Speaker 1: This is a me eat podcast coming in you shirtless
Speaker 1: severely vote bitten in my case underwear lessening podcast. You
Speaker 1: can't predict anything, um me and the lavin ego. Here
Speaker 1: did a little duck hunt in this morning? Is that
Speaker 1: make you jealous? Christum browse? It does? It does? I
Speaker 1: did a little driving this morning, did you? We're all
Speaker 1: enjoying the wilds uh do, Christie Wound? If you run
Speaker 1: through a couple of news points, love issues, let's do introductions.
Speaker 1: I'll introduce you. Okay, sounds good? Uh. Author, I don't
Speaker 1: get to say this very often. Author and poet Julia
Speaker 1: Husain had books of poetry. Come on, don't start with that.
Speaker 1: You don't believe me kidding? He had, He had multiple
Speaker 1: works of poetry and one of the Iraq War was
Speaker 1: going on. I would often catch myself saying, um, the
Speaker 1: novelist and poet Saddam Hussein because he had published novels
Speaker 1: and published books of poetry similar Similar to Saddam, krist
Speaker 1: Dombrowski has, No, you don't have any novels, novels, not
Speaker 1: yet books of poetry. I think that you're probably the
Speaker 1: first poet, the first actual real live publishing poet that
Speaker 1: we had on the show. That's fantastic, But I mean
Speaker 1: the only three of you. Harrison's dead, right, that's true,
Speaker 1: that's true. It was his birthday yesterday, by the way.
Speaker 1: Oh it was. Yeah. Chris used used to guide, used
Speaker 1: to you were like a guide for Jim Harris. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I wrote Jim down the river. Guiding is probably a
Speaker 1: you know, not quite an accurate an exchange of money. No, No,
Speaker 1: you guys are just hanging out and and every time
Speaker 1: I would you have an idea, he would say, go
Speaker 1: to the other bank, you know. So if anything he
Speaker 1: was he was guiding, but not rowing. So you were
Speaker 1: just like a facilitator, facilitator, a wine opener, dispenser of
Speaker 1: chicken thighs like you got a lot of you know,
Speaker 1: as a guide, right, you've seen the thousand people cast? Right?
Speaker 1: Is he a good fisherman? He was an exceptionally good caster. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: I remember being so thrilled when the first time I
Speaker 1: saw him cast, and I've realized that he could actually cast.
Speaker 1: You know, because I grew up in Michigan. I worked
Speaker 1: for this, as did he, as did he, as did you,
Speaker 1: as it as did uh so many Michian Tannins. But um,
Speaker 1: you know, I can remember I worked at this lodge
Speaker 1: up in Grailing as a kid, and the experts, the
Speaker 1: so called experts would come through and you'd always be
Speaker 1: so disappointed when you actually saw him cast. You know,
Speaker 1: they were so bad compared to you know, your buddies whatnot.
Speaker 1: So the first time I said, Jim Cass, I thought
Speaker 1: I was I was, well, yeah it was. That is
Speaker 1: a relief as a guide when you see h the
Speaker 1: client cast and they're good and you've never seen it before.
Speaker 1: It's definitely just like yeah, But then you hope that
Speaker 1: that doesn't come with some real she expectations. It usually
Speaker 1: reverses the karma, right, you know, yeah, if you're if
Speaker 1: you if you're telling me that you're Mike's two fingers
Speaker 1: off your lip. Yeah, he's got really big hands. April
Speaker 1: fulkey are you are you? Are you familiar with Have
Speaker 1: you ever met Chris before? No, we haven't met. We
Speaker 1: met about five minutes ago. Okay, had you had any when? Uh?
Speaker 1: Had you seen his book around? I saw this afternoon. Sorry, Chris,
Speaker 1: but I'm excited to learn more about it. We sprang
Speaker 1: this on April. We didn't give April the long lead time. Well,
Speaker 1: in order to go read up on on body of Water.
Speaker 1: Ryan actually sprung it on me last night because I
Speaker 1: I was podcasting Ryan this morning or this afternoon, and
Speaker 1: I still see you tomorrow. He goes, oh, yeah, for
Speaker 1: the Chris podcast, and I went, who what? So, but
Speaker 1: what a pleasure. I'm I'm thrilled to be here. I'm
Speaker 1: glad share professional connections though because of the whole you know,
Speaker 1: fishing world. Are you guide still? I still got about
Speaker 1: eighty days a year? Yeah, I've count that. It's still
Speaker 1: being a guy. Dude. We have at this table right
Speaker 1: now are four people who have at some point in
Speaker 1: their life done professional been professional fly fishing guides? Are
Speaker 1: you the only one who hasn't? I'm the one that hasn't,
Speaker 1: the smart one with so that meaning there's four people
Speaker 1: at this table who horror themselves out and one who hasn't.
Speaker 1: Open that the driven snow. I think it's real good
Speaker 1: for recruitment purposes that you never guided anybody. Uh. That's
Speaker 1: the voice of Ryan Callahan who's also here, and then um,
Speaker 1: then Yannimani, Hello, So we talked about that. I was
Speaker 1: asking you a couple of news items. Yeah, um, a dude, Okay,
Speaker 1: a guy in Alaska. Check this out. A guy in Alaska. Uh,
Speaker 1: just got jail time in a one hundred thousand dollar
Speaker 1: fine for poaching some moose. Man, those guys do not
Speaker 1: mess around in Alaska. What do you mean some moose?
Speaker 1: Because he killed three He killed and ditched three moose.
Speaker 1: Here's what they think. Okay, we talked without four like
Speaker 1: in Alaska. Depending on where you are, there's always exceptions,
Speaker 1: but generally, like generally for a bull moves to be
Speaker 1: legal in Alaska has to be either depending where you are,
Speaker 1: has to be either a three have three brow times
Speaker 1: on one side, or be fifty inches tip to tip
Speaker 1: antler spread. Or you might be in a unit that's
Speaker 1: what you'd call a four brow time unit where it
Speaker 1: has to have four brow times on one side, oh
Speaker 1: were and or b fifty in tip to tip. And
Speaker 1: then there's other units that are like any bowl or whatever.
Speaker 1: But but typically you're either it's either a three brow
Speaker 1: time or four brow time area. And it's when we're
Speaker 1: hunting moose, like it's real nice to see the brow
Speaker 1: times because gauging fifty inch tip to tip is some
Speaker 1: tricky ship, real trip it's nerve racking, like to shoot.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of guys like my brother Danny's a
Speaker 1: very experienced moves hunter. He is not. It makes him
Speaker 1: very uncomfortable to shoot a bowl on spread and to
Speaker 1: not shoot a bull on brow time count. But it
Speaker 1: seems like this feller was just real bad. It seems
Speaker 1: like real bad at judging, and he'd kind of check
Speaker 1: them once they were down to see if they're legal.
Speaker 1: Three of them hundred thousand dollar fine. I like that, man,
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, it's so be it. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's pretty ignoring because now and then you hear something
Speaker 1: doing something like agreedgious stuff. Then is he winds up
Speaker 1: with a misdemeanor, has to do like a day of
Speaker 1: community service. They don't mess around, man Like Alaska does
Speaker 1: not mess around on game and fish violations. They treated
Speaker 1: like business. Is there not some sort of calculation that
Speaker 1: you can make from afar? Yeah, So that's where the
Speaker 1: stuff gets tricky. If he like, let's say he's broadside
Speaker 1: and turns his head and look at you, there's all
Speaker 1: these little tricks like if that outside swoop hits the
Speaker 1: midpoint on his hump, or you know that a standard
Speaker 1: run of the mill bowl is ear to ear. I
Speaker 1: can't remember. I can't either, but it's out there's a
Speaker 1: measurement of like, hey, like your typical mature bull is
Speaker 1: x inches ear to ear ten per year and plus
Speaker 1: ten in between. Yeah, so you got like that, and
Speaker 1: then you imagine does it go you know, a percentage
Speaker 1: of that? That way all this stuff, what you arrive
Speaker 1: at is unless like a friend of mine, is a guide,
Speaker 1: Like unless you look at and you're like, you know,
Speaker 1: it blows like you you feel that your heart's gonna
Speaker 1: stop because it's obviously don't mess around? So wait, did
Speaker 1: they did they count? Did they measure? Then did it
Speaker 1: come in? It? Like one was I read the article.
Speaker 1: I came here with the other ones, but one, the
Speaker 1: biggest one was around Okay, did he take any part
Speaker 1: of the animal? Says more? All? Most of all three
Speaker 1: went to waste? Most so is he stripping backstraps and stuff?
Speaker 1: You know, you're asking a lot of great questions, and
Speaker 1: I think that, uh, we have to do a little
Speaker 1: more reading. Body mind just sent me the article. So
Speaker 1: I'm a little bit guilty of having not done a
Speaker 1: ton of research. But the outline of it, I have
Speaker 1: a sense of the outline, but that um it said
Speaker 1: like left most to rot. It sounds like a hundred thousand.
Speaker 1: It's fair. That's big. Yeah, and I do. I was
Speaker 1: wondering if there's a little more to the story because
Speaker 1: I can see that price tag climbing, if I can
Speaker 1: see that fine being less. If it was like guy
Speaker 1: was caught with three moose that were fully processed going
Speaker 1: to feed his family the ditchen the ditch of definitely
Speaker 1: probably colors that many favorite past violations probably covered. Some
Speaker 1: states have a thing where if it if it's a
Speaker 1: trophy animal, then your fines go through the roof. Yeah,
Speaker 1: poaching a trophy class animal costs you a lot more
Speaker 1: money than than then if you're like a pop hunter,
Speaker 1: then they slap you down harder. Uh. What a couple
Speaker 1: of things I want to talk about. Oh, guy had
Speaker 1: some feedback on something. Cal you were here for this
Speaker 1: conversation where our buddy Steve kendrot this is tricky. Check
Speaker 1: this out, Chris Uh, Our buddy Steve Kendrott shoots him
Speaker 1: seek a deer down in Maryland and it's missing a
Speaker 1: time in Antler time. His buddy shoots a sea Kadeer
Speaker 1: and he's skinning it and there, lo and behold is
Speaker 1: Steve Kendrot's antler time embedded in the buck. So they
Speaker 1: are these are pugnacious little fighters, you know. And he
Speaker 1: snaps his antler time off in the buck, and so
Speaker 1: the guy uh kept the antler time. Steve was able
Speaker 1: to take the anler time to match it up. And
Speaker 1: I was saying, how I felt that if that friend
Speaker 1: of his was an honorable friend, he would have given
Speaker 1: Steve Kendra at the antler time. Steve Kendra, I'm glad
Speaker 1: you said that, because everybody that rolled in we took
Speaker 1: a vote at that day at the table. I mean,
Speaker 1: cal you said, you've made a good point that well
Speaker 1: maybe the story, because I agree with you, like he
Speaker 1: should have just given it to him. Becaw said, well,
Speaker 1: the story is just as good if the anertine's hanging
Speaker 1: like near that trophy that head, because he's like, this
Speaker 1: is what I had in my neck and I was
Speaker 1: still alive, right, but go ahead. Well, the guy, one
Speaker 1: of the guys, one of the many guys that wrote
Speaker 1: in about it, was looking at it like this. He's
Speaker 1: contrary to my my personal opinion, he says, contrary to
Speaker 1: my Steve's opinion. Um, he's like, the fight between these
Speaker 1: two things happened outside the realm of man. The fight
Speaker 1: was the fight, and it wasn't involved I didn't involve people,
Speaker 1: And there's there's no room to weigh in on the
Speaker 1: people perspective. They had a fight, and he likens it
Speaker 1: to this. Let's say you've got a knife fight. Or
Speaker 1: let's say someone came up and stabbed you in the
Speaker 1: leg and in the scuffle, the his knife blade snaps
Speaker 1: off in your leg. Whose knife blade is that? Now
Speaker 1: that's a good no? Wait later, would that guy say, oh,
Speaker 1: I need you? Would like, what would your response to
Speaker 1: that fair enough? That knife blade would go in my shelf? Absolutely,
Speaker 1: and when people came over and be like, see that
Speaker 1: knife blade? But would you feel differently if in this
Speaker 1: fantastical world it was his finger that he had jabbed
Speaker 1: into your thigh, broken his finger, and I would have
Speaker 1: it on my shelf and when people came over and
Speaker 1: they were and I caught him looking at it like
Speaker 1: you see that, and I would tell them about it.
Speaker 1: I don't think it's a great comparison. I'm sorry, I
Speaker 1: think that's a horrible comparison. So the time was in
Speaker 1: the animal or in the animals donlers you know what,
Speaker 1: because you missed it was in the animal right and animal.
Speaker 1: So this book a like Buck A and Buck B. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they get a fight and Buck A's antler ends up
Speaker 1: snapping off into Buck B. My body shoots A, who's
Speaker 1: missing it's antler, and his body shoots B and finds
Speaker 1: embedded in its body, and the body keeps be bark. No,
Speaker 1: you've explained it. But my thing is, what is what
Speaker 1: is that buddy going to do with it? I mean,
Speaker 1: it's one thing if it was if it was wedged
Speaker 1: into the antler somewhere and it told the story like
Speaker 1: what you're talking about. That makes sense. That's a piece
Speaker 1: of art. You know, you're putting the story up to
Speaker 1: mount on your wall. But it was ingrained in the shoulder.
Speaker 1: You can't just hang it on. It's like that's like
Speaker 1: having a fish sculpture and hanging a fly out of it.
Speaker 1: It's got some stupid chuck an. It's ridiculous. Give it
Speaker 1: to your buddy so he can superglue it onto his
Speaker 1: You know, he mounted We thought he should hang it
Speaker 1: from it in a deck with some decorative. Just set
Speaker 1: it next to it, your guys. Is decor is a
Speaker 1: lot different in my opinion. But okay, I don't think.
Speaker 1: I don't think bringing a knife to it is is
Speaker 1: necessarily the same. Analogy. Great analogy. Okay, one more quick
Speaker 1: one and then we're gonna we're gonna talk about other stuff. Um,
Speaker 1: I know how to really attack this one. Not long
Speaker 1: ago we were talking about this. We're talking about that
Speaker 1: when you're sitting in a tree stand and it's cold
Speaker 1: out and a big buck comes through, and you get
Speaker 1: all excited, and then the big buck wanders off about
Speaker 1: his business unscathed, and then I personally all sudn't feel
Speaker 1: like I'm cold, like it left me like I then
Speaker 1: I'm like, this is like, God, am I cold? And
Speaker 1: that guy was talking about how my brother when he
Speaker 1: goes he calls going off to take a growler, going
Speaker 1: off to take a heater. Right. The guy wrote in
Speaker 1: about a doctor writes in to explain these two things.
Speaker 1: He says, you haven't autonomic nervous system of the human
Speaker 1: body and has two parts, the sympathetic nervous system and
Speaker 1: the parasympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system releases epidephrine,
Speaker 1: EPERN and other stress hormones to prepare for what is
Speaker 1: often referred to as fight or flight response. Some of
Speaker 1: these things with like UH affects of these hormones increase
Speaker 1: heart rate, dilate pupils, vassal constrict blood vessels. It shunts
Speaker 1: blood to the core vital organs. The skin becomes pale, cool,
Speaker 1: and diaphretic. The vassal constriction of peripheral vessels is why
Speaker 1: a person might feel cold after a stressful encounter with
Speaker 1: game animals dragon. On the other side, the parasympathetic nervous
Speaker 1: system is known as the rest and digest nervous system.
Speaker 1: The parasympathetic nervous system is active when the body is
Speaker 1: not under stress, i e. Eating fornicating. Now, poor word
Speaker 1: choice on his part, because fornicating means having sex outside
Speaker 1: of marriage. How do you know that? Yes, there could
Speaker 1: be probably only if you're married. Yeah, but I'm saying
Speaker 1: you could be having like some serious stressful Let's say
Speaker 1: you a fella was a woman. Let's say a woman
Speaker 1: was married and the old man's off at work. I
Speaker 1: feel like, right now he's got a little bit of
Speaker 1: bad word choice with fornicating, because he's saying when the
Speaker 1: body is not under stressed, I e. Eating, fornicating eating. Yes,
Speaker 1: fornicating isn't just synonymous with love making. Fornicating means marriage
Speaker 1: outside of or sex outside of marriage. So a woman
Speaker 1: could be in a situation where she's you know, like
Speaker 1: nervous about being discovered by her old man, you dragon,
Speaker 1: which could make it stressful, which would then involve the
Speaker 1: other side of the nervous system. Yeah, where there's like
Speaker 1: you got the fight and fight going on because you're poor.
Speaker 1: You know. I think he should have said, um, love making,
Speaker 1: which is makes that that word just makes people uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: So the parasympathetic nervous system is active when the body
Speaker 1: is not understressed, I eat, eating, love making, or in
Speaker 1: this case, pushing out a grumpy The act of bearing
Speaker 1: down to defecate stimulates the vague nerve, which is part
Speaker 1: of the parasympathetic nervous system. When the parasympathetic nervous system
Speaker 1: is stimulated, you get vaso dilation to peripheral blood vessels,
Speaker 1: therefore increased blood flow to the skin, resulting in a
Speaker 1: warmer sensation. Therefore, bearing out my brother's observation that when
Speaker 1: he goes off in the woods on the cold morning
Speaker 1: to turn over a rock, so to speak, Um, he
Speaker 1: feels warmed up by it all, that's all. And can
Speaker 1: you confirm that you do feel cooler or colder gonna
Speaker 1: a big deer walks by? And what's the different? Where
Speaker 1: does adrenaline fall into all of this? I think it's
Speaker 1: what he's saying is that when a big buck comes by,
Speaker 1: you get the adrenaline spike and then it drops and
Speaker 1: you're that's when I become cold. And I do feel
Speaker 1: that you get warmed up going off and rolling over rock. Definitely.
Speaker 1: You guys have a lot of strange ways of saying
Speaker 1: taking a poop. I've heard three different ways in two minutes.
Speaker 1: Because that's what you're saying though, right is you know,
Speaker 1: like the term like turn out saying earlier that makes
Speaker 1: people uncomfortable growler growlers? Oh love making it. Yeah, going
Speaker 1: poop it just sounds so personal. I love it. I
Speaker 1: think it's great. Pooping sounds fantastic. We use that like
Speaker 1: that's what our what with our kids? Yeah, they need
Speaker 1: to poop, they're pooping. It's just like I feel like
Speaker 1: it's very family a family term it is, but taking
Speaker 1: a growler is a hunting term. I'm in laden. I've
Speaker 1: learned a lot so far. Well that's interesting. That's a
Speaker 1: very wordy way of saying. Um, yeah, you know, but
Speaker 1: I'm so happy that that's explained it just like it
Speaker 1: makes sense right, seem like not engaged. I've been thinking
Speaker 1: about poop a lot this fall because I've been, um,
Speaker 1: I've been hunting hungarian partridge a lot. So I'm just uh,
Speaker 1: you know, they like a covey of partridge. Huns will
Speaker 1: roost together, and they roost tails together, so when you
Speaker 1: find their roost, you actually find this neat little pile
Speaker 1: of poop um And I can't you know, they're tough
Speaker 1: to find. Bird. I have a great bird dog, but
Speaker 1: a lot of times you're just walking around looking for
Speaker 1: sign which are these little white tip dropping So the
Speaker 1: same thing they come in, they back, they back into
Speaker 1: each other and make a little circle and make a
Speaker 1: little collective like poop group. No, I was not disinterested.
Speaker 1: I was lost in thought, you know, doing my poet thing.
Speaker 1: How do we getting out of that? How best? How
Speaker 1: best to to get get to our subject matter at hand? Well,
Speaker 1: I could tell you why I think huns are the No,
Speaker 1: not that. Oh, what is our subject I want to
Speaker 1: talk about? Uh? I want to talk about your book
Speaker 1: of course in bone fishing in general. Yeah, well that's
Speaker 1: what I was gonna say. I could tell you about
Speaker 1: how huns are the bones that do that. So I
Speaker 1: have been thinking about them a lot this fall, and
Speaker 1: and uh there's something to the um the seemingly uh
Speaker 1: mundane habitat and huns living you know, uh, grassy hillsides
Speaker 1: there their seat mostly seed eaters. They don't um, they
Speaker 1: don't need a whole lot of agriculture to survive. They're
Speaker 1: really hearty birds. Um. And they covey up. They group
Speaker 1: up a lot of times. You know, bone fish will
Speaker 1: uh we'll school up as well. But you're doing a
Speaker 1: very good job man. For the most part. The reason
Speaker 1: why I enjoy traversing that wide, wide country. It reminds
Speaker 1: me of being on the flats. You know, there's there
Speaker 1: are these what mcgwaen called these long silences you know
Speaker 1: between would you actually find a covey of birds when
Speaker 1: your dog goes on pointing. Uh, it's usually you know,
Speaker 1: right about when you think nothing's gonna happen. And then
Speaker 1: suddenly yeah, uh, I found some hunts. I shot some
Speaker 1: huns one time of my late buddy Eric that had
Speaker 1: their crops were full of um grasshoppers. Oh yeah, they
Speaker 1: that's their chief chief food in the in the early fall,
Speaker 1: and then they go to cheat grass after the hoppers,
Speaker 1: you know, die off for the My buddy told me
Speaker 1: he found one, uh clean one last year and the
Speaker 1: hunt had in its crop a grasshopper that was still
Speaker 1: kicking when he cleaned it. That doesn't surprise me, So
Speaker 1: it upsets me a little bit, but doesn't surprise for
Speaker 1: the just just like it'd be like a little bit startling,
Speaker 1: I guess cleaning the bird and there's a live grasshopper
Speaker 1: in there, Well, I wouldn't feel bad for him. Uh.
Speaker 1: You guys have all you I mean, as you've caught
Speaker 1: a whole pile of bone fish right April. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think I've caught a few. Never really yep, yeah, I
Speaker 1: always kind of poo pooed those things. Got a lot
Speaker 1: of white fish in my day. You can go if
Speaker 1: you're if you got something else to do, because we
Speaker 1: thought you'd caught bone fish. So oh really, yeah, I've
Speaker 1: seen him. I took a couple of casts one time, yeah,
Speaker 1: a few, though only a few. Fifteen years ago. I
Speaker 1: was down in Belize for I don't know, a couple
Speaker 1: of weeks and I maybe landed a half dozen. Okay, nice,
Speaker 1: So your butt Chrissy explains how that fish went from
Speaker 1: being it does a lot of things, but explains how
Speaker 1: like how that how the bone fish became a celebrity
Speaker 1: fish when it used to just be a what well,
Speaker 1: they threw it into piles that went into making dog
Speaker 1: food back in the day. You know, the commercial netters would,
Speaker 1: uh if bone fish ended up in their catch, they
Speaker 1: would basically throw it into a pile that went to
Speaker 1: uh to purina or or some other uh, you know,
Speaker 1: undesirable pile of fish, right uh. And that the evolution
Speaker 1: of that is really what, as you say, the book
Speaker 1: is about, at least on um on the surface level. Um.
Speaker 1: Why nineteen fifty one was when the first Bahamian bone
Speaker 1: fish lodge was erected, this guy named Art See I
Speaker 1: read the book, but I don't remember being that early really,
Speaker 1: so people in we were thinking like, oh, this is
Speaker 1: a cool fish to catch. Yeah, well, not very many people.
Speaker 1: There was wealthy Floridian guy named Gil Drake Um who
Speaker 1: had bone fish in the keys. There were a few
Speaker 1: guys that had bone fishing the keys. Now most most
Speaker 1: people that kind of famed Bahamian bone fish guy. This
Speaker 1: guy named Crazy Charlie Smith. You know that Crazy Church
Speaker 1: is the fly everyone knows about. But I got I
Speaker 1: got a small problem. Yes, what's the guy's name again?
Speaker 1: Because here's the guy you got me thinking, the guy
Speaker 1: that shot the moose and got in trouble. Guess what
Speaker 1: his name is? Gil Drake. No, he's got the perfect No,
Speaker 1: Rusty counts. Rusty counts. That sounds like, yeah, Rusty counts. Okay,
Speaker 1: So Gil Drake, Okay, so Gil Drake. And about nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty one, I actually had to listen to this book
Speaker 1: on audio book to remind myself of a few things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I hadn't read it in a couple of years, so
Speaker 1: I had to re requain myself. But uh, fifty one
Speaker 1: sounds right. Gil Drake was this wealthy Floridian guy who
Speaker 1: lived in Palm Beach in his is um. His wife
Speaker 1: basically fronted into money, uh to go down to the
Speaker 1: Bahamas and build a lodge um and he you know,
Speaker 1: the flight from Palm beach to the east end of
Speaker 1: Graham Bahama is really thirty five forty minutes, right, So
Speaker 1: he found this at the far east end of the archipelago,
Speaker 1: this little island that was that came to be called
Speaker 1: Deepwater Key. And uh after a few months of being
Speaker 1: down there, he hired a man named David Pender, who
Speaker 1: who he hired to basically uh cleaned the island of
Speaker 1: mangroves and helped them lug rock and and you know
Speaker 1: rudimentary construction project. But soon he found out that Pender,
Speaker 1: who had been born and raised on this tiny little island,
Speaker 1: uh knew a lot about where the bone fish lived.
Speaker 1: Right for what reason? Just be he I mean, he
Speaker 1: grew up foraging. He was a shore for his father
Speaker 1: had been a sponger, you know, and had drifted uh
Speaker 1: uh kind of islands, islands, island. Pender says in the
Speaker 1: book the sponger like got to collect sponges from the
Speaker 1: exactly and that's not ornamental, right, that's for sponge. They
Speaker 1: were so yeah, they were selling them for sponges. Um.
Speaker 1: Pender contends that that the sponges were over harvested at
Speaker 1: one point. Uh, so you know, he was basically a
Speaker 1: sponger's son who had spent in an ordinarate amount of
Speaker 1: timeand this tiny little island at the east end of
Speaker 1: Grand Bahama, and so he knew where the bonefish lived.
Speaker 1: He was basically be mused when uh Drake said, you
Speaker 1: think you could show us where to catch them because
Speaker 1: of you know, of what use was a bone fish? Right?
Speaker 1: They were uh tedious to eat at best, you know,
Speaker 1: and there was snapper plentiful and and uh lobsters and whatnot.
Speaker 1: So we talked about this that in Hawaii they make
Speaker 1: a ground up patty. They're not bad. I've I've eaten one,
Speaker 1: I mean, but regardless, one thing we gotta do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: somebody needs to explain, like what a bone fish isn't
Speaker 1: where it lives. I can do it, go for it,
Speaker 1: all right? Well, so it's a um you know, the
Speaker 1: bone fish is a a sport fish. Now it's really
Speaker 1: average is about three to five pounds. Um. It's a
Speaker 1: fish that lives in deep water. Looks to you know,
Speaker 1: the Western I or even the Midwestern I like a whitefish. Basically,
Speaker 1: if you caught Lake Superior whitefish in Michigan, or you
Speaker 1: caught Rocky Mountain whitefish, Um. The bonefish looks very very similar. UM.
Speaker 1: It can travel with speeds of up to thirty miles
Speaker 1: an hour. UM. So it's a you know, a super
Speaker 1: sporty fish when hooked right, UM strong strong, kind of
Speaker 1: straight ahead laser sharp runs. Not not real. UM. It
Speaker 1: doesn't make a whole lot of buck rockets when you
Speaker 1: hook them. The line going through the water, I cameber
Speaker 1: I came up with this somewhere else? Did I don't know,
Speaker 1: Maybe I stole it from someone. When that fish takes
Speaker 1: off and your lines caught in the water, it sounds
Speaker 1: like someone ripping news print. Yeah, that is exactly what
Speaker 1: it sounds like. If you did steal that. That's a
Speaker 1: good theft. Um. You you actually in the chapter I'm
Speaker 1: kind of describing the physicality of the bone fish. I
Speaker 1: quote a bit from Meat either the book. You have
Speaker 1: a great line where you say their nose looks like
Speaker 1: the working in of a rechargeable vacuum. I finger like
Speaker 1: your mas va, your mom's the kind of vacuum like
Speaker 1: stick in the wall with tell. I forget what those
Speaker 1: are called, but dust something and that's not so that's
Speaker 1: not um anyway. So they live um for the most
Speaker 1: part in deep water where they're rarely caught, but they
Speaker 1: come onto the flats defeats, so the saltwater flats being
Speaker 1: ankle to knee deep really um and and exceptionally clear. Uh.
Speaker 1: They eat crabs, they eat shrimp, they little benthic worms,
Speaker 1: They eat sea urchins, they eat small perch. They even
Speaker 1: eat small bone fish. There's a great story in here
Speaker 1: where this old guy, David Pender who I mentioned, uh,
Speaker 1: just catches a bone fish that has a small a
Speaker 1: twelve pound bone fish that has a one pound bone fish, uh,
Speaker 1: actually still alive and in its in its belly. Um,
Speaker 1: it's the only fish you can maybe that's the only one.
Speaker 1: But when a very few fish you can track down.
Speaker 1: Oh sure, yeah, because they leave signs. They leave signs.
Speaker 1: They go up and go into the mud and make
Speaker 1: a little looks like it looks like someone like kind
Speaker 1: of jammed golf ball down on the ground and pulled
Speaker 1: it back out again, and you'd be like, oh, they've
Speaker 1: been through here. Yeah, you see like dark gray patches
Speaker 1: the MUDs everywhere. Yeah, and then those little little what
Speaker 1: you call little divot rootings, Yeah, little rootings. But they
Speaker 1: don't you know, they don't jump. I think they are
Speaker 1: certainly fast, but they they're probably best renowned for their speed,
Speaker 1: right and their and their strengths for their size. And
Speaker 1: I think at the time when Gil Drake this this
Speaker 1: Floridian was thinking he could make a fishing lodge based
Speaker 1: on this bone fish, it was their their fickleness, you know,
Speaker 1: they're the difficulty um of pursuit that kind of made
Speaker 1: them a target as a sport fish. Um. I'm assuming
Speaker 1: he never fished permit, you know, he would have, he
Speaker 1: would have chanced upon him in the keys. Um. His
Speaker 1: wife actually became an actually his son's wife, Into Drake,
Speaker 1: became an incredible keys guide, and Fat Harrison used to
Speaker 1: fish with her. Um. Do you do you don't recognize
Speaker 1: that name, Linda Drake? Yeah, she she was. She was.
Speaker 1: She also guided for this lodge where, um, most of
Speaker 1: the book takes place, called Deepwater key. Um. Yeah. So anyway,
Speaker 1: this old old man, David pender Um started guiding basically
Speaker 1: for five dollars a day, and yeah, five bucks a day,
Speaker 1: five bucks a day, right, um, And he had been
Speaker 1: working at a some kind of a missile detection site
Speaker 1: near Freeport. You know, I'm making probably five bucks a month.
Speaker 1: So five bucks a day was just incredible raised for
Speaker 1: him and opportunity um and over the course of because
Speaker 1: there's a great story where he's like working there and
Speaker 1: he must just be doing hard labor too, and it's
Speaker 1: him and two other dudes, and that's when uh Rap
Speaker 1: comes up and he's looking for a strong, healthy worker
Speaker 1: and he's literally he doesn't know anything about these three
Speaker 1: men except just he's just sizing them up. And Pinner
Speaker 1: gets picked and he's like that that was the day
Speaker 1: of all my days. That was the moment that wasn't
Speaker 1: life changed? Right? It's an amazing It's a really a
Speaker 1: beautiful moment. I think, Um it was. I want to
Speaker 1: say it was whatever. Ruination Day is the same day
Speaker 1: the Titanic sank Um, the Titanic sinking has a name, yeah,
Speaker 1: Ruination Day, and it's based off the Titanic sinking. Well,
Speaker 1: I had this argument with with my editor actually because
Speaker 1: she said it was um it was a Gillian Welch
Speaker 1: phrase or invention, but whatever, the same day, same day
Speaker 1: Lincoln was assassinated, right and in the Titanic. Yeah, anyway,
Speaker 1: so man, the guy a shot Lincoln. What a nut
Speaker 1: job that guy was? Man, I didn't realize that I
Speaker 1: recently was watching something that I mean, you're obviously nut job,
Speaker 1: right man, But I mean just like, you know, it's
Speaker 1: kind of like a drunken derelict, you know, total loser.
Speaker 1: You can't believe it even besides, like how bad you
Speaker 1: are to kill a man, let alone kill the president.
Speaker 1: But in addition, it was just like a drunken Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're walked into the playhouse. Drunken theater. Guy, go ahead, though,
Speaker 1: all right, I will see if anybody had any doubts
Speaker 1: whether or not the assassin. But I could be like,
Speaker 1: now there's a fine specimen of a gentleman did Yeah,
Speaker 1: So it's Abraham Lincoln's assassination, the Titanic sinking and the
Speaker 1: Black Sunday dust one adds up to ruinations. There you go,
Speaker 1: and everybody's saying bad things happen in threes. And then
Speaker 1: Gillian um First brought attention to this historical confluence on
Speaker 1: her two thousand one album Time Good Yeah, okay, now
Speaker 1: remind me, remind me the guy that goes down and
Speaker 1: he and he opens the thing up to try to
Speaker 1: establish a fishery, right, Gil Drake? Does he need to
Speaker 1: because he's trying to take a fish that no one
Speaker 1: cares about and make people begin part of his job
Speaker 1: to market the fish. He needs like manufacture a clientele. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but he's still decades really away ahead of himself as
Speaker 1: far as acts concerned. I mean, this is the fifties.
Speaker 1: So um, he's really just putting up a cool place
Speaker 1: for he and his buds to go hang out. Um,
Speaker 1: but he thinks it's fun and doesn't care if you
Speaker 1: think it's fun exactly. He's he's fronted, his wife's fronted
Speaker 1: in the money. He's he's going to go down and
Speaker 1: enjoy himself and and then um, the fishery kind of
Speaker 1: begins to take off, um, and and some crazy things coinside. Uh.
Speaker 1: Timing wise, so as the rise of f ye fishing
Speaker 1: uh for bone fish starts to happen, Um, we're also
Speaker 1: looking at the height of the Columbian drug cartel. Right,
Speaker 1: so um, you know Deepwater Key becomes this destination probably
Speaker 1: next to uh Charlie Smith's Bang Bang Club, the great
Speaker 1: Bahamian bone fish destination at the time. Right, what's Charlie
Speaker 1: Smith's Bank Bank Club that's over on Androws. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: over on Andrews and Charlie Smith is probably the real famed. Uh.
Speaker 1: If you ask people who started bone fishing, who was
Speaker 1: the first Bahamian bone fish guy, almost everybody will say
Speaker 1: Charlie Smith. They won't say David Pinder, who is at
Speaker 1: the center of this book and actually was the first guy.
Speaker 1: But there's really Pinder has that that's a generational family,
Speaker 1: right because I was guided by a Pinder when I
Speaker 1: was there. Yeahah, you might have been guided by William.
Speaker 1: You might have been guided by Joseph. His two sons,
Speaker 1: David Jr. And Jeffrey guide up out of Freeport. They're all,
Speaker 1: you know, incredible. And then, um, third generation is a
Speaker 1: guy named Miko Glinton, who's who's people know from his
Speaker 1: his YouTube world and his I mean I think he
Speaker 1: and I fished. Yeah, we fished for a day and
Speaker 1: he would do this like he does the Michael Jackson turns.
Speaker 1: He'll do a cast and the in between castle do this,
Speaker 1: you know, Michael Jackson turned on the bat with the
Speaker 1: boat and complete his cast. Yeah. Yeah, it's incredible. He
Speaker 1: can throw his he can throw the whole line with
Speaker 1: just his hands, you know. Um, so yeah, Miko is
Speaker 1: third generation and um, you know the book. I'm getting
Speaker 1: ahead of myself. But if we go back to the seventies,
Speaker 1: Gil Drake's son comes around, becomes this also a great
Speaker 1: young guide in the area, and um, bone fishes. The
Speaker 1: bone fish is like a viable sport fish. Now suddenly
Speaker 1: people are traveling to to the Bahamas to you know,
Speaker 1: catch this fish. Right. Um. Meantime, the Bohemian economy is
Speaker 1: in the tank, right Yeah, we're just getting to the
Speaker 1: drug cartel. So we're still I mean, some people like
Speaker 1: Prime Minister Linden Pindling are getting exceptionally rich, you know,
Speaker 1: taking bribes from from the cartel, but everybody else is, um,
Speaker 1: it's floundering. And about that time someone discovers that the
Speaker 1: bone fish is the reason people are coming to You know,
Speaker 1: we didn't use they didn't use the term eco tourism
Speaker 1: back then, but um, someone had a good sense to say, look,
Speaker 1: we can keep giving the Colombians all this money, um
Speaker 1: or all this you know, play in the islands, or
Speaker 1: we can kick them out all together and see if
Speaker 1: our economy can actually be based on this this fish.
Speaker 1: So as it would turn out in two thousand and ten,
Speaker 1: that same fish that Pender guided toward for five bucks
Speaker 1: a day in the fifties. The bone fish is a
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty one million dollar industry tourism wise per
Speaker 1: year in the Bahamas is then the Bahamas alone, So
Speaker 1: it's and that's you know, eight hundred thousand people, maybe
Speaker 1: nine thousand now, but it's the it's the crux of
Speaker 1: of their eco tourism industry. Um, and what's one day
Speaker 1: of flats fishing out there right now? I want to
Speaker 1: say it's seven seven bucks. Now, maybe there's a friend
Speaker 1: of mine who did what it cost to go fish.
Speaker 1: That's what it cost to go up and stay at
Speaker 1: a lodge and fish in Alaska right bcs it lodges.
Speaker 1: They do a lot of you know, week long packages.
Speaker 1: So it's great for the entire economy there. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: the can you still do like? I don't know why
Speaker 1: you wouldn't be able to? Like in ninety six, my
Speaker 1: brother flew to Cancun, took a bus to apply Adele
Speaker 1: Carmen and then ball shiploads of beans and rice and
Speaker 1: a bunch of water and just walked and slept on
Speaker 1: the beach and fish bone fish And you'd like now
Speaker 1: and then run into do it? Who was doing it?
Speaker 1: But it wasn't like a thing people were doing. So
Speaker 1: just do I y on the beach has complicated that
Speaker 1: a couple of years ago. I mean you could still
Speaker 1: do it in Mexico. You can still do it and believe. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So if we go if we take that, uh, that
Speaker 1: five dollars a day in the fifties, and we compare
Speaker 1: it to the seven per guy day today seven dollars
Speaker 1: seven hundred and nine dollars per day. Um. According to
Speaker 1: this Econ guy that I talked to, nothing but gold
Speaker 1: has appreciated more in that span of time. So you
Speaker 1: take this fish that was basically thrown away, uh, discarded
Speaker 1: into piles for dog food whatnot, and it literally becomes
Speaker 1: the crux of this whole whole country's economy, gets him
Speaker 1: out from under uh the drug cartels, um, you know,
Speaker 1: the shadow of the drug cartel. And really now that
Speaker 1: we're talking the third generation of Bahamian guides, uh helps
Speaker 1: a country becomes self sufficient. Um. This guy Prescott Smith,
Speaker 1: who's uh, go ahead, you can take You can take
Speaker 1: this on later if you want. Um. Is the money
Speaker 1: phone to Bohemians or is it all phone to Americans?
Speaker 1: Good question, because take that when you want, well, I'll
Speaker 1: take it on now is about where I was gonna go.
Speaker 1: So um, Prescott Smith is the son of Charlie Smith,
Speaker 1: that crazy Charlie guy, right, And what's Prescott? He's a
Speaker 1: bohemian yet and he's funny. I didn't want to I was.
Speaker 1: Oliver White recently corrected me. I said, oh, is your
Speaker 1: wife bohemian? He said, bohemian? Right, it is. It's easy
Speaker 1: to confuse it to you. A fact. When I was
Speaker 1: working on this book, I must have said bohemian a
Speaker 1: few times, and people thought, like, God, this guy. I
Speaker 1: knew this guy was weird, but I didn't think even
Speaker 1: that weird to write a book about bohemian. If crazy
Speaker 1: Charlie was a local, yeah, so crazy Charlie. He has
Speaker 1: a famous lodge over on Androws, and his son Prescott
Speaker 1: has become the voice of this second third generation of
Speaker 1: guy's basically saying we have to get these lodges out
Speaker 1: from under the ownership of these wealthy um Floridian dudes
Speaker 1: or or or wherever they're from, and we need to
Speaker 1: we need to own these lodges because only if we
Speaker 1: own them will the conservation be uh. The necessary choices
Speaker 1: in conservation he made right. Um, he talks. That's a
Speaker 1: bold statement. It is man, and he's a he's a
Speaker 1: hated dude in a lot of ways. UM. You you
Speaker 1: asked about the UM, can you just get a bag
Speaker 1: of beans and rice and go kind of dirt bag it? Uh.
Speaker 1: In the last couple of years, the Bahamas UH passed
Speaker 1: the law that basically said you can't do that. And
Speaker 1: when I was in the Bahamas, I mean I did
Speaker 1: a lot of d I I knew that when I
Speaker 1: was going there. You still couldn't guide there as you know,
Speaker 1: if you weren't from there, but you could do it yourself.
Speaker 1: So they've changed that in the last few years. In
Speaker 1: the last few years, I shouldn't say this, Well, that's
Speaker 1: the thing. It's not. I was actually down there. We
Speaker 1: went down as a family, UM to celebrate the book
Speaker 1: with this whole town, this little town of maybe three
Speaker 1: people called mcclean's town, and that's where David Pender lives.
Speaker 1: We went down to celebrate the publication of and I
Speaker 1: wanted to take Luca our son bone fishing, so UM
Speaker 1: I had to get him a license. But no one
Speaker 1: thought you needed to have a license. They thought the
Speaker 1: old rules were still in place, so to find the
Speaker 1: actual license was as a classic high jinks of like,
Speaker 1: you know, island time, you should go over see Steve. Well,
Speaker 1: Steve told me to go over see April. You know,
Speaker 1: blah blah blah. Um. So no one appears to be
Speaker 1: monitoring it, but I had We had an argument in
Speaker 1: the Bahamas, uh, and I don't want to say where,
Speaker 1: because it's kind of not a place, not when people
Speaker 1: go to. We had an argument in the Bahamas with
Speaker 1: the guy we were rent in a house from where
Speaker 1: he was insulted when we suggested the need for a
Speaker 1: fishing license, and was especially insulted when we when we
Speaker 1: mentioned that there was uh distances from the land where
Speaker 1: you cannot spearfish, and he's like, didn't not that he
Speaker 1: didn't like the law, was like insulted that we would
Speaker 1: be so stupid as to bring up the idea that
Speaker 1: someone could possibly even make that law. Yes, I had
Speaker 1: the same conversation with a gentleman who who thought that
Speaker 1: going to try to buy a license was the stupidest thing.
Speaker 1: But you know, he's like, he's you're telling me that
Speaker 1: there's no way it could be true that you can't
Speaker 1: use spearfish where you want money, that's great anyway. So
Speaker 1: Prescott Smith has become a kind of a controversial figure.
Speaker 1: But what he talks a lot about conservation wise. Um,
Speaker 1: the Bahamian Archipelago is a fascinating um geological specimen. If
Speaker 1: you will, right, if you um, if you want to
Speaker 1: forego you're ambient tonight, just pick up a book on
Speaker 1: Bahamian geology. Um, it's it's a real sleeper. But everything
Speaker 1: but every like five pages or something, you you discover
Speaker 1: some really cool things. For one, UM, slavery didn't really
Speaker 1: take in the Bahamas. Um, the Bahamas had a um
Speaker 1: way different narrative in terms of colonialism than most of
Speaker 1: the Caribbean. Uh because culturally it wasn't suitable ground to
Speaker 1: grow cane both but the latter for the most part.
Speaker 1: So for the same reason that cane didn't grow there.
Speaker 1: The limestone. Right, Um, we we get this thing called
Speaker 1: the freshwater lens. So obviously the islands exists in salt water,
Speaker 1: but rain falls onto limestone and basically percolates through the
Speaker 1: tiny um holes in limestone and then spreads out and
Speaker 1: makes what's called the freshwater lens. It's like a meniscus
Speaker 1: of freshwater that um allow the mangroves to flourish, floats
Speaker 1: on top of the salt water. It floats on top
Speaker 1: of it. Yet is that why when we were catching
Speaker 1: baby tarp and they were saying it was I mean
Speaker 1: I knew it was brackish. Yeah, That's exactly why I
Speaker 1: was hearing how they could have how they could have
Speaker 1: brackish water in that area. So that's how it doesn't
Speaker 1: make any sense until you, you know, see this gigantic
Speaker 1: map of so. Prescott Smith is a huge proponent of
Speaker 1: preserving these freshwater lens is because they are the places
Speaker 1: where mangroves can flourish. And if you can get mangroves
Speaker 1: to flourish, you can get you know, the bait fish
Speaker 1: to flourish, the lobsters which they commercially fish for to
Speaker 1: flourish all of these things. Um, when that freshwater lens
Speaker 1: is destroyed, uh, basically according to Prescott and really um,
Speaker 1: this other biologist named Andy Danield Chuck who works at
Speaker 1: you Mask you know, so he was you know a
Speaker 1: great content that study, that study that they did, he
Speaker 1: and his wife, Right, they did that incredible study. Right,
Speaker 1: I mean, he's probably one of the people I talked
Speaker 1: to scientifically the most while while working on his book,
Speaker 1: and he helped establish, you know, the value of these.
Speaker 1: I read the whole paper. It was fascinesting it is.
Speaker 1: It just starts saying body of water instead of the book,
Speaker 1: so it burns into people's head. Thank you. What the
Speaker 1: name of the story is the body of Water? Two
Speaker 1: things about the freshwater lens body of water. I have
Speaker 1: often in body Water you mentioned the freshwater lens. Um, dude.
Speaker 1: I spent a lot of time puzzling over how in
Speaker 1: the hell, Like, let's say you see a little island.
Speaker 1: It's got mangroves on it, but there's no fresh water,
Speaker 1: there's no pond, there's no creek. I've often been like,
Speaker 1: how in the world does that things survive? That's what
Speaker 1: I'm wondering. So is that is that a Is that
Speaker 1: a lens there? It's possible that there is one. But
Speaker 1: mangroves are really like the most hardy plant you'll ever
Speaker 1: come across. I mean, they can live basically underwater. Their
Speaker 1: roots poke up and kind of snorkel for air, you know.
Speaker 1: They um they can store salt water and shed it
Speaker 1: basically through dead leaves, so they're an incredible survivor. Um.
Speaker 1: I don't know that you know direct answer to that question,
Speaker 1: but but I would say the kind of tenacity of
Speaker 1: mangroves has something something to do with it. Can they
Speaker 1: clip all their freshwater from the simple rain? It's got
Speaker 1: to be that, right. This second point is you talk
Speaker 1: about saltwater, how freshwater float on saltwater. I dove in
Speaker 1: a in a body water in the Philippines where there
Speaker 1: are freshwater species, and then you dive down and there
Speaker 1: are saltwater species because it's like it's a freshwater lake
Speaker 1: that has an out like like like a cave entrance
Speaker 1: that leads out into the ocean. And so there's there's
Speaker 1: these like sicklids that are up in the freshwater portion,
Speaker 1: but then down in the saltwater portion you'll run into
Speaker 1: barricoot and other stuff that come in and out. You
Speaker 1: can dive down through and the temperature changes unbelievable. Do
Speaker 1: they have blue holes down there? It was like one
Speaker 1: of it was one of those. They didn't call it that,
Speaker 1: but it was it was like a blue hole setup. Right,
Speaker 1: there's a few of those around. Somehow these freshwater fish
Speaker 1: got established in that these freshwater fish somehow got established
Speaker 1: in there and formed like a little population. You dive down,
Speaker 1: the water's warm and you dive down in there, and
Speaker 1: also the water is like frigid, and there's that open
Speaker 1: ocean salt water. But that somehow that that that body
Speaker 1: of water fresh water on top of the well. So
Speaker 1: I mean, if you if you imagine this, this table
Speaker 1: here is is an island in the Bahamas. Whenever a
Speaker 1: piece of ground is developed, an infrastructure is put in,
Speaker 1: they basically have to cut into that limestone and when
Speaker 1: they do that, they destroy that freshwater lens. So if
Speaker 1: you look at um places like zuma Um where the
Speaker 1: fishery has kind of been uh destroyed by resorts and such,
Speaker 1: that's what guys like Prescott Smith are trying to stop
Speaker 1: from happening, and really are are allowed in the guiding
Speaker 1: community UM because they want to take this Bahamian resource
Speaker 1: and keep it a Bohemian resource. They don't want, you
Speaker 1: know what what has happened for generations. Someone comes in,
Speaker 1: build something, mess is something up, leaves, it goes somewhere else,
Speaker 1: and mess is something up. You know, they don't want
Speaker 1: that same process. Are our bone fishing resorts doing that
Speaker 1: level of development. Like when I think of a bone
Speaker 1: fishing place, I think I'm being real chill, Well, how
Speaker 1: long does it take for that so when you dig
Speaker 1: up the flats bottom? I mean I heard it takes
Speaker 1: an astronomical amount of time for it to get all
Speaker 1: of its nutrients backs. Right, how long does it take
Speaker 1: to do that? Well, I mean all, I would say,
Speaker 1: exponentially longer than it takes to destroy it. So a
Speaker 1: little tiny island like deep water Key Sorry, um, that's
Speaker 1: like a two square mile island. I think you know
Speaker 1: they proposed the economic well being on the island is
Speaker 1: it was for a long time owned by a guy
Speaker 1: that you know, we talked this about this but um
Speaker 1: on the island, and they proposed putting in I think
Speaker 1: a hundred houses. So that would that would do it?
Speaker 1: I mean that would, um, a hundred houses would on
Speaker 1: a two mile island basically damage significantly that habitat nearest
Speaker 1: the island. Now, everyone wants a dock, right, everyone wants
Speaker 1: a dock. And if you look at the damage that
Speaker 1: all of those docks do, it's it is unbelievable. And
Speaker 1: then you get the outboards you've ever seen all the scrapes, yeah, Chris,
Speaker 1: especially when you're flying over that kind of when you're
Speaker 1: flying over those flats and see all those out, those
Speaker 1: engine scars out, and those take forever to repair. I
Speaker 1: saw recently. So the guys want to build a house.
Speaker 1: They're trying. They want to do like a golf course model. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: basically come down in golf fish, right. I mean, the
Speaker 1: notion that a small island could support kind of a
Speaker 1: an ocean reef club sized development is crazy. But over
Speaker 1: and over and over, management the management of this small
Speaker 1: island changed hands, and as changed hands, you suddenly somebody
Speaker 1: needed to make more money in the endeavor than the
Speaker 1: last guy did, right, Um, And so uh essentially, as
Speaker 1: the as we find it in the book Body of Water, Um,
Speaker 1: the island itself is at an impass, and um the
Speaker 1: community is is about to be uh damaged by what
Speaker 1: might transpire. Right. So um. David Pender, who was was
Speaker 1: the original guide, he goes basically through Um he becomes famous,
Speaker 1: if you will, as a guy. He's he guides like
Speaker 1: a J. McClain and Joe Brooks and all the famed
Speaker 1: you know, magazine stars of the day. And they come
Speaker 1: down and they write about him and he makes deepwater
Speaker 1: key what it is, the the great destination of Bahamian
Speaker 1: bonefish lodges. But there's there's kind of a caveat as
Speaker 1: he's as he's working all these decades, he's not wearing
Speaker 1: polarized glasses, so he's developing severe cataracts on his eyes.
Speaker 1: And as the lodge itself grows kind of into fame, uh,
Speaker 1: his site declines and he's eventually you know, ship can
Speaker 1: by the lodge and given a severance of I want
Speaker 1: to say, eighteen thousand dollars is the amount they gave
Speaker 1: him for forty year or so years of service, which
Speaker 1: um was the severance back that was you know, a
Speaker 1: dollar an extra dollar twenty five a day. We should
Speaker 1: point out here that the that these fish, and you
Speaker 1: can talk about this as well, um, the preferred way
Speaker 1: of catching them just to see them, yes, see them,
Speaker 1: stalk them and cast him. I mean I've caught him
Speaker 1: out just like dicking around too. But yeah, if you're
Speaker 1: one vision, one's vision. I was just saying, one's eyesight
Speaker 1: is quite important. Absolutely, yeah. I mean apparently Pender was
Speaker 1: so skilled at finding these fish that one lodge owner
Speaker 1: said he hears the fish, he doesn't need to see them.
Speaker 1: But um, you know it was a knack to it
Speaker 1: for sure. Man like spotting fish. It's huge. Like people,
Speaker 1: you can be like no right there, no, no, no no,
Speaker 1: no right there, right there there. It's like spot mule deer.
Speaker 1: But it's not the prefer I just want to say, like,
Speaker 1: it's not the as fly fisherman to people, you know,
Speaker 1: think we're just trying to make it harder. It's not
Speaker 1: the preferred method. It's it's the most efficient method. So
Speaker 1: if you could, you could blindcast all day and don't
Speaker 1: get me wrong, when you find a whole school of
Speaker 1: bone fish and they're mudding up, you can cast into
Speaker 1: that enormous mess of fishing and you'll catch a bunch
Speaker 1: of little I mean catch them out of channels because
Speaker 1: they travel the channels. Yeah, but you know you're gonna
Speaker 1: be blindcasting all day long. You're gonna be much more
Speaker 1: productive if you start pulling the flats and you're siting them,
Speaker 1: and then you can preferred because it's more productive. Because
Speaker 1: if I said it's more productive to blow them up
Speaker 1: with dynamite, that doesn't mean you're going to blow them
Speaker 1: up with dynamite. I would actually argue it's more that
Speaker 1: it's still more productive to fly fish for them then
Speaker 1: blowing up up with dynamite. Okay, He's like, No, the
Speaker 1: fishery is what it is is because people want to
Speaker 1: go down and site fish for the fish. They're not
Speaker 1: like I want to catch a bone fish and I
Speaker 1: don't care if I'm if I'm out in a hundred
Speaker 1: feet of water with a pound of lead and a
Speaker 1: live shrimp. They're not. They want to come down and
Speaker 1: they want to see that fish. If you prefer to
Speaker 1: come down and see that fish and stalk that fish
Speaker 1: and present fly whatever four ft off the end of
Speaker 1: its nose firs, and you're not gonna scare the ship
Speaker 1: out of it and have it pick it up. Like
Speaker 1: that's the thing. If he's like all cunning and I
Speaker 1: and I it was a tough day, you know, And
Speaker 1: I said, I'm gonna give you a heat seeking bullet
Speaker 1: and you can safely shoot it onto that mountain side
Speaker 1: and it will find you know, the wouldn't do it.
Speaker 1: I don't big we talk, So my only point I
Speaker 1: mean to derail the conversation. But I was just saying,
Speaker 1: like when the dude loses his right like waynes you're
Speaker 1: kind of but as I say, Wayne is according to
Speaker 1: the ownership at this lodge. And this is the you know,
Speaker 1: this is the point in the book where he becomes
Speaker 1: kind of that that you know, the classic archetypal figure
Speaker 1: that was cast aside. Right, he helped basically, he literally
Speaker 1: built the place with his hands. And then when he
Speaker 1: becomes a little yes, less useful, he's cast aside. So
Speaker 1: he um, he takes on a little bit of this
Speaker 1: this mythic quality. And and as I would discover, he actually, um,
Speaker 1: he didn't lose his sight altogether. We fished together quite
Speaker 1: a few times, and he was just as good as
Speaker 1: a spotting bone fishes, um as you or I would be,
Speaker 1: because he could hear him, I don't know, he could
Speaker 1: send them somehow, or or his eyes healed up. He
Speaker 1: got cataract surgery and didn't tell anyone. You know, there's
Speaker 1: a there are a few kind of mysterious missing pieces
Speaker 1: in the in the narrative. Um, not missing because I
Speaker 1: didn't research them, but missing because I got different answers
Speaker 1: from you know, different people. Um, how what what even
Speaker 1: brought you down there in first place? Were you trying
Speaker 1: to work down there? No, I my original uh tripped
Speaker 1: down there was on a how to Are aware two
Speaker 1: piece for you know, Outside magazine, And um, I had
Speaker 1: an old friend and old client. I'm sure you how
Speaker 1: long have you been guiding or were you guiding before you?
Speaker 1: So you probably have a large group of people you
Speaker 1: would consider your friends, right, that you have from your
Speaker 1: client set. So I had this awesome client, a guy
Speaker 1: named Jeff Miller who grew up in St. Louis and
Speaker 1: had fished at Deepwater Key from the late seventies early eighties. Um,
Speaker 1: and when I went down there, he said, you gotta
Speaker 1: meet this guy, David Pinner. He's he's the guy that
Speaker 1: started at all. If you if you really want to
Speaker 1: write about bone fishing in the Bahamas, you need to
Speaker 1: know David Pinder. Of course, you know. I went down
Speaker 1: with the hopes of dashing off an article and fishing
Speaker 1: the rest of the time myself, right, Um, But on
Speaker 1: subsequent trips I would bring groups of clients down. On
Speaker 1: subsequent trips, I met Pender and spent a lot more
Speaker 1: time with him and realized that he was one of
Speaker 1: those kind of singular dudes, I mean, a person who
Speaker 1: has spent his entire life on a two mile island.
Speaker 1: I mean he grew up foraging for snails and crabs
Speaker 1: and whatever he could find. Um lived on the same
Speaker 1: plot of land that entire time. So um, the more
Speaker 1: more time I spend down there, the more time I
Speaker 1: realized that he he was the subject of whatever this
Speaker 1: this book might be. And when you say you brought
Speaker 1: people down like you were a promoter, no, I was
Speaker 1: a host. I just hosted a group of my clients
Speaker 1: who wanted to go down and bone fish at this lodge.
Speaker 1: What's that relationship look like? It looks good if you
Speaker 1: get it for free? I mean, yeah, so if you
Speaker 1: get eight people, then um, you get to go for
Speaker 1: free and then cut your check for whatever. The April
Speaker 1: used to do that, right, But I also heart well, no,
Speaker 1: and I used to do. I've done trips to the
Speaker 1: Bahamas and Belize and yeah, and I'd get a check,
Speaker 1: But I also would sit there and I wouldn't fish,
Speaker 1: and yeah, that's right. But I would host these trips
Speaker 1: and unless my client caught a permit, for example, I'd
Speaker 1: be sitting on the boat being like, oh, and I
Speaker 1: don't know about you, but my clients are great steelhead fishermen,
Speaker 1: they're not all great in a flat boat. So I
Speaker 1: did a lot of just sitting and watching. What do
Speaker 1: you mean you would be like anxious about them being successful?
Speaker 1: But no, I no, yes, no, I couldn't catch a fish. Professionally,
Speaker 1: I didn't feel comfortable fishing until my clients had caught
Speaker 1: a fish. I mean, there are two different kinds of hosts.
Speaker 1: There are some hosts that that don't have that same consideration.
Speaker 1: I felt it would be a professional courtesy to take
Speaker 1: a back seat. What are they asking of you though,
Speaker 1: to talk to them and just give them advice. So
Speaker 1: these be people like in your in your case you
Speaker 1: guys steelhead clients, you become friend professional friendly with the
Speaker 1: clients and they say, man, I would love to go
Speaker 1: fish bone fish, but I'm not comfortable just going down
Speaker 1: there and cold rolling in Like you're be my host
Speaker 1: so that I have a familiar face when I arrive
Speaker 1: and when we arrange everything right, So it's not even
Speaker 1: so April is going, I'm gonna make sure we're going
Speaker 1: with the right operation. They got the right boat. We're
Speaker 1: going to make sure that we're weve gotten in with
Speaker 1: the right tides and the right you know, guides and
Speaker 1: when something goes wrong, it's kind of on you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you've been there before, right, you sussed it out.
Speaker 1: You know how to get from the plane to the
Speaker 1: shuttle to the lodge. And have you done this? M
Speaker 1: It's something I'd no longer do. Um. I find it
Speaker 1: really exhausting. It's a lot of work. Yeah, and well
Speaker 1: it depends on I mean a lot of my clients
Speaker 1: are amazing and for their friends, you know, it's a
Speaker 1: great time. But you you still have to be on
Speaker 1: And I don't know, did you did you take a
Speaker 1: back seat? I wouldn't do a great business. No, no,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't do it again. I wouldn't do it again.
Speaker 1: How many times you do it enough? A dozen't? Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know half it doesn't. I think it's a young
Speaker 1: five fishing guy though. Boy was something you dreamed about? Man,
Speaker 1: Because you get at that point, Oh yeah, you're here
Speaker 1: like senior guys talking about doing these trips and you're
Speaker 1: like if that sounds like paradise? Oh yeah, but you
Speaker 1: end up you know it. Your your commission gets put
Speaker 1: towards air fare and stuff, and yeah, you don't make
Speaker 1: any money off of it, and you get to a
Speaker 1: point as you get older, I think you're like, I
Speaker 1: would rather pay to not have dude take a Yeah you,
Speaker 1: I mean your guy. By the time I stopped doing it,
Speaker 1: we our family was growing. I didn't want to be
Speaker 1: going from the family at its best. It's a free
Speaker 1: week of fishing at it's best. Right. Yeah, So it's
Speaker 1: so just so I'm understand the business right, it's more
Speaker 1: of a way because like guiding, I appreciate that guiding
Speaker 1: can be lucrative, but I gathered from the guides I
Speaker 1: know that it's a pretty it's like a bootstrap, it's seasonal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it could be a tough way to make a living.
Speaker 1: Just terms two thousand to uh, is that what you're saying? No, No,
Speaker 1: that wasn't. I wasn't referring to anyone's particularly. My sense
Speaker 1: of it is is that as a guide, it's like
Speaker 1: a great lifestyle that people want to do, but when
Speaker 1: it comes it's not like you know, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of guys out there that aren't meanting money. So it's
Speaker 1: the hosting do I'm understanding the business right. The hosting
Speaker 1: is the thing you do because you want to go
Speaker 1: down in your position. I would love to go down.
Speaker 1: No way, I'm going to spend the money on that.
Speaker 1: All I need to do to make it that I
Speaker 1: can go is to assemble this trip. It's usually I
Speaker 1: can't afford to pay that money to go on that.
Speaker 1: Here's what I'll do to make it happen. There are
Speaker 1: a number of book booking aige would you call a
Speaker 1: and sees that that's their whole business, right, the entire business.
Speaker 1: It's like it's another service that you can provide to
Speaker 1: your stable of clients that keeps them hanging out with you. Also, right,
Speaker 1: and so hey, I mean I've done it on the
Speaker 1: hunt side, and I mean really it's I mean, be honest,
Speaker 1: is doing a something very very similar every time he
Speaker 1: sets up a meat eator shoot, right, And you get
Speaker 1: a taste of it when you invite somebody out to
Speaker 1: hunt with you, and there's that kind of like gnawing
Speaker 1: feeling in the back of your head where you're like,
Speaker 1: I know I shouldn't feel this way, but I really
Speaker 1: want these guys to have success. I hope everything goes
Speaker 1: well this trip. I hope we at least see something
Speaker 1: that's not just total goat rope. The whole time. The
Speaker 1: difference is is if you bring one guest on the show,
Speaker 1: you have to deal with one person. But if you
Speaker 1: have ten guests, there's usually a sour apple in there somewhere,
Speaker 1: so it can make things interesting. Yeah, the lodge, the
Speaker 1: post phishing lodge dynamic does not always show people out
Speaker 1: their best. You know, April caught a twelve pounder. My
Speaker 1: biggest fish was five cow. Kind of permit, what everyone's disappointed?
Speaker 1: You did you see any permit? It turns into pretty
Speaker 1: much drivel pretty pretty quickly, I think, or even well,
Speaker 1: I wish they would have told me to bring that fly,
Speaker 1: you know. And you're like, or why is the host
Speaker 1: always getting the best guys? You know, that's a big
Speaker 1: one too. I've heard nightmare stories from different like or
Speaker 1: about different hosts. There's some great hosts and there's some
Speaker 1: real shitty hosts. So there, as we all know. I
Speaker 1: won't mention them, but yeah, there's some shitty one they're
Speaker 1: just selfishly trying to get that free trip. But there
Speaker 1: are other hosts who really care about your quality experience,
Speaker 1: and a lot of a lot of people who host
Speaker 1: trips own fly shops, so for them it's an opportunity
Speaker 1: for them to sell gear. Right. Oh, no, ship man,
Speaker 1: just like a neat little business you guys all got
Speaker 1: involved in. There's a work you know you're talking about,
Speaker 1: Like I think he almost said scam. No, No, there's
Speaker 1: a I was gonna name I want to name my
Speaker 1: daughter after my mother, but I wanted to name my
Speaker 1: daughter uh zinny uh And Zinnia is a word. It's
Speaker 1: a word that has to do with the guest host bond,
Speaker 1: the bond that forms between the guests and the host.
Speaker 1: And I believe it's somehow related to it comes from
Speaker 1: the action of a flower and the pollinator. Point being,
Speaker 1: I'm interested in this guesthole situation. Don't get too interested.
Speaker 1: It's really not that great. It's really not It was
Speaker 1: a way for me to get down to get back
Speaker 1: down there. I had a good buddy who he kind
Speaker 1: of was a fixer of sorts for destination lodges, right, um,
Speaker 1: And you could hire him and he would go hang
Speaker 1: out at your lodge and help kind of ferret out
Speaker 1: the usual crap that happens at those things. Right. Had
Speaker 1: a little bit of theft, a little bit and like
Speaker 1: not you know, taking cash under the table instead of
Speaker 1: running at through the books type of stuff. And and
Speaker 1: he had quite the experience out there in the Bahamas
Speaker 1: and and just taught. He's like, man, I he's like
Speaker 1: I had. He's like a part of the deal is
Speaker 1: like I could take a boat out and go fish
Speaker 1: and I he's like, but I didn't get to enjoy
Speaker 1: any of it because there was so much animosity between me,
Speaker 1: the white dude, and the staff, right the local guides. Um.
Speaker 1: And he said the friction was like nothing he had
Speaker 1: ever experienced. And but that's really what it was. It
Speaker 1: was during that time of like, hey, we gotta make
Speaker 1: sure that we control this industry and and because nobody's
Speaker 1: gonna take care of it the way we wanted to
Speaker 1: be taken care of. Yeah, yeah, no that I I
Speaker 1: saw that dynamic at work too, And um yeah, I
Speaker 1: think you know, Um, it's funny because funny you bring
Speaker 1: that up. Of all the things that reviewers talked about
Speaker 1: in regard to this book Body of Water, no one
Speaker 1: would no one would touch race, you know, even though
Speaker 1: it's definitely a subject in the book. So you write
Speaker 1: about race with the reviewers that want to talk about
Speaker 1: how it talks about race. Yeah, even sitting here right now,
Speaker 1: I don't want to talk about it. I mean stories,
Speaker 1: I've got stories for days. But I'm just like, okay,
Speaker 1: I got more tell me about Okay. Well, I mean
Speaker 1: there's it's not surprising to me to hear that there's
Speaker 1: a little racial tension between Well, there isn't every recreational economy,
Speaker 1: and it's not like necessarily black, white, brown, white, whatever
Speaker 1: it's you're from here, You're not from here. And even
Speaker 1: though I'm making my living off of this industry, it
Speaker 1: is totally totally hyper focused on people not from here
Speaker 1: as an American, and you're going to feel it. It's
Speaker 1: nothing to do with color, So it's more insider outsider,
Speaker 1: but it happens to be overlaid with race rather than
Speaker 1: being black versus white, right, I mean, according to Prescott Smith,
Speaker 1: the guy mentioned earlier, he all, he says he's different
Speaker 1: really Island Island. He says, you know, on on Androws,
Speaker 1: race relations are far more evolved than they are on
Speaker 1: say the east end of Graham Bahama, which I would
Speaker 1: gather after spending a lot of time, there's there's a
Speaker 1: lot more in the wilderness, if you will, right, Um,
Speaker 1: But with that kind of racial tension though, man, it does.
Speaker 1: It's there's a lot of it in Hawaii, and there's
Speaker 1: an inside. It's insider outsider, but it's also not because
Speaker 1: look at the like the derogatory term for an outsider
Speaker 1: is like a howiy right, So ghosts you presume like
Speaker 1: white ghost so like it's it's us them we they
Speaker 1: inside outside, But it's overlaid by racial So there's a
Speaker 1: moment in the books, it's probably two thirds of the
Speaker 1: way through. There's this guy, Walter Recley, who's guiding me
Speaker 1: uh On on a given day. And Walter did an
Speaker 1: interesting thing. After guiding for this prestigious lodge deep Water
Speaker 1: Key for twenty five years or so, he along with
Speaker 1: another local guide from mc cleanstown, got together with a
Speaker 1: couple investors and said, we want to build our own lodge.
Speaker 1: Will you front us the money for this? And the investors,
Speaker 1: who had fished with them for thirty years or so,
Speaker 1: said yeah, let's do it. You know, we'll build it
Speaker 1: across the channel from deep Water Key. It'll be within
Speaker 1: i shot but and it won't have its own island,
Speaker 1: but you know, you'll have your own boats, you'll have
Speaker 1: your own dock, everything, and um, this is a place
Speaker 1: called East End Lodge, which is still in existence and
Speaker 1: still like yellow Dog takes people down there. Um. But
Speaker 1: for a couple of years it was floundering, and so
Speaker 1: Walter had to go back to work for the lodge
Speaker 1: that he had turned his back on, and of course,
Speaker 1: you you know, fall in at the bottom of the
Speaker 1: totem polled. So we're sitting at lunch one day and
Speaker 1: we're talking about this, and I'm trying to dig a
Speaker 1: little bit out of him from a research standpoint. You know,
Speaker 1: I kind of play this conspicuous role in the book
Speaker 1: and my poet and my a ficient guy to my
Speaker 1: a nonfiction writer, what am I doing down here? But
Speaker 1: he finally caves and and says, like, um, how would
Speaker 1: you feel? He says, how would you feel if where
Speaker 1: are you from again? Manitoba? That's what he says, And
Speaker 1: say Montana? And he says, well, how would you feel if, um,
Speaker 1: if someone opened up a lodge in Montana? Or if
Speaker 1: you worked for a lodge and you worked your entire
Speaker 1: life but you could never own the boats, you could
Speaker 1: never own the equipment, you could never really get ahead, right,
Speaker 1: And that's a you know, a moment in the book
Speaker 1: where I and epiphany, if you will, where I begin
Speaker 1: to see far deeper into the lens of these local
Speaker 1: Bahamians because it's the answer is obvious, right, you feel
Speaker 1: like shit, I understand exactly where they're coming from. Look
Speaker 1: at believes now compared to what it used to be
Speaker 1: when you know, you Americans, when I bought up everything
Speaker 1: or standing to San Pedro, right like yeah, you guys,
Speaker 1: you too, do the culprits. But yeah, I get where
Speaker 1: they're coming from. I mean, it's a limited resource. Do
Speaker 1: you see this up and BC? I mean BC is
Speaker 1: a lot more controlled in some ways, right it is.
Speaker 1: But yeah, there's always going to be that little bit
Speaker 1: of I mean, you can be an American and have
Speaker 1: a lodge, but we want to see that you've put
Speaker 1: your time into you know, be one of us, because
Speaker 1: it's just it's like, why are you here taking from
Speaker 1: the resource? And what are you giving back? That's the
Speaker 1: big question. What are you giving back? So that's you know,
Speaker 1: the same question this guy, Prescott Smith asked the same question.
Speaker 1: Walter asked, alright, So by the end of the book,
Speaker 1: we um body of water, body of water, we we
Speaker 1: see this lodge, uh called North Riding Point also kind
Speaker 1: of an old prestigious lodge in the Bahamas which becomes
Speaker 1: managed by this guy named Paul Adams, who had grown
Speaker 1: up on deep Water Key, had grown up um with
Speaker 1: David pinder as as a friend, as a mentor. His
Speaker 1: his parents had managed the lodge, and then he goes
Speaker 1: off to prep school and college whatever, ends up back
Speaker 1: and at this lodge called North Riding Point. Their model
Speaker 1: is far different. They want um, you know, we talked
Speaker 1: about Miko earlier, Miko Glinton. They hired Miko away from
Speaker 1: deep Water Key and said, we want to groom you
Speaker 1: to be the manager of this place. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: we're gonna send your three kids to school, private school
Speaker 1: and freeport. We're gonna give your wife a job as
Speaker 1: assistant manager. Uh. Samantha is also a masseuse, you know. Um.
Speaker 1: And so that that old kind of antiquated post colonial
Speaker 1: model that deep Water Key had been following for so
Speaker 1: long is beginning to be usurped, if you will, or
Speaker 1: um bettered by by some newer lodges. So they're giving back,
Speaker 1: even though the money is presumably coming from somewhere up here.
Speaker 1: I don't know exactly what makes it tricky is that
Speaker 1: the industry is driven by outsiders, right right. It's like,
Speaker 1: it's not like there's this economy going on and then
Speaker 1: outsiders come in and they're like, Oh, what a cute
Speaker 1: thing you've created here, We're gonna grab it from you.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, no, ship. There's a lot of outside
Speaker 1: interest in the economics of it because it's fueled by
Speaker 1: outside and trust. If it wasn't for the if it
Speaker 1: wasn't for outsiders coming to fish, those jobs wouldn't exist.
Speaker 1: So what it's not, it's not it's clean, right right.
Speaker 1: But I mean eventually it's the same discussion we're having
Speaker 1: here in Montana. What is sustainable and what isn't? Right? Um,
Speaker 1: what is erecting fifty or a hundred houses on a
Speaker 1: to mile island sustainable to the environment? Probably not? Um,
Speaker 1: Could this economy support it? Probably not? Would people continue
Speaker 1: to go there after years and years? No, So you'd
Speaker 1: end up with something that's not sustainable and was it?
Speaker 1: And it's one of those things that, yeah, you have
Speaker 1: the cliche loving something to death. It's one of those
Speaker 1: things that in in pursuit of an ideal, you wreck
Speaker 1: the entire You wrecked the entire point of it all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I I see the statistics in Montana were
Speaker 1: the outdoor recreation industry is bringing in billions, literally billions
Speaker 1: of dollars seven point one billion is the last stat
Speaker 1: that I saw. And outfitting and guiding is third in
Speaker 1: outdoor wreck tier of things, a lot behind lodging and gas.
Speaker 1: So we're also contributing to those as well. Um, but yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a breaking point for sure, I think, And and
Speaker 1: these are good examples, right, It's like, yeah, it's like,
Speaker 1: well I was in Belize when it was really good
Speaker 1: and it wasn't bought up, and so I don't even
Speaker 1: want to go there anymore. So then you move on
Speaker 1: to the next spot and ruin that. Like before you
Speaker 1: guys get any of that, Like when you go around
Speaker 1: you you're kind of rolling loud at this point, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, had a role real quiet, and we typically
Speaker 1: do roll real quiet, and if we don't roll real
Speaker 1: real quiet, it's not good, right, So people, we try
Speaker 1: to be discreet. Man. People don't know where somewhere. People
Speaker 1: don't know we're somewhere unless they hear it from a
Speaker 1: name until the episode airs, and then do you hear
Speaker 1: it not. I mean we have starting that blew up
Speaker 1: a place. Is that what you're getting at? No, I'm
Speaker 1: not accusing you that, I'm just saying like I mean,
Speaker 1: when you go and do like a kid that amazing
Speaker 1: caribou hunt you know where you see that fifty miles
Speaker 1: string of caribou coming through? Are your email inboxes getting
Speaker 1: lit up every week? Like you want the thing that
Speaker 1: we've been We get asked about most. We get asked
Speaker 1: by by a factor of ten. Um. We get ask
Speaker 1: most about a particular antalope unit. No kidding why Um?
Speaker 1: Some things are self limiting okay, because of inaccessibility, because
Speaker 1: of uh needed to like draw like limited entry permit
Speaker 1: lotteries for tags right where there's only a set number
Speaker 1: of participants that can engage anyways because they have a cap.
Speaker 1: You could be carible hunting in a place that has
Speaker 1: a quota. So it's it's the quota gets filled every year. Right, Um,
Speaker 1: you could make it, you could make you could blow
Speaker 1: it up and that you make it. Participation become harder
Speaker 1: because there's increased interest and so therefore getting one of
Speaker 1: those permits becomes more difficult. But in a lot of places,
Speaker 1: including the place that we would never in a millionaires
Speaker 1: divulge um. The the Antelope unit, we would never divulge. Uh.
Speaker 1: You can't blow it up because there's that limiting thing.
Speaker 1: There's gonna be set. A number of people are engaged
Speaker 1: in the activity every year and that's kept by law
Speaker 1: other things. Yeah, you could, you could blow it up.
Speaker 1: And I think that that happens to some extent, but
Speaker 1: a lot I think that a lot of the people
Speaker 1: that watch the shore are like, honestly just interested in
Speaker 1: seeing the experience, and a lot of it's not something
Speaker 1: that people it's not something that a ton of people
Speaker 1: really want to go do. Always um, in cases where
Speaker 1: we are up front about it, sure, I have absolutely
Speaker 1: no doubt that it that it that it does a
Speaker 1: negative to it. Um. And there's all kinds of arguments
Speaker 1: to be made about to what uh, to the extent
Speaker 1: that awareness and advocacy and people's engagement with the resources
Speaker 1: is beneficial. And there's two really good arguments. There's two
Speaker 1: really good arguments, and I can articulate them both, and
Speaker 1: I vacillate between the two. And the one is that, um,
Speaker 1: there's this great stuff out there. I don't want anyone
Speaker 1: to know about it. I just wanted for me. And
Speaker 1: the other argument is is that that mindset, we'll sink
Speaker 1: you in the end. Just had this discussion earlier today.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a balancing act. Yeah, did my old
Speaker 1: my old boss, This guy, Rusty Gates, he owned a
Speaker 1: lodge on the Assemble up in Grayling, Michigan and was
Speaker 1: one of the first fierce conservationists in that area. He um,
Speaker 1: not a lot of them. No, he fought off like
Speaker 1: Nestley and some big oil wells from going in, and
Speaker 1: he amassed this group of doctors and lawyers who were
Speaker 1: his clientele and basically said, look, they're gonna screw this
Speaker 1: river up if we don't fight them. Until he started
Speaker 1: this thing called the Anglish of the Assable. But you say,
Speaker 1: in fact, I quit throwing my refrigerators and old exactly.
Speaker 1: But I remember when I started bird on and he said,
Speaker 1: you know, CD, that's not a that's not a sport.
Speaker 1: You want to get too many people into. So there
Speaker 1: is that, there is that feeling. But I read an
Speaker 1: amazing book. Um. I was asked to write a blurb
Speaker 1: for an amazing book by a writer named Dean Kuiper's
Speaker 1: called The Deer Camp, which takes place in Michigan and
Speaker 1: Keiper's He wrote for Spin magazine forever and has written
Speaker 1: a lot of kind of environmental justice pieces, but he
Speaker 1: talks a lot about all the Leopold's philosophy and basically
Speaker 1: that notion that I'm gonna write read this note I wrote.
Speaker 1: He says something like, we can be ethical only in
Speaker 1: relation to something we can see, feel, understand, or otherwise
Speaker 1: have faith in, you know, so that idea that um, yeah,
Speaker 1: you want to keep something yourself, but if you keep
Speaker 1: it really all to yourself, the next generation ceases to
Speaker 1: have the ability to have to that direct contact, you know,
Speaker 1: that thing that inspires uh, stewardship and conservation and and whatnot.
Speaker 1: And and that's the that's the the razor's edge you
Speaker 1: walk right, It's I want to influence people. And you
Speaker 1: got a book like Body Water here that's going to
Speaker 1: be very influential to who reads it. But you want
Speaker 1: to inspire folks just enough to where if they get asked,
Speaker 1: if hey, just by chance, would you care if we
Speaker 1: ended fishing in the state of Montown, they'd be like, boy,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't fish there personally, but I don't
Speaker 1: think that's a good idea, right, but you don't necessarily
Speaker 1: want him out there on the on the river. You
Speaker 1: no doubt know the fishing writer John Geerrick, Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then his uh, he's got a fly time buddy a
Speaker 1: k bas No, it wasn't a k Best to said,
Speaker 1: it's Yehny, who's the guy that had the quote about
Speaker 1: what are you doing over there taxing? Brody? Know what
Speaker 1: I'll bring this. I'll help you sell people on why
Speaker 1: you're doing that, and I'll bring it full circle and say,
Speaker 1: Brody's a fishing guide too. That's right in Colorado and
Speaker 1: he used to do quite a few of these hosted trips.
Speaker 1: I'm just keeping I'm just keeping your little side activity
Speaker 1: and making it seem like it's have many side activities
Speaker 1: going during these conversations. Help me out. Though, it wasn't
Speaker 1: a k beast who said the role casting quote that
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote. Yeah. We even asked John about this
Speaker 1: in some fishing writer, some fishing writer who John Gearrick
Speaker 1: Admiers was saying, I won't write about any river that
Speaker 1: I can roll cast across, and I can roll cast
Speaker 1: a long way. That's a great I think that's a
Speaker 1: really really great rules. Sure, it's okay to write about
Speaker 1: the Missouri. It's like, are you bigger than right? What
Speaker 1: do you like? You can keep that secret? Yeah, this Missouri.
Speaker 1: You speak up, but you're walking the line, dude, because
Speaker 1: there's no doubt. Like I read it, I've done that,
Speaker 1: I've done that. I've five for bone fish in Mexico,
Speaker 1: I flat fish for bone fish and Belize, I fly
Speaker 1: fish for bone fish in the Bahamas. Okay, but kind
Speaker 1: of like whatever did it? Moved on to other things.
Speaker 1: But reading I'm like, damn, that is pretty cool, man,
Speaker 1: I do It's like makes me want to go back
Speaker 1: because you write about it. But we haven't talked about this,
Speaker 1: but you write about it very beautifully. I can tell.
Speaker 1: I can see you struggle as a poet and writer
Speaker 1: because you're trying to mix. You're you're putting a poetic
Speaker 1: sensibility into certain passages, but also there's a journalist sensibility,
Speaker 1: and those two things are not always dancing nice. There
Speaker 1: are not always like dancing nice dances and dirty. But
Speaker 1: the point let me fish this thing to take the
Speaker 1: writing on. But want to finish the point here, you're
Speaker 1: sending people down there by writing beautifully about a place
Speaker 1: that you feel could potentially be destroyed by people going
Speaker 1: down there. I know you're setting up a real conundrum.
Speaker 1: It's the thin edge of the wedge, right, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: know it's I think. Um, you know, a place like
Speaker 1: deep Water Key has been developed to the extent that
Speaker 1: it can be developed, and it sounds like the money
Speaker 1: was pulled. No one's gonna be able to build fifty
Speaker 1: houses anymore. That that's kind of a pipe dream. Um,
Speaker 1: But I do think about that. I've never written one
Speaker 1: fishing piece on Montana that even remotely refers to a
Speaker 1: body of water that you could locate. In fact, I
Speaker 1: try to obscure it as as best as possible, right,
Speaker 1: I try to, um super cute. Um, you know, I'll
Speaker 1: I'll obscure it as best possible hunting hunting pieces in
Speaker 1: the same way. Um, but back to your notion of
Speaker 1: that that kind of poeticized journalism or whatnot. When um,
Speaker 1: I showed David James Duncan an early draft of this,
Speaker 1: who's a real good friend of mine, probably my first readers,
Speaker 1: uh hisn The manuscript came back and every now and
Speaker 1: then he would write this acronym which stood for poet
Speaker 1: colon right pros exclamation point. You know so, um, it
Speaker 1: did take me a long time to try to weed
Speaker 1: myself out of the impulse to um to poeticize something
Speaker 1: that really didn't need to be poeticized. Are you better
Speaker 1: because um? Are you better because you just can't make
Speaker 1: poetry pay? Oh? No, that took me, you know? Are
Speaker 1: you better because one cannot make? No? That's why. That's
Speaker 1: why poetry. There's a great guy Clark's song about that, right,
Speaker 1: that's what keeps the poet free. I forget what the
Speaker 1: actual line is, but yeah, no, poetry is not supposed
Speaker 1: to pay. It's uh, it's below money, it's above money.
Speaker 1: It hovers in the ether. It's romantics. Is lovemaking that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: in the right field. I have a fun way to
Speaker 1: make it pay. But a matter of fact, it has
Speaker 1: cost me quite some money. But um, so you don't
Speaker 1: do you still write poems? Yeah? I have a new
Speaker 1: book of poems coming out in March called Ragged Anthem.
Speaker 1: It actually has there's there's um, there's three hunting poems
Speaker 1: in it. I can't trying to remember, because you were
Speaker 1: once telling me you you didn't like to mix fishing
Speaker 1: in poem. Right, no, no, there's and I actually went
Speaker 1: back and look there's there's one poem in there. The
Speaker 1: last poem in the book is it's not a fishing poem,
Speaker 1: but it is a poem that has a brook trout
Speaker 1: in it that's actually grabbed, you know, by hand and
Speaker 1: eating over a stick fire. Um, it's you know, you
Speaker 1: can what you can say about poetry. Everybody's gonna just
Speaker 1: turn their phones off. Let me rip Let me rip
Speaker 1: out a lot of poetry, and you tell me who
Speaker 1: said it. Okay. Um, there are strange things done in
Speaker 1: the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold
Speaker 1: pop service, Sam Maghee. Okay, all right, you got me?
Speaker 1: Can I rip out another one? This is the only
Speaker 1: poem I know? Okay? Um? How was the hunting Hunter?
Speaker 1: Bold Brother? The watch was long and cold? Rob Service? Okay?
Speaker 1: Group bottle line of poetry? Oh man, Uh you know
Speaker 1: yesterday was Harrison's birthday. Uh. He has a great line
Speaker 1: from a poem called Cabbage. If only I had the
Speaker 1: genius of a cabbage, or even an onion to grow
Speaker 1: myself in their lamon a from the holy core that
Speaker 1: bespeaks the final shape. Oh yeah, yeah, gives me a
Speaker 1: little choke. Yeah. Yeah, well, you know you mentioned gear Rock.
Speaker 1: He was sweet to this book. He I'd never met
Speaker 1: him before. I've grown up reading him, you know. I
Speaker 1: read everything I could. Uh. And then, um, my publicist
Speaker 1: called me up in November, right after the book came
Speaker 1: out and said, you know a guy named John Guy Rich.
Speaker 1: I said, um, what some writer John Guy? I said,
Speaker 1: John gear Rock. She said, yeah, you better check the
Speaker 1: Wall Street Journal. He just wrote a review on Body
Speaker 1: of Water. So no, yeah, he had he'd written a
Speaker 1: beauty this quote on the back of the book. You
Speaker 1: didn't know he was putting that in there. And that's
Speaker 1: the paperback, so um, you know he wrote the review
Speaker 1: about the hard back and I had no idea. No,
Speaker 1: I just saw the literal paper, which was fantastic. It
Speaker 1: was the first thing I saw when I well, I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously it's the top quote, but definitely stuck out to me.
Speaker 1: I saw the Body of Water. But he came up
Speaker 1: to Missoula last year to give a reading. Fantastic crowd
Speaker 1: out there, and we had a nice dinner and he said,
Speaker 1: you know, um, he said, he wrote a good book.
Speaker 1: Thanks not. It's really humbling to hear and he said,
Speaker 1: but you can only write one bad one, so you know,
Speaker 1: get back to work. All of the book, he says.
Speaker 1: Krist Dombrowski's exacting descriptions of the sport made me long
Speaker 1: to try it again and to wish that more fishing
Speaker 1: books were written by poets. It's amazing. I'm excited to
Speaker 1: read it, but I'm kind of scared. I don't want
Speaker 1: to get sucked into wanting to fish for bone fish again.
Speaker 1: You know what's funny, I have such little desire to
Speaker 1: fish for bone fish at this point. I know, Yeah,
Speaker 1: why What I don't miss, what I don't think I'll
Speaker 1: ever not want to do, is is the hunt, the
Speaker 1: visual hunt for the fish. And we were talking about
Speaker 1: this earlier, you know, the preferred, the preferred way. I
Speaker 1: think it's preferred because it does it takes us back
Speaker 1: way back into that like place, to seeing brain that
Speaker 1: has really not been missing from our world for too long.
Speaker 1: It's you know, our new brain hasn't been in existence,
Speaker 1: not up to date. No, it's not. So we desire that,
Speaker 1: we we crave that that language, of that visual language,
Speaker 1: and that that doctor was talking about. I mean, I
Speaker 1: would imagine if it got cold out there, which it does.
Speaker 1: You know, you heat up in that moment and then
Speaker 1: if it's cold to get cold again, chill if you
Speaker 1: have to take a heater. So I've been thinking about
Speaker 1: something you said, April. You're right, Uh, dynamite is not. No,
Speaker 1: I'm not kidding. You're right about this. If one found
Speaker 1: themselves in bone fish country and someone and uh put
Speaker 1: a gun to your head and they're like, you catch
Speaker 1: one as fast as possible or I'll shoot you. Um, yeah, man,
Speaker 1: that's probably what you would set out to do, is
Speaker 1: go look for one. Yeah, you wouldn't go out and
Speaker 1: start wailing away out and look you and a for
Speaker 1: you guys are probably more an expert on this than I.
Speaker 1: But I know people that guide bone fish in the Keys,
Speaker 1: and I think that if you put that question to
Speaker 1: at least two of my buddies down there and what
Speaker 1: tool they would use, they'd say a very nudely spin
Speaker 1: casting rod with a shrimp on it. But but I
Speaker 1: wasn't necessarily saying that the fly is the most proctive.
Speaker 1: I'm saying sit site fishing for then and casting to
Speaker 1: them like a live crab in the flats that's going
Speaker 1: to clean up everywhere so it doesn't matter if it's
Speaker 1: flier or bait, but it's the site fishing and specifically
Speaker 1: tracking that fish rather than just blind casting over and
Speaker 1: over again and hoping one goes by. In the likelihood
Speaker 1: that you're gonna spook one if you're just casting over
Speaker 1: you know what books sent me down to want to
Speaker 1: go catch one real man? Uh remember dude, I don't
Speaker 1: know if he's on the scene anymore. Randall Kaufman. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was kind of big, like Oregon and ship like
Speaker 1: that and sold fly tian equipment whatnot. He had a book, yeah,
Speaker 1: Kaufman stream Born. He had a bone fish book. It's big,
Speaker 1: it's hard back, great photos. And then my brother Danny
Speaker 1: had one of those my bro Dames of Fisheries biologist.
Speaker 1: I think you know this. Uh, he's a big fly
Speaker 1: pole fisherman. He uh to this day. He had one
Speaker 1: of those calendars where it's like cool fishing pictures. I
Speaker 1: think I had this too, Yeah, and everything third one
Speaker 1: was a bone fish picture or some dude on the
Speaker 1: flats or some dude doing something like that, and you know,
Speaker 1: every third day you're like, damn, that looks cool and
Speaker 1: that's what like, you know, it was being inspired not
Speaker 1: by people. I didn't know anybody that's ever done it.
Speaker 1: It wasn't being inspired by people who did it. It
Speaker 1: was being inspired by art. I feel like it's one
Speaker 1: of those things that art sends you to do it.
Speaker 1: Art doesn't send you to fish through the ice. Something
Speaker 1: else sends you to fish to the ice. It's not art,
Speaker 1: but art propels one, you know, madness, It sends you
Speaker 1: to the ice and hunger, hunger or a buzz. But
Speaker 1: it's just so easy to catch a lot of bone
Speaker 1: fish in a lot in a lot of places. I
Speaker 1: mean not always. I always say to people that you know,
Speaker 1: especially people who are new to fishing, salt bone fish
Speaker 1: are an excellent way to hone up your skills. I
Speaker 1: don't want to take you permit fishing if you haven't
Speaker 1: gone bone fish, because they're just gonna be like miserable.
Speaker 1: Well and there, they can be difficult, especially those big ones.
Speaker 1: I mean, they are just a whole new world. Right.
Speaker 1: If you see someone getting nervous in front of a
Speaker 1: bone fish, you know they're just going to free a permit.
Speaker 1: But I think there's a lot of opportunity for this
Speaker 1: art because it is pretty I mean you can go
Speaker 1: to wile Ease and catch fifty bone fish. Really, especially
Speaker 1: if you're casting into like a big over a day
Speaker 1: or I mean over a trip that depends, but definitely
Speaker 1: easy over a trip, easy over I mean there'll being
Speaker 1: a big mud pile. Right, so you're literally just casting,
Speaker 1: you're flying and stripping and anything's gonna bite. It makes
Speaker 1: you feel like I was going about it all wrong,
Speaker 1: and we do. We're kicking ask to catch a few
Speaker 1: of them. Well that's what it should be like. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're you know, the the purest frown upon throwing into
Speaker 1: the MUDs. But if you're a guy, you're a guide
Speaker 1: or a host and it's day six or hate into
Speaker 1: a mud, I think personally I really don't care. But
Speaker 1: but for some people yet it can be deemed the
Speaker 1: mud is really cool. There they You know, you see
Speaker 1: this kind of dense cloud of milky water and then
Speaker 1: you just see a little flash or two up to
Speaker 1: little tails and wagging around. Do you have to kind
Speaker 1: of disagree with you like you're earlier comment in April
Speaker 1: and which bone fish Like, hadn't you ever heard of permit?
Speaker 1: What do you mean? In the fifties by him? Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I mean just think tongue in cheek. It's like
Speaker 1: these things coming in and out of fashion to like
Speaker 1: fly fishing or fishing in general is you know, it's
Speaker 1: like driven by what's cool not And I know a
Speaker 1: lot man who love bone fishing and do not like
Speaker 1: to go fishing for permit or even turpin. You know
Speaker 1: a lot of people who are into that. But a
Speaker 1: lot of this also has to do with like in
Speaker 1: the fifties, I don't know, we don't have enough time
Speaker 1: to drive you know, to jump into the history of
Speaker 1: like Joe Brooks and a lot of those guys. But
Speaker 1: a lot of that, like you're saying it was fashionable
Speaker 1: or a lot of people knew at that time that
Speaker 1: they could catch bone fish, but they didn't know that
Speaker 1: you could catch permit, so it wasn't necessary that. I
Speaker 1: mean a lot of it could have just been that
Speaker 1: he didn't didn't know that he could catch permit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: pure ignorance. It's just like nobody fishes, you know, five
Speaker 1: years ago, nobody threw flies at trigger fish, and like
Speaker 1: everybody wants to catch trigger fish. Well they did five
Speaker 1: years ago, but it's really trendy. Yeah, you know, it's
Speaker 1: the hip like, you're right, it goes to it goes well,
Speaker 1: that's I was going to get to that. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think even ten fifteen years ago, people I thought
Speaker 1: you couldn't catch permit. You know, now we think they're tough.
Speaker 1: Late in the book, this guy, David Pender, this amazing
Speaker 1: human being and one of the great guides and anglers
Speaker 1: in the Caribbean, tells this story where at almost dinner,
Speaker 1: this tiny little shack of dinner in mcclean's towns conch fritters, lobsters,
Speaker 1: you know, peas and rice. I always get it wrong,
Speaker 1: peas and rice. Um. And somehow one of his his
Speaker 1: son's winds him into this glory story of having guided
Speaker 1: back in the eighties a man, a Coca Cola executive
Speaker 1: into a double on permit. He and his partner doubled
Speaker 1: on permit and landed him simultaneously. You know. Um. So
Speaker 1: it's a story that that's told in great detail, and
Speaker 1: um it's like an amazing One fish goes east, peels
Speaker 1: into the backing and leaves just a couple of cranks
Speaker 1: left on the reel, and the other fish goes north
Speaker 1: and does the same thing, and and penderested make these
Speaker 1: incredible adjustments to land both of these fish and um
Speaker 1: and they do. I remember going home after hearing that
Speaker 1: story and uh and thinking, maybe, you know, we'd fallen
Speaker 1: over into the edge of of and and lore and
Speaker 1: this didn't actually happen. But at this point in the book,
Speaker 1: I was gonna give Pinder his own his own voice, right,
Speaker 1: he'd earned it, and um so I just I left
Speaker 1: it his is. You know, he told the story. It happened,
Speaker 1: But in the back of my mind, I was always thinking,
Speaker 1: was you know it was that a little bit of
Speaker 1: a fish tail? Um So, the book had been out
Speaker 1: maybe um three or four or five months, and I
Speaker 1: get this private message on my Facebook author page, and
Speaker 1: it's a picture, an old black and white picture of
Speaker 1: this old dude they called the Coca Cola Man and
Speaker 1: Pinder sitting on the dock with these uh two permit
Speaker 1: And yeah, the picture had been sent by uh, this
Speaker 1: guy who basically captain's a yacht for the Coca Cola
Speaker 1: Man and they go all over the world and and fish.
Speaker 1: And he said, I was reading your book and I
Speaker 1: got to this passage about the double on permit and
Speaker 1: I said, oh my god, hey, boss, come here, you
Speaker 1: gotta take a look at this or whatever. So he,
Speaker 1: you know, procured the picture. Was down in the the
Speaker 1: lodge or or the bar of the yacht, and he
Speaker 1: took a picture of it and sent it to me.
Speaker 1: And that's great. I'm told this before, but on the
Speaker 1: difficulty of permit I was with I was down with
Speaker 1: my brother one time. We were in the Bahamas, my
Speaker 1: brother Danny, and he was out wanting around looking for
Speaker 1: bone fish, and I was taking some We had been
Speaker 1: spear fishing, and I was taking some snapper heads and
Speaker 1: catching some little sharks, and uh, I hook a big ray.
Speaker 1: You know, permits like the following. So the ray goes along,
Speaker 1: and the ray just goes along, and he's moving along
Speaker 1: and he's silting, stirring up the silt and spooking up stuff,
Speaker 1: and so permit just in bone fish were just getting
Speaker 1: the habit of following behind him to see what they
Speaker 1: kick up. So here I have a big ray on
Speaker 1: the end of my line. Okay, And after a couple
Speaker 1: of seconds, there's to permit in mudding behind the ray
Speaker 1: because he's raising the real ruckus because I got him
Speaker 1: on my line. So I motioned frantically for Danny to
Speaker 1: come over, because here, what better scenario you have to
Speaker 1: permit that you know, we're feeding there, like looking for
Speaker 1: food because they're following behind the ray and the rays
Speaker 1: kicking up so much silt that there's like dust in
Speaker 1: the air, dust in the water. So it would presumably
Speaker 1: like impair the permit's vision in some way. And he
Speaker 1: is able to just take cast after cast because I
Speaker 1: can reel the ray in and then let him back again,
Speaker 1: let the drag loose. He goes back out on the
Speaker 1: permit and the ray go out and the permit the
Speaker 1: ray come in the permit, and meanwhile he's like cast
Speaker 1: after cast after cast after cast. Sons of bitches would
Speaker 1: not know because they're like so yeah, like that, they
Speaker 1: like run up, they want to I'm gonna kill that thing.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna stop and smell it. Look at the size
Speaker 1: of their Did you cook that ray on purpose? No,
Speaker 1: I was trying to get sharks and the ray picked
Speaker 1: it up. I um, that ray lives today. Well, let's
Speaker 1: something else killed the hammer head shark might have come
Speaker 1: and killed it. I don't know. I didn't mess with it.
Speaker 1: Kristen Browski body not though body, but body of water awesome, man,
Speaker 1: thanks for having me. Yeah, people should go read the book, man,
Speaker 1: please do. It's got like a real It tells a
Speaker 1: cool story and it tells you and it tells you
Speaker 1: what to do about it. There's a bunch of good
Speaker 1: guiding David guiding stories in there. Another one pops into
Speaker 1: into the head where he's got the investor in the
Speaker 1: original owner in the boat. And I'm not gonna give
Speaker 1: it away because you gotta go get and read Body
Speaker 1: of Water to get this story. But that's a good one.
Speaker 1: Like there's a fish on and then I'll hope is lost.
Speaker 1: But then the guide says, you know what, let's try
Speaker 1: this and yeah, and this is coming from a former guy, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I could go on. I know we're short on time,
Speaker 1: but I was just thinking about the times where rowing
Speaker 1: a boat, you know, you got to fish on and
Speaker 1: they're not just like any two fish where you're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: just skip that thing across the surface. But these things
Speaker 1: are like bone a rod over there on the bottom
Speaker 1: of the river, and you're like, okay, what am I
Speaker 1: gonna do? How's it gonna work? Oh, there's a rapid
Speaker 1: coming up, Holy sh it. And then somehow you at
Speaker 1: the bottom of the rapid and you've got to fish
Speaker 1: in one net and it's just everybody's Yeah, those are
Speaker 1: good times, good stories. Kristen Browsky Body of Water. Folks
Speaker 1: can go buy it on Amazon, right, And you gotta
Speaker 1: know that you have influenced at least one more dirty
Speaker 1: bum fishing guy to pursue his writing dreams. And my
Speaker 1: buddy Colin Scott, you wanted me to be sure to
Speaker 1: let you know that he uh really looks up to you,
Speaker 1: and you let him know that it is in fact
Speaker 1: pop boy. So he's still bumming at in ak and
Speaker 1: writing screenplays. So you're not only are you ruining bonefish
Speaker 1: people clouding it up, you're ruining writing and bringing in
Speaker 1: all the kind of writers now competing precious limited resources.
Speaker 1: Pretty soon they're all gonna have TV shows too. Come on,
Speaker 1: it's great to be here. You guys are fantastic. Thank
Speaker 1: you very much everyone,