and whatnot. And then they came back to their homeland and took that technology to start catching big gas baths out of the lake or out of the river. Do you buy that? Do you think that they really like invented that fishery or that method. Um. I wouldn't say they invented it, and I don't know if they would say they necessarily invented it either, But I think, um, you know, so many people are used to fishing smallmouth in really big rivers or deep lakes that um, it's a fairly unique situation, having these giant fish and a fairly small river that reads a lot more like a trout stream. So I think because of that situation they probably perfected it. They were just in the perfect place where they had that sort of experimental grounds to play with big dry flies, whereas guys in Pennsylvania or Michigan or whatever, maybe they were just working hairbugs and poppers like they have been forever. Um. So I think just the whole scenario. Let those dudes really perfect that. And in fairness, it's not to say they're the only ones to do that. There are some very good guys in Michigan smallmouth guides. They do the same thing, but they've honed this sort of very FINESSI much more trout like presentation than than the aggressive stuff most people think you'd need for small amountal do you know that there's an east else? Dude, he's got a book like Fishing River small Mouth and Fishing Stream small Mouth. I got his books. I probably have it here too. I'm telling you, man, I have never my life learned something from a fishing book. But he's got those maps. Well that that you have my book, I learned something from your fishing. No, I don't mean like that I have Joe and I Okay, that was Wronton say, I have Joe's surfishing book. I don't mean that I've learned a lot about like rigs and Okay, but hear me out, hear me out. What I mean is, you know when people draw a map and it's like I stare. It's like here's a river and it shows like fish here, fish here, fish here. Right now, I greater detail. I would usually be like somewhat skeptical of that illustration. Okay, Like I just wouldn't it wouldn't. I wouldn't be like, okay, and then go to a river and be like, hey, this is just like in the book, and then cast there, you know what I mean. But he was like, because I used to fish the Delaware over your way for small mouth, big nice smallmouth. And I looking at his book and where he put his axes all the time, I was like, I'm canoeing pass shiploads. According to this guy, I'm canoeing past ship loads of small mouth. And I started casting to where he would put his exes behind rocks and catching bass that I would have never known what they were there, because I would be like, oh, you go to the big deep bends, Yeah, you know, and that's of course, you know, any idiot would know. And then you'd pass. Then you'd go down two more miles of the river and not do anything because you're waiting for like the next thing. And meanwhile, every one of those rocks, not everyone of them, but like small mouth out of crazy spots man, well smallmouth. And actually it's okay, because like, looking back, I feel like I wrote that when I was twelve. It was so long, But I bought that book not knowing you were brought the book not knowing you or who you were. Yeah, it was served up to me when I was trying to figure out surfcasting. Yeah, it's cool. No, that's but to get back to what you're saying about the X is on the map. Um, I mean I think people get pigeonholed into that with a lot of stuff smallmouth and trout, and what we were doing in Wisconsin plays right into that. Yeah, your average your average dude, he's gonna go for the deep bend, the slower bends, the deep hole, the honey hoole. When um, if you really know what you're doing and learn from guys like I fished with in Wisconsin, it doesn't make sense for a twenty inch small mouth to be where we were catching them, But you're dealing with guys who understand why, and that's why it was so eye opening a lot too. Yeah, they may have been I see that a lot too with trout, Like nighttime mouse fishing for trout, they are not uh, where where you catch them at night is typically not where you catch them during the day. They move, and you know, everybody goes for the community hole and don't realize how much fish move around on a daily basis. All right, Kevin and Oliver, you guys went. He'll explain this to me. Man, Kevin, you grew up in muskie country, but you never fished muskie. No, I never did, because it seems like everybody always fished them in the fall and I was I was hunting. You called a big bull in near night, didn't You sure did? Anyhow, We'll get to that maybe later. Um. Never did you guys have t tiger muskies? Yeah? I think those like Midwestern lakes and especially in the like near the Twin Cities, to like there's all these fisheries that everybody was fishing. I just never got into it. When I was a little kid, it was cool. It was cool to go see that happen, you know, just like thing. It's like a new thing whereverybody's all fired up. But like in my grandpa's day, they fish musky by it. I'll take this the ust the harness rig chipmunks. No, that's fantastic. They would they would harness rigged chipmunk and row it out into the middle of the lake and put it on a little piece of wood, and it wouldn't it wouldn't want to jump off, of course not. I'm just selny man. I didn't do this, and it wouldn't want to jump off. You then go to the beach and wait a while and then pull the chipmunk off the board. And that's how they would fish muski. One of the ways they would fish musky and just watch it kind of service swimming's wait and wait for something to blow up on wait for something to grab it. Then would you rotate that out with a fresh one if you made it back to shore. I don't know, but I know that a little breather, you've earned your freedom. My grandpa would also um. They would. They would do a lot of things that even the unnerved, even me, which is they would uh. They would talk about that when you find a big large mouth on its bed, what dud as you go dig around under logs until you find a salamander, because everybody knows if you hook a salamander and drop it out of the bed, it'll eat the salamander. And they would take little frogs and hook them and have those be swimming around a lot of just stuff that wouldn't fly. They wouldn't fly. Well, you're talking about about muskie fishing becoming popular and cool now, and I think you know something we didn't really have time to cover on in that episode, as much as I would have wanted to, is how much that has to do with the fact that musky populations have made a significant rebound lakes. Well, they're dumping them all the lakes. Is well, I think it's hard to point to one fact now. It's because they're dumping them into all the lakes, man. I would I would say that like strains like, oh, this lake's got the Bally Who's strain or whatever, you know, and it's like he's exciting about it. Yes, it's it's like Leach Lake strains, a big one, the Great Lakes strain, and then the one from that river right up in that same area. I'm blanking on the name of that river strain that that's a big one that like grows faster but doesn't get as big. But anyway, you're right dot ones from miles aren't there Polka dot muskies out there too? Those are those Great Lakes streams, I believe, like those ones you see from Saint Clair have a lot of those like heavy polka dot patterns, and they the States are buying them and dumping them into the lakes hopefully. Yeah, but those are giants, right, so they get big And you got all into this, Oliver, I did, and I come at it with a completely different perspective because I was pretty much from l a in my whole life and we don't have any muskies or X species anywhere near us, so as a young nothing. Now there's one lake I think it's called Lake Davis in northern California. Somehow Northern Pipe got into and like it was like a big deal and they pretty much poison the lake to try to start over. Uh, they're still there, but there's just like this weird thing about them. But we don't have any exposure to them except through the content like TV shows, magazines, watching an in Fisherman TV show as a young kid on a Saturday morning, did you grow up like, did you grow up sitting around LA watching fishing shows? Yeah? Man, Yeah, tell your story. I heard it yesterday's. Yeah. My story is a little different than most. And just to give you a little context of who I was, I've never met my father, so watching all this content of like this very heavily father son, uncle's son, some type of paternal figure and young child as an entry point into fishing was not me and I just happened to randomly stumble upon it in We talked about it in episode four of season one as well of how I got started in fishing. But it was just kind of random. I was ten year old kid on a family picnic at a regional park just outside of l A. Uh. If you guys are fans of Bill and Ted's excellent adventures, um, it's putting Stone Lake on the other side of the freeway from sand Dimon's High school. Good luck with that one man. That's that's that's a place that has always been challenging. And we were there on a busy weekend. It might have been an Eastern weekend. It was a spring. Uh, there's frogs in the in the reeds and stuff. So I was being a ten year old catching things and came across a pile of discarded fishing line and back then, I guess literally must have been a proxix. I remember seeing signs of like, hey, don't throw fishing trash on the story line because it was there and I went through it and I found a couple of those like eagle claws smelled hooks kind of like mix and untangled probably three to four ft of it. And you know, the only exposure I had to fishing as a suburban like l a County kid was what I saw on TV, right, whether it was like Yogi Bear like cartoon fishing or you know some kind of yeah, like some kind of reference in some TV show like Family Manner used an rcle and them going through the ice. That's why I don't want to ever go by ice fishing, because I was traumatized as a young kid because of that show. Um, but I didn't know what I was doing, but I had enough sense to like take that three to four ft untangled line, wrap it around the end of a stick, and I knew I could find earthworms under rocks. So I went to the little creek that fed down into the southeast shoreline. Sure enough, found some earthworms. Throwing my little party cup and walk my little happy ten year old ask to the fishing pier where people were fishing, and I had my little entourage of coutins with me and pin a worm on that hook and just threw it over the end of the dock. No actually no, wait, fly line is what we call it on on the West Coast, so it's literally just your line, a hook in your bait. And my my cousins got bored after five or ten minutes, and I really back whatever, I'm just going to hang out here and just kind of started like dozing off into you know, to me with a wilderness, right, I mean this lake, and and before you know it, I could I feel that tell tell, like don't, don't, don't, And in that moment I went to just react and I tried to like pull out whatever this creature was, and that shitty line broke and it was probably a blue glod ready or sunfish most likely, And but in that moment, especially since I didn't capture it, I was just totally like just fascinated about like what the hell just happened, Like I need to know. Like that sense of mystery really drove me to want to come back to try to successfully catch whatever that was. And I spent that whole week researching every fishing publication I could in the West Covino Public Library because my my mom would take me to the library every day after school, and I would just just read like do decimal system at all, like it was. And it's funny because like you guys are very entrenched in the fly fishing side of things, and a lot of that stuff that was available to me, and even outside of just l A was fly fishing stuff. So like terms like match the hatch and like reading water, like even though I didn't really have ways to apply it, like those are really like prominent in my like just my arc as a fisherman. So I went back out there, flooded my grandma's garden because I knew, like if you flood the dirt worms are going to come out, and she was pissed, but I flooded it, got a whole coffee can full of worms because I saw, I saw that's what people put worms in. So we got coffee cans. Let's let's do this, And went back out there, talking my mom into his spending at the kmard across the street from the library. Got me a crappy little Shakespeare spin cast combo with its little tackle box and everything, and I was tying overhand knots because I didn't know how to tie a knot like all that stuff I saw in the encyclopldia was too complicated for me to to digest. So literally a couple of overhand knots like a little dropper loop similar to a drop shot, but like a little bit of a leader coming off like a three Waitte level, very crude, and spent all day on that pier and didn't have just no it was. It was like Kevin Bluegil fishing. There's just nothing going on. I'm just kidding. But but at the end of the day, end of the day, sun's falling. And maybe this is why I still love fishing afternoons and evenings more so than mornings. Is as that sun was falling, I felt another tick and I wind in a bullhead that were there was like man validation. I'm like, damn, that was awesome. I did it, and that's led me to sitting here with you guys in Bozeman, Montana. So yeah, it's to me as a West Coast like fishing junkie seeing this like giant freshwater fish with these gnarly teeth and the tactics that these guys in some far off land which is the Midwest. To me, it was like, man, that looks so dope, Like I'll never probably get a chance to go do that, but like, this is fascinating the Midwest. It was like it seemed like Marrakesh. It from my world. It really couldn't, like you know, getting past like an hour outside of downtown l A to go fishing was an adventure and like not something that I was fortunate to really experience. So to to see myself actually fishing for a muscal lunge didn't really register in my head until it's a great names. They a great name. They should rebrand back to what they used to be most lunch Musca lunch. It's great. It's a great Like animals, they're amazing. And the fact that like Kevin grew up like totally like in one of the mecca's of it and didn't partake in it. It was fascinating to me because like I love all styles of fishing and I'll always be a heavy bass fisherman, but like I want to catch the Apex and those systems. They're the Apex, like they're they're the top dog. And seeing a four to six foot fish engaging with your hunk of artificial chipmunk boatside is an exhilarating experience. And you start driving out there to go. Yeah, well, I started driving around the country chasing big bass, and I started chasing big smallmouth the last four years and got into that, and then I would kind of just randomly encounter muskies wild bass fishing, and last year made it really considered effort to dedicate like two to three months of just chasing a proper muskie and like trying to apply different lure styles and techniques and just trying things that this established muskie fishing culture may not have tried. Because I saw something in that that culture that reminded me of a lot of the different fisheries in the different regions I've got to like engage with and penetrate. It's like they kind of pigeonhole themselves, like Joe is talking about, like in so many ways, like everybody is so afraid of missing out like that FOMO keeps them from experimenting and stepping outside of the norm because they don't want to waste the day, right, because they know excelure works and why lure works. So if I try z, I might have wasted that day for that cast. Right, And when you're dealing with the fish of ten thousand casts a right, that's a high opportunity cost. Have you ever counted up how many casts it takes to catch musky Well that's skew too, because I also caught one on the first cast of the day once, So they're like, I gotta cast ten thousand more times, right, so like does that reset? And I've also caught them back to back cast, So but like on average I would say, like like ten thousand casts would be optimistic. No, this is what I was curious about. How many casts? Well know, how many casts? Have you ever counted up? I have no idea how many casts does the person do? Have you were like calculated it? Actually, someone like at a trade show in Italy gave me like this little like cast counting like device thing. Yeah, they have smart rods now that will count that for you. Yeah, when you're musky fish. Because I watched you muskie fish and you have a very polished cast. It looks like you've done it a lot. I'm not saying you've done it ten thousand times, you've done it a lot of times. Well, I saw parallels in the muskie fishing, especially on the gear side. Two things I've been doing my whole life, whether that's inshore saltwater fishing in southern California or throwing a big like lure for giant large mouth Like the only thing I really had to account for on the gear side and the technical side is those teeth. So experimenting with leader configurations, materials, connection like options that was my biggest hurdle because I needed to be able to still fish those lures and articulate them in the way to trigger a bite but not be hindered from like oversized leaders or big barrel swivels to connect my line like little nuances that were affecting How I can like really maximize that hopeful potential opportunity I get once a day on return to cast numbers, Oh man, it's a lot. How many? Know? How many can you really hawk out in an hour? And it depends on the fishing style because there are times when I'm like burning a bait back, so I'm that that cast takes a lot less time. Then if I'm like really taking my time and fishing an area methodically, like some of my cast can take like five to ten minutes. If I know a fish lives on a piece of cover, like I will soak a big soft plastic, realistic bait down there, and eventually that fish may like engage with it, versus if I'm on a new body of water like dost boat, like I need to cover ground looking for an aggressive fish. Why did you guys go to a lake you've never fish before? I think that's part of the beauty of fishing, is diving into the unknown. But if I had, if I was making a thing, I don't want to right, Yeah, there's a balance, right. You can blame that on the oliver. It's okay, okay, cool miles made me fish there. We fish those lakes. I probably would have chose different places, but I didn't know so like that that mystery was it luring to me? I did catch one, so it worked out. Uh. Here's I don't really have a grape of musky, but here's I just want to tell you what I fear about muskies. I fear that it's not the fish. I don't blame the fish for anything. I fear that the human the emerging perception of muskies is playing into the gulf ification of fishing, and that the people who think that it's naughty two eat a fish will become so numerous that that will become the norm, and in the dystopian future, it'll be that there's just it's just more like that that that natural resources as stuff that you eat will become more fringe and it will be that like, well if, yeah, I see why you want to go fishing, but how why would you want to hurt a fish? And so that's like the in the long game, I fear the golfification of fishing. It'll lose its connection to being a food acquisition tool. Right now, I will make this observation about the muskie community, and they remind me so much of like the trophy arge mouth community, Like those fish are so revered and so valuable, and those experiences that they provide us as anglers is that there's like an overprotecting like vibe. Those guys will hammer you on fish handling and care and this and a third, but it's okay to for me to stick a seven out trouble hooking its face, Like where do we draw the line? And we really didn't want to hurt it, right, you stay home? That's it. Yeah, But yeah, I think that's what I was just gonna say. That's what was in the Midwest growing up. That was like the old timers thought process. You know, it was like, oh, I'm not gonna go fish. I was, I can't eat them, you know, when I was a young dude, I just remember him talking about muskies is like these ferocious predators who they were killing their bluegills. Right, So we always fish for food growing up. But then my younger brother Ian started fish for muskies when I was when I was gone already out west um and that that transition from like, oh we can fish for these and we can still go catch bluegills and eat sort of is the norm now. I would say, that's kind of what we we showed, you know a little bit there, Steve. I understand what you're saying about the muskies and the attitude about them, But I mean, you don't think that's been going on long enough now that it's not a concern. I mean, they're not the only one, right. Tarpin a lot of guys like to fish for them, but they don't eat them bone fish, same thing. It hasn't stopped people from doing tarpin one day and mangrove staffords the next. So they had something to take to the restaurant and the keys to eat. Yeah, here's why I fear it, Joe, if you want to know, because even things like, um, it's even emerging with catfish, where it's becoming like like a fish that has always been regarded as a blue collar food fish. Okay, there's either people now where it's like if you catch a big cat, which it's kind of naughty that you ate it, right, and yeah, rivers that there's a fifteen a day, like it might be a bag of them in fifteen channels a day, and then you got like the local cat Fisher's Association lobbying to have it be one a day. Right, so there's a there's a drift, and when it starts going after things like that, um, yeah, just like you know, any little piece of it, I'm not worried about, but the general sense of the minute, you get people who golfify a fish. Um, even when there's no real like there's no sort of like biology behind it, like this river you're talking about the Monomnie River, Like, oh, you know, you can't keep fish out of the Monominee. Uh you know, because you'll destroy the fishery. Uh. Fish and game apparently doesn't know that. Yeah, No, you're right, because you can still keep one. So if that was the truth, I guess what you're saying is they would just make the whole thing no kill, which they haven't. Yeah, like like who And so when people start to take where you have like a team of biologists out there whose job and you haven't and date from the state to manage fisheries in perpetuity. Right, they can't run fisheries into the ground. I'm not supposed to. It happens, but you're not supposed to that. These people can look and be like, yes, um, we feel that you can catch whatever the hell channels the channel cats a day out of some river. Um, but then you wind up having other outside forces come in like never mind what you've found. We like catching them and letting them go, and our life will get better if the if the the hell billies that come out here to eat catfish weren't able to do that, I would have more fun golfing with these fish. See. I think that's just like I don't know, I don't like it, man, I don't like it. I think it probably stems more from what social media and the internet have done fishing. I think, like I look at that with flatheads, like there's a ton of flatheads in the School River and Philly huge culture and internet forums and groups on on flatheading there, and yeah, nobody ever talks about killing one and eating one there because I think that they would rather have them for an Instagram post than quietly take them home and cook them, even though like, personally, I'm right, well, you built an entire business around that's why we're all here. But there is like to say, so, yes, this, this should make you upset, and Leary is fine too, But there's parts of bodies of water, and there's certain times throughout history that that attitude is very appropriate, and there's times where it's very inappropriate. And some of this is based around, well, you gotta return those big ones because those are the effective breeding fish. Now certain circumstances, we need all the effective breeding fish doing what they can because that fishery is in trouble and we need those numbers. And there's there's all these other fascinating factors that I'm learning more and more about every day. Sometimes we just need numbers in order to keep other fish out of the system, and you're gonna have to deal with eight inch trout instead of eighteen inch trout because we just need that mass taken up in the river. But there's this other time where it's like, boy, the reason we have a bunch of eight inch trout in here is because nobody's keeping them. And his damn catch and release ethos and folks hooked on dry flies and no bait is what is keeping this river where it's at. And unfortunately, like the really conservation because it isn't truly about what is best for the fish in this instance, right, it also takes into account recreation and economics and uh that the social media, uh what people want and like, um, you know what people think about their fishery and what needs to happen. It takes there's a big lag between the biological data and what people think, and when those two meet, you know what I mean, it's like you mean like when you do surveys, everybody says they would like to catch more bigger fish. Yes, right, and then it's like that deal down on the snake, right, we're right a whole fishing games like great, what we need to do is kill a lot of rainbows and everybody's like, oh, we don't really want to do that. It's like, well, you want more cutthroat and bigger fish. We need to kill a lot of rainbows. No, you're still not doing it. Okay, we're gonna pay you to do it, and you can keep as many as you want. Oh you're still not doing it. Okay, Well we're gonna pay you to do it. You can keep as many as you want, and then you can give them to us and we'll give them to a food bank. Oh you're still not doing okay. Well jeez, Well that's when you got to go to the move that happens now and then. Is it's illegal to let them go alive? Yeah? Yeah, And there are fisheries like that. You can't let it go alive, right, Flaming gorge right now, Bourbon, If you catch a bourbon, you gotta keep it illegal to let it go. Yeah. But I want to ask this question with specifically back to the muskies, right, and and we talk about a lot. We talked about how the dollars that are spent on tags and license sales go toward things that we believe in management practices that are important. Right, and so if you want to talk about fisher let's just let's take Green Bay as an example. There are in the last ten years, really five, but let's go back ten years. That has become known as a one of these places to go for trophy muskies, Like if you want to catch a fifty incher, that's the place you go in Green Bay. Yes, and that has led to a signal, nificant influx of people coming there buying those licenses because they want to catch those fish. Guilty, and and and and that that is bringing in revenue dollars that are going towards management and conservation. If those big fish weren't there, if people didn't want to get their picture taken with that fifty in fish, you could I think there's a clear argument you can make that there would be a loss of revenue toward conservation management of those fisheries. I think there's value there. I get the I'm not arguing with the golfers were tribal. We're tribal people many um and I UH associate with and empathize with, and UH feel inclined to look out for the interests of a group of people. And there are layers to it, and at the tightest core is on like the person whose interests I want to advocate on behalf of would be the person who v use um wildlife management as being a combination of maximizing suitable habitat maximizing wildlife populations in order to allow sustainable use, sustainable extraction. And they're still gonna get that picture. It's just the fish is going to be kind of covered in mud and have a dent nuts forehead. It's a little bit of blood. It's so just like raising kids. You have a child, now, okay, a little thing, right, they look at you, kind of roll their eyes. Right, You're like, is that in and of itself the end of the world? No, but I noticed it. I noticed it. I didn't like it. And then they kind of do this, and you're like, is that in and of itself? I mean that my kids a darrel looked No. Did I like it? No? And so when I look like all these little pieces of this, like the muskie thing, I went out musky we went to night so um, and when we used to catch tiger muskies we'd be bummed out when they weren't legal size. Yeah, so, uh, in and of itself, is this little thing going to like ruin the wild foods world? No? But do I like it? Yeah? A little suspicious of it. I think, I think the suspicion is fair. I'm not. I'm not arguing that point. I'm really not, and I've I mean, you talk about the Snake River. I used to cover these stories all the time when I was writing for fly fishing magazines because it was fun to piss off people and talk about that, Like the beaver Head. I did a whole thing on the beaver head and how stunted those fish are and how the biologists are begging people. You know, they were trying to talk about making a seventy five fish a day limit, and I know, seriously, and I didn't. You didn't give a dude to ticket if he had seventy six. But I was like the cooler, damn it. It was an interesting conversation with this biologist because like, seventy five fish, man, like, you can't get people to keep three. What makes you think that going to seventy five they're gonna they're gonna do it. He's like, because I'm trying to bring in a different group of anglers, I'm not going to convince these guys to go who won't take one to get seventy five. But if I advertised, like, hey, you can keep seventy five fish a day. Here, I'm going to get a different group of anglers that's coming in and they're gonna feel cooler. Yeah, you're gonna have some bloody knuckle. Dude take notice and be like, there must be something going on there that I need to find out about the big hole right next to the beaver head. Or I was reading um in the Montana UH Fishing Game magazine, Old I should clarify they didn't change it seventy five. That never happened, just so everybody like that didn't go through. But that was what they wanted to do. A big hole. Regulations were ten pounds of fish plus one per person per day, plus one plus plus not one pound, but plus one fish. Do you have it any idea like what that was meant to do? I don't even know who I could talk to. I'll figure that out though, because that has obviously stuck with me. Some guy called his representative and said, wow, I caught ten pounds. Then I caught a real giant, and well I supposed to let it go. And he's like, what we'll do is we'll adjust the regulations to say ten pounds plus one. Seems like great. Thanks, put your food aside at the beginning of the day and then you can. But if you really get one, you just can't stomach letting go. Yeah, keep him too. So uh, but you caught a muskie for this show. Yeah? Yeah, the stars aligned saw a little window in that morning and we got one. You know, it's hard, one of the hardest things for a cameraman to do the moment. They always catch your reeling, but I don't catch the hookups because what are the odds casts, what are the odds that they're low. I asked for four days minimum for this shoot, initially only for we got three, but like I have to, I just have to jump in and add just give props because on our shoot they had a camera guy this crew. He swore he was on my fly on every single drift the entire time we were there. He's like, if that gets eaten, I will not miss it. Did he hold up to did he hold up to the I think he got all the eats? I really do ye. Big shout out to Bryson, Brian Gregson, you were going for there, I was. I was going for Paul Bourke on that if if he was listening because he was on that fly the entire day. Ken. I got a question for you, Kevin Harlander. Why isn't that when I was reviewing the cut to edit. Are they messing with you? Or they make it be that you never even catch up bluegill? Probably? I definitely boated some fish, that's sure. I was just there for the jokes. I think they make it seem like when you guys switch the bluegill fishing, which is my style of fishing, they make it seem like Oliver is just blowing them up. Yeah. I was trying to make a point with the whole leech slip bob or set up and didn't really work out. He's trying to wrap the Midwest to the fullest. He stuck away the did you uh did you not catch a blue gill? I put my in my notes, I put like, did he really not catch up bluegill? So I caught some bluegills? Good? I think you's talked about one scene. You guys remember that one scene where like we first switched the bluegill and Oliver put on the drop shot. Did the drop shot rig? And it was that first time Kevin were like that in that one hole, you really did blank but I think it wasn't. It wasn't like from there on out you never got another like you got into him, but in that one hole, Yeah, it didn't look good for you. Yeah, that's Paul said. It wasn't gonna make me look bad. But that got call? Uh what? Um? How happy already catched? Like? Was it did it strike you as uh, you know, to catch a muskie out there? Were you like about time or were you thinking, man, we got lucky. Um. I've spent a lot of time fishing them in the last eighteen months now, and I knew that catching one on film, with all the pressures that come with it, it was not gonna be easy. But I felt good about our odds, like I've put in that time, and I gained some confidence in that that fishing style, and I wasn't surprised by it. I felt like we should have had another chance at a truly big fish and that didn't come. Can you tell people about the um the figure eight deal? Yeah, which is like, what do you want to know about It's It's well, I just explained to people the strategy of the figure eight, Like do you only throw a figure eight when you see it? You don't do it every time. This is going back to kind of like that lore and like that mysticism that was muskie fishing to a California kid, right like oh, the figure eight, Like what is this? And it's this boat side mechanic that accounts for the behavior of these muskies where they'll track your bait all the way to the boat. And if you can maintain that fishes focus on your lure even boat side, you stand a pretty high chance of getting it to still bite your lure even though he's like basically staring at you, staring at you, I mean, even like your whole rod is in the water, Like it's crazy, because like that just seems so foreign to so many different fishing cultures, and it's it's very prominent in muskie fishing to where like some fisheries like Lake of the Woods they say like two thirds of your bites actually come boat side, like you'll suck those fish up from a long cast and you can expect it to actually make it like kill attempt at some point on the at at the boat. And for me that that was the first time I actually caught one doing it, after tens of thousands of repetitions and failed repetitions. And I think part of that was because of where I was doing most of my muskie fishing was really high visibility, clear water. Those fish would see us and the boat and spook like by the time I went into the first turn versus like Lake of the Woods is much like dirtier water, so they I just don't think they are as skittish. And I got my first one after watching this in muskie follow my freaking white poodle looking lure like around and around and around, and we're all like, dude, it's still there. And on the first the fourth turn, it actually got it. And it's like the water just like cutting circles the rod right I'm and I'm going like high, like away from the boat, and I'm changing elevations and like trying to pump it on the turns, like just trying to get it to trigger and watching this fish just engage with my thing as I'm walking it in like this big circle four times around, and when it actually made the commitment, We're all kind of like, oh, ship, it's got it. Like this is a real thing, and it's It's a fascinating fishing technique and one that I've actually previously applied with large amouth bass fishing, and it's not as like aggressive of like a figure eight And most of the time I'm actually doing like ovals because those bigger fish apparently have a harder time like turning on a dime and have got big predatory like skittish like where we like educator conditioned fish to make a mistake with inches of line off my rod tip. I did it yesterday on the Yellowstone. Got a brown shout to eat my jerk bait because I was trying to burn it in to make a cast at a snag and this like nineteen inch brown shout just blines it like fastest hell and boat side like I didn't. I was about to go into a figure eight turn because I've just built that into my mechanics. It didn't even give me a chance. It just snuffed it well, like right at the end of my rod tip. But I've actually started incorporating it like on some other fishing like it's like murray cod fishing in Australia, a barrow mundy, like it's a it's a underutilized fishing style for all fish. But like the muskie guys, like you have to make that boat side mechanic at least one revolution, especially in like low light or low visibility situations, whether the water is dirty or nighttime fishing, because you don't know if there's one on it or not. And sometimes like you'll suck one in and it will camp out under the boat and then like on the six cast later or something like, it could just hid he's been the whole time. Potentially, they do that, so you you're supposed to do it every time, and it it's kind of like that Murphy's All thing. Every time someone that's super green to muskie fishing comes on my boat and I'm trying to like tell him figure eight every time at least one revolution because that'll give you time to kind of like watch and see if there is one in the area. And everybody gets lazy. Man. It's a mental focus thing, like and the one time they don't do it, guess what happens. It's big, big old musky was on it and maybe if you had actually gone into a turn, it could have ate it, but you never gave it that shot and you just blew your shot for the day, you know, potentially, So it's it's an exercise of like this mental focus and hyper focus. Then that's what drew me into it as a fishing like culture because that's like right up my alley with like the engagement I'm expecting and living trophy bass fishing, like I'm trying to catch a fish that most people on average will never see all the time, so I have to maintain this level of hyper focus. And for me, like the musky fishing, I was like, oh, like, you're just a dumb bass guy from California. You don't You're not gonna do any good. Like you're gonna throw that thing now here, man, throw this, throw these two things that every other musky fisherman I've ever talked to tell me to throw. It's like, yeah, I'm not gonna do that. Road. Yeah, I went rogue and I stuck some good fish and had a lot of fun, like learning the process and failing on my own and trying to pick and choose from these hardcore muskie guys who I respect so much as a culture as again a type of angler. But like, at the same time, how do you know that there isn't a better way to catch a musky or a different because you went and talk to everybody at the fly shop, Oliver, they told you what's up? Yeah you can, you can skip all that stuff, right. Yeah. I enjoy the process of learning, and unfortunately experience and failure is the best way to learn. Yeah, it really is until you actually like live it and can have that opportunity to make that adjustment on your next opportunity. Yeah. I think here and stuff is great, but then making it your own is particularly helpful. Man, totally, because I think when you're doing something with confidence, you do it differently and do it better, right, Slightly differently and better for with confidence, right, is a huge part of it. And nobody like the amount of people that have the stomach for failure over and over again is just not a lot of folks like that. They're like, man, I need some success though. We're talking to uh, we're talking to the baseball player Peter Alonzo. He saw about the psychology of baseball players and being a bad or. He's his baseball is a game of failure. It's just all failures because if you can um succeed ten percent of the time, you might be regarded as phenomenal failure. So it's like you get really used to it's not every time you get out to the plate like bayam homer, bayam homer, right, have a good homer because I'm doing the bad Like if you're bating a hundred, you're not. You're not doing that right, great better than me, but I can't remember what the hell number. Yeah, maybe he said they're amazing. Point being, he's like, it's more typical to fail at bat, absolutely than it is to succeed at bat. I think that applies for anything that's hard to do, anything that is like revered. It shouldn't be easy because no one cared be like blue your fit toss boat? Do you don't be hacked on blue gill fishing? Now, why wasn't you guys were incapable of catching the big mouth buffalo? I mean, like you can't put the you guys, it was it was me, cal was smarter than Me's like that looks stupid. I'm not going to do that. You go ahead, But what were you trying? Like most of them? I mean people do catch them, yes, yeah, most they shoot a lot with bows in the river like there's and certainly like in the more of the moving water as opposed to like the stag nut stuff. I'm not putting anybody down here. But like that that is very doable, very very well within the realm of what people would consider success, like not that much of a trick, but going out on the big water with the big old fish very doable as well. But that is going to take a lot, a lot of failure to figure out what were you trying to do? All right, So I feel like I should give a little context on what this fish is because not that people know that. Everybody sees me. I think they're looking at the cart right and and just so everybody knows, big mouth buffalo are not carb, They're not even related to car. They're the world's largest sucker and there they are native fish in North America, and they're incredibly cool. And I used to support a commercial fishery they did. Yeah, I've not eaten one. I've heard they're very delicious. We have grilled the ribs on them. Really, there's guys in Wisconsin take the ribs, clean the fish and then they take the ribs, leave it on the bone Brussia with barbecue sauce and grill it and then you suck the ribs clean like you're eating pork ribs. Nice. Yeah, it's good. It's still a commercial fish and Tennessee. Yeah, yeah, and I believe Louisiana as well. Yeah, the last I could find, which wasn't super contemporary, but the last commercial fishing report I found from Louisiana. They were a small send it to the commercial fish, but they were they still were representative there. But anyhow, uh, we learned about these fish. I think I think you actually turned me onto that cal You turned me onto that that study that came out and because I can't remember what it was, member of old fish uhest known fish in the in the US freshwater fish. Yeah, there was this assumption that they lived like the same length as other sucer species, so twenty thirty years, but no one had ever tested that. They're they're a rough fish. They don't get much attention. No one had really studied them much at all. And then this guy named Alec Lackman decided he was gonna do a study. He was gonna pull out the odlet bones from some of these fish and age them from from in his home turf in Detroit Lakes and discovered, first of all, the oldest fish he found was a hundred and twelve and second of all couldn't really find any fish under eighty years old in that system. And it was because they have been gone to ship, right, And so there's no successful reproduction anymore, just all fish that were born prior to going to ship. Wasn't that something like that? Well they don't know like it had been. Yeah, there's there's you know with all things. It's like, okay, well here we we found this. We can make a lot of speculative ideas, right, like, well, that fish landed on your car because two birds were having a fight. Um, you know, oh this elk got stuck in the mud. That's how it ended up on your boat anchor or your dog anchor, right, um. And so that's where they're at with this, and and uh you know, so they do have some funding. They're going to release another paper coming up. But yeah, the the idea is something has happened that UM has limited recruitment. So there is they think some some successful spawning, but there is no successful recruitment mean meaning that UM eggs are being produced and inlaid, but they are not uh you know, rearing a new age class of fish UM, and that that's happening in very very limited doses as compared to other populations that are successfully spawning and having successful recruitment outside of this system. UM. They know that the sucker fish UM can have some pretty amazing uh migrations for spawning, and they know that that that can't happen in this system that they're looking at right now, do you know, do to some man made factors. So they're like, ah, this could be something. And if they look at the fact that they have eighty two and twelve year old fish, it lines up very well with how some of these waterways have been manipulated. Yeah, there are a couple of things that looked at. One is is changing the hydrology, putting in dams and things like that. But the other thing is right around that time is when common carp showed up. And common carp fill a similar niche in the ecosystem as these fish. They don't just look alike, they feed similarly, they spawned similarly. Even though they're not at all related, they're in the same place as doing some similar things. So it could be that it's because of the changes to this waterway. It could be the introduction to this of this invasive species. It could be considering they know that these fish can be over a hundred years old and still be capable of spawning, still be pretty fit, in good shape. They may be fish that don't successfully recruit every year or even every ten years, but they just don't know. So it's still uh people just figured this out last year, so that those research is brand new, and we got to go hang out with the dude who's doing this research and and get to get to meet some of these fish. Say he's interested in what he's doing would be a gross understatement. What does he What does this individual feel about the fact that people go out and fill garbage cans and dumpsters full of car and probably are mixing in all kind of big mouth buffalo in there. You know, I would say it doesn't like it. But there's part of him. Uh Alec has a uh an interesting brain, for sure. There's part of him that knows that these people value that fish, even if it's just to shoot, and that could in turn be valuable to keeping this fish around. When I was out both fishing with Jared Fink in Wisconsin, they you could definitely tell because if you knew what you're looking at, you would know a big mouth buffalo when you saw it, and they would like it. Yes, yeah, they still shoot it, yeah, but they would prefer to get it and that would be like and that's one of the amazing things that really came to light, um because we talked with a you know, a guy who you know, like anybody who really gets turned onto some kind of fishing or hunting, like started both fishing about fifteen years ago and then he kind of figured out how to be the best bow fisher mountain and got really really invested into it. And he holds the big mouth buffalo in very high regard to the point where, um, it used to be that that is the fish he would target to where it wasn't sporting for him to go after karp and so, but he still likes to shoot him. But he has seen firsthand that the population is going down. But there's some challenges associated with this, you know, big old fish that are much more desirable from like a sporting aspect, which again could be you know, something that you could harn us for the preservation of this species. And so what were you guys trying to do? We were, well, we were trying to do two things. One we wanted to go meet this dude and learn about these fish because we turned onto the story. We think it's fascinating. And in this Detroit Lakes area where we were focusing part of our story, you know, that's the area where they can't find fish. Are hardly any fish under eighty years old. And I think it was ten years ago it became legal to bow fish at night with no limit, and so guys are pulling out thousands of pounds of fish. You know, we were talking to both fisher said, yeah, I get five hundred pounds a night. Used to be on a regular basis. And now they're not seeing them of big mouth buffalo, big mouth buffalo, not carp, not carp. This is what this is what we were told, not anymore. Now. He's like, man, I remember ten years ago, you go out, you go out for a few hours, you literally fill your boat. Now you go out, you might see a couple. And and so they're they're seeing a dramatic change because these fish aren't reproducing, and the bow fishers really want to shoot them because they think it's really fun, it's great sports. So they would call it instead of saying they were going carp shooting, they would go buffalo shooting. Well, they'll shoot they'll shoot carp or dog fish or sheeps or other things as well, but buffalo were like the prime target. They were apparently the most challenging fish, and they fought the hardest. So those are the ones that they wanted to get, but were they were They garbage in them all. So they're still throw them in a dumpster and put him on the field. Whatever helps you do exactly. Yeah. The exception, I mean really, if you especially if you look at the gross poundage, the exception to the rule would be eating them. Yeah. I went to a bow fishing tournament one time, kind of covering a bow fish and tournament and just everything to do a dumpster man, and it was a lot of carp but it was also a lot of native fish. Yeah, tons a long nose gar fish, dog fish into a dumpster. I went to a shark tournament one time, and they fill a dumpster. They fill two dumpsters. Blue sharks, no two dumpsters. The UH Tennessee regulations allow you to dump those things back into the waterway that you got him in, uh, which to me is seems more appropriate than throwing him in a landfill somewhere. At least you got nutrients going back into the system somehow, some way, But it is just it's hard not to see it all as very wasteful. If you can put if you can go in into a fishery and put slot limits in place, you can ask hunters not to shoot female bears, right. You can request that hunters don't shoot uh Nanny's on mountain old hunts ship. That takes like a trained eye to figure out. You can put antler restrictions in place, being like it's got to have three points on one side. Whatever. Like you can ask people to have like a little to have a discerning I why not just have it be that like, yeah, you can shoot carp, shoot carp. That's that's what they're talking about here. And and we got to have a really I felt like it was an interesting and productive conversation with a couple of hardcore both fishers who love to shoot buffalo and Alec Lackman, this this biologist and and have a dialogue in place that was really more about, Hey, we need to talk to we need to talk about finding a way to manage these fish because this is not sustainable. No one's pointing anybody out is like you're the bad guy, You're the good guy whatever. In fact, shooting carp out of there might really help these fish. So by all means, don't stop bow fishing, but let's think about how we manage these fish because this is not sustainable. But because this research is so new, you know how long that stuff takes to filter into actual regulation hasn't gotten there yet. And so my hope is that by maybe making this episode, having this conversation, we're getting more people to talk about it. The thing that this can't be is it can't be a situation where we're pointing the finger at bow fishers and saying, you guys are screwing this up, because that's not the case. Both fishers aren't the ones that are preventing these fish from recruiting. They're just doing what they love to do. And if if we it's just like additive stuff. Yeah, But if we can get that community on board with like, hey, yeah, we do want to manage these fish because I want my kids to be able to shoot him, that's just a broader coalition of folks trying to figure this problem out instead of factionalizing it and breaking it up. And you're looking at like, you know, the leave the big ones alone type of adage. The old big ones are the successful spawners. Well that's literally all that's left. And these big females, these hundred year old females, Like you're talking millions of eggs on the spawn, so potentially, um, you know, laying off them and figuring out what is going to lead to successful recruitment could be a relatively fast turnaround too. So it's not like next generation type of thing. Uh. I grew up bow fish, and we just like the bow fish. I still both fish now now and then. I do think that the thing that kind of like justifies the thing that justifies bow fishing when you're just bow fishing to shoot fish and throw them away, is that you're dealing with a non native, delterious, non native species. So it's like shooting carp. You know, Um, if you went to any fisheries manager, any serious fisheries manager in the country instead, if if you could wave a magic wand and make the common carp vanished from these waters, they would all wave it, right, everyone would wave it. You're not gonna go find a fisheries manager, a serious fisheries manager and say, like, if you could wave a magic cart wand and make big mouth buffalo vanished from their native range. No one's gonna wave the damn wand so I just don't like the same way that when you're bow fishing, you're not allowed to shoot large mouths. You're not allowed to shoot yellow perch. You're not allowed to shoot Wally's hypas and W's uh. I don't know, man, it's not I don't think it's like blaming that. It's not like blaming them, but it's just like it's like a real management oversight. It's like if you're shooting stuff because you want to throw it into a dumpster, shoot something we don't want. But I think I think there's an education problem here because a lot of people do think they are carp because people call them buffalo carp and and those same both fishes we were talking to said like, we thought we were doing the lakes of favor. We thought we were removing a problem species until this guy Alec came along and told us we were wrong. Yeah, but it's not. It is funny too, because you're like, oh, yeah, I can see how you know. It's tired to you're really gonna give a kid a ticket for mistaking this fish for a carp But then it's like all the other things that we do, right, Uh, you can only shoot one hand mallard and they're flying at twenty So are you really gonna give a ticket a ticket for shooting too? Yes? Yeah, But then there's all these other things in wildlife management, right, Like I've talked to people who are pro mountain goat, as pro mountain goat as it could possibly be, and they're like, well, yeah, the tag has got to be either sex because you don't want some kid not you know, miss identifying uh nanny for a billy. I'm like, well, yeah, but it's pretty freaking easy to identify it billy if you put yourself in the right situation. Just ask Pete Munich, who made the World's Greatest video about how to telling nanny from a billy? Great video. Yeah, and uh, and that's always just been a stumper for me. I'm like, is it that much of a stretch to ask? I mean, they're they're testicle sack is about the size of a cantaloupe, and they seem to be real proud of it. On the goat thing, there are interesting ways they deal with it where um, there's units in Alaska, they give out of either sex tag. It's mandatory reporting, so you have to report your animal, you have to bring it in for reporting. If you shoot a nanny, you don't, uh, you're not eligible for the draw for five years or seven years or something. If you shoot a billy, you're up to bat next year. That is fantastic. And they haven't made it like, they haven't made it wrong, but they've definitely And I'll tell you what. When I hunted that unit um that to put it over the edge for me their consequences, I was like, man, they really really don't want you to shoot a nanny. And then we didn't, and it was that little thing. I'm like the fact that that little shame they put into it. It's like a little shame with some teeth makes a difference now the recreational aspect of Buffalo. Miles and I talked about this quite a bit because I was kind of laughing, you know, and like, yeah, sure, yeah, you know. I if I were in this system and I'd really exploited all there is to exploit, I could see how I could get really into trying to trick these things consistently. But I'm just I'm not there yet, you know, but it is really freaking funny to sit there and do the color commentary while Miles as fishing as I ass off for him, trying to site fishing, all site fishing, and we should clarify in the lake these fish again, they're older than my grandparents. Like, there's not anything they haven't seen. They've been shot at with bows, like there's nothing that I'm gonna do that they're not gonna notice. Right, and these fish will you'll move in. You'll find them circling in these shallow bays. I'm like, okay, I've gone. I see one count right over there. They can't hear anybody. Just start whispering anyway, and I try and make a cast and lead them and drop that. They own their filter feeders, so you gotta throw small, small stuff at them, right. I wasn't fishing a fly rod because I wanted to be cool. With a fly rod. That was the only way I could get a bait small enough to trick them. So they're not they're not going to pick up a leaf form no, now, according to I mean, well, I won't say no. The stomach analysis is really there's lots like micro crustaceans, and then there's these odd ball things that Alec can kind of theorize on of like you know, his cousin has caught two in the same bay on crank baits. Yeah, so every once in a while they will attack something, but but primarily when you're seeing these fish, you can watch them because it's clear water. They're just cruising through and just like a whale or a whale shark, they're opening their big, wide mouths and they're just sucking in whatever's in front of them and just keep going. So they're not going to move to take something. You can't. You put a leaf worm out there, but they're not gonna like turn and eat it. You have to get something that looks appropriately. You're trying to ran something from his face so he can suck it in on accident, correct, But it's not not necessarily on accident, right, you wanted to look like a little subaquatic insect the things that they're eating, but he would be to avoid it. Then to justin Halett and what would happen. Then I would set the hook and it would be game on. But didn't in theory, so in the in the lake, I don't know what happened in theory, I mean, what would happen. Oh, what would happen is that these fish would see us and they go from like happily feeding about a foot under the surface. As soon as they see the boat, they dropped down like to six ft and then they get not an arrow range, yeah, because you have been flinging arrows at them. Are they too far out horizontal distance? Yeah? Sure, So they're up at the surface doing that and they're like near near they call them, yeah, not sucking mud up. They don't have a downturn mouth. Sorry you can say. Actually, their mouth, unlike a lot of those fish, actually faces forward. It's not a downturn mouth like like not like a red like a red horse sucker or a lot of those other sarcer species that are are really pouty. It's a forward facing mouth. Yeah. If you if you people out there want to go way back in time, we did a meat eater episode many many many years ago, turkey hunt. But we did go out night and shoot some big mouth buffalo long ago. But in the Wisconsin. What we did do though, was we then chased them around on the Mississippi River where they are spawning more successfully and there are more of them, and we we hooked up with this other dude who consistently catches them, and we did hook a few there, and uh yeah, I still got my ask kicked. I broke, I broke one off. I straightened the hook out on another one, another one just just it didn't stick. It was It was maddening, but it was also like I gotta go back. I'm so those fish were more like the so the ones in the in the lakes were like fifteen to forty pounds. The ones in the river were like five to twelve. So they're smaller fish, huge fish. But you see that fly dropped down in front of them, because it's pretty darn clear, you know, and you watch that, uh buffalo would like either just like sink below it or just like go to the side of it or whatever. And we were laughing. I'm like, yeah, that fish is thinking, Ah, i'm quaw hooks. I remember when those came out. I had There's a possibility that I might have had one eat on that lake or I might have just flussed it. Either way, it hook didn't stick. I can't I can't prove it one way or the other. But I had one moment of like hope, and by a moment, I mean like a split set. Were you using uh well, you were using the trolling motor on toss boat to come up on him. Oh yeah, sneaking up and like they know that noise trolling motorate, like one power came out some of those Like god, I remember that, those those those old fish just put me man. I cal was smarter. He was standing in the back throwing like a little jighead and catching everything else while I just made a fool a golt minnow, Sir Melie. That wow, first time I've ever known a goat minnow. And that thing is catches a wide variety of fish very consistently. H What tell me a couple of things you did catch? Uh? Caught some you know, different panfish species. Caught some croppy bass, andy wally dogs. W No, I don't think we have a couple of pike. Yeah, um, but it was yeah, it was funny like catching those croppy and and so the It's one thing I didn't know but makes complete sense is those sunfish hybrid eyes. And somebody caught a hybrid bluegill readier slighter readier not real weird one that's a real weird one. Um, But anyway, it was a big, big sunfish, cool looking. So all right, episodes we haven't discussed, but I'm just gonna skim through them. When we got yeah, I thought a little bit about it. Lake Trout um right near my home, so you know, we used to catch like you know everybody like go troll quote the big lake uh Lake Michigan growing up. And we went out with um friend of mine who's a charter captain who normally fishes a boat where they put out what was he telling me? Seven? They can fish like twenty rods? Yeah, he says, more normal is seventeen to the point where they have lines with with using um, I mean the fishing down riggers, planning boards, dipsi divers. They're usually fishing lines sixty yards out each side of the boat, so they're covering one twenty yards of water. What because they have an array of like said down riggers straight down. Then the next step out are there running dipsey divers. And they sometimes put so much line out that the dipsey divers banging the bottom of water. The dipsey diver dredging all the sand is like in waves out there and that DIPSI divers hitting the top of all those sand waves, and then beyond that you got planer boards one, two, and three. So yeah, they got they're running fifteen hooks, fifteen lines in a hundred and twenty yard wide swath and you can imagine they locate a couple of fish. I mean the thing that like the other boats like don't go within a hundred and twenty yards of any other boat. Yeah, they're real like cautious about all the boats. But uh so here he is. We were running how many were running five covering made about the thirty yards swath of water. So he was very frustrated. But still he's a lake trout catching machine. We still call a lot of fish. Looked like you guys did. We had a great time and that that little boat was fun, man, because it's like, you know, like when I was a kid, you know, we had a troll. We had like a big lake boat which had to be a StarCraft um and two to four foot waves. You'd almost kind of think about not going four to six. You're like, there's no way two to four would suck. Zero to two was cool. On the day we went out glass like never happened. Never happens, and it never happens. When you plan in a trip six months, you know, it's like it happens, but it doesn't happen. When you're like we will fish on June seven, you know, and then like you show up on June sevens like like certainly it'll be like the worst day of the year, but no glass glass. Yeah, that was amazing. I lost five out of my seven planned days on Green Bay muskie fishing last fall, and I was in a bass boat. Yeah, we say Gordon Lifefoot's record, the Evan Fitzgerald. He offers a synopsis of all the Great Lakes and he says, like Michigan steams like a young man's dreams. It's islands and bazar for sportsmen. He was correct. We had a great fish and then a very own Danielle Pruett goes out with Frank smith Wirst Smethurst and they fish love Smith. I wish smith Wirst was here. They catch a variety of fish. They're targeting another um fish of ill repute, the freshwater dru fresh drone, the sheep's head, another much maligned native fish that was a fun one that was a really fun episode. And then I talked about oh and Yanni did in my home state. In his home state, Yannie did the um the fishing trip that elicits eye rolls for many people, which is when a thing happens in a thing happens in Michigan where you get the heckx hatch and they'll cover your garage door. If you have like an overhead light above your garage, you'll wake up in the morning and mayflies are covering your garage door. There's like local legend of the roads getting so slick with mayfly smashed mayflies that cars careen off the road and crash. It's a real thing. Bringing out the snowplows to clear him. Yeah, big ass you know, uh, big ass mayflies, and ever you'd see him, and ever you talk about how sometimes you know, yeah, you gotta snowplow of the roads to get the may fid which I never saw happen, but it's like a thing I've heard about it. I always thought that had to be. And when you go up to fish the hecks hatch, which we did, you go up and you stay in the dark and get mulled by mosquitoes and you listen to a fish, not an angle in the dark, and you're like, I don't know, cast over that one. It sounded like it was that sounded like it was out in the river. Yeah, goes and does that fish. So he goes, but he went with the dude who actually has success that. It's not the kind of thing that I didn't growing up there. It didn't strike me as the kind of thing that you just went up and did on a whim. It seemed like the kind of thing you've got to kind of like study it. Yeah, there's a lot to it. Well, I think trying to target any hatch there, there's so many factors as to win those those insects hatch and when the fish choose to eat them that you gotta be really dialed into even give yourself a chance. And even then it's a crap shoot. Yeah, Like, but climbing down off some bridge, waiting through the mosquitoes and staying in the dart down there listening, it's hard to be like, yeah, I will stay till one or two. Have you tried, Yeah, yeah, I'll say until one or two, I don't know, maybe daybreak. Then about eleven you're like, yeah, I'm gold this sucks, let's go. I think I heard one. Yeah, yeah, we definitely gave Johnnie the short straw on that one. Well he winds out with the tanker. I don't want to want to. I don't want to ruin the st in the story. And that's the episodes. Yeah, we got six episodes. I think we got them all. Talk about how they how they how people can go watch them. These are gonna start. The first one is gonna be available starting to They are on the meat Eater YouTube channel or you can get there through the website, the mediata dot com. And we're gonna keep releasing them every week, a new episode every week till we run out every Sunday at I think eleven am, Montana time. So check him out whether if you like the first season, definitely check him out. If you didn't see the first season, go back, catch up and watch a second season. Doss Boat season two, dose Boat. I couldn't call it dosebot because and people will be able to find it. Yeah, we weren't allowed to. We worked it in there. You worked it. I gotta say you worked it. I didn't come up with it. You didn't know should I come up with that? I don't know who came I think Josh Pristine came up with comes up with all kinds of funny little sentences. Yeah, that would make always time. He works best, uh, sub sentence, he works best shorter than a sentence. He's very good at when it comes to putting one or two words together. He excels. Not there's anything wrong with his sentences, but he does. Partial sentences is where his sweet spot sits. Yeah, it's all that marketing background. Yeah, brevity quick two words, one word, two words. That was a good one. That was a good one. All right, Oliver, thanks for coming by. These are having great to have you here. Yeah, you participated in a bunch of our stuff. Now that's right. I appreciate that because you're doing awesome things. And uh, real quick, tell people how to go find out about you if they want to see your stuff. Oh gosh, take pick your poison hopefully met here dot com right dost boat seasons one and two. Uh, there's a lot of me on YouTube, Instagram. What's your handle on social so you can find me on my personal handles. It's just Oliver and Ny it's spelled m g Y. And then you can look at a bunch of the big bass stream stuff we've done as well. When people mess up your last name, where do they go with? Oh gosh, it's uh, it's a crap shoot. Just give me one naggy uh nig nigge new win. I don't know where to get that wrong, it's n g y. I think you're underselling them, and like, it's not just you got Big Bass Dreams. There's Big Cod Dreams like you got. If you're interested in seeing Oliver and his friends catch giant fish, you can see them do it all over the world. Big Pike, big murray cod, big baron Mundy. It's YouTube channel where you yeah put fishing stuff. Yeah, absolutely, So the Big Bass Dreams channel has the most of it. And then I launched my own personal channel this year as well. So there's even big Whitep Dreams on their Big Blue Eel Dreams. I mean, if it's if it's catchable, we want the biggest one. I mean that's that's the point, right, So yeah, it's it's pretty wild. You and I find real annoying about travel fishing pages on Instagram. No tell me, people don't tell you what the freaking species is. It's like, hey, my PB, my record best, whatever you wanna call. Yeah, I follow h Rob Allen spear fishing, Yeah, spear fishing Africa. It's like a lot of the South African company. I'm like, if you would just start out but tell me what I am looking at, I would be appreciative. But I'm just going through Oliver's page here and he does. I was like, oh, I wonder what that fish has and he actually says it's spotted baybass, so he's good about it. It's a total so cawfish there, so there's a who little subculture of that that's cool. He lives in Southern College's pretty fish. Yeah, super bad ouncer ounced probably the hardest fighting and tenacious fish I've encountered. And one of the things I appreciated, like when you were done in Australia and you were catching all those cool fish, you didn't just say what they were, but you dive into some of the basic biology of those fish and why they were interesting. And like, I mean, I don't even wrong, I like big fish, but having that extra context of why they're cool just to me augments the experience of seeing it. Yeah, and I'm looking at you right here, is that a giant snakehead. No, I was looking at the skin of something. It's like as close as it's a big small mouthballs was looking at the corner of the skin. Yeah, that is a that things so fat. It's not not a real good looking fish. Whole ton of fish up. Don't shame the fish. Sweet. I'm checking you out online right now and you're sitting right here. It's like metaphysical alright, guys, Joe guy, I know your way over there and wherever the hell get it that you want to add. No, they just it was really fun to be a part of the new dost boat and awesome trip and I'm I'm really excited for this to come out. Kevin Harlander. Yeah, same, you're so distracted by wanting to go hunt. Yeah, I know, I'm getting itchy over here. Um, they actually let me be a part. That was a fun trip. Oliver is great to fish with you and and uh see that intensity. Man, it was awesome. So looking forward to seeing what comes of it. If it's not too late, I'm gonna have If it's not too late, I'm gonna get in there and try to have a beat that you catch a couple of blue Yeah, yeah, I get that edit in there, I'm gonna have scour. I'm gonna have to scour the footage and I'll tackle on it. Oliver, you and I need to fish together, man, We need to make that happen. Absolutely. Let's talk about it later today. We shall, alright, guys. Thanks everyone,