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The MeatEater Podcast
Ep. 234: Deep Drop Boyz
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1h44m
Steven Rinella talks with Miles Nolte, Joe Cermele, Rick Smith, Corinne Schneider, and Janis Putelis.
Topics discussed: Jani's school report on Hobo the linx; how Joe moved across the river for the tax break; the name origin of MeatEater’s new fishing podcast, Bent; Covid hair like Kenny Loggins; the Ghostbusters theme song sound effects; how the super zoom fluke lure has vastly improved Jani's fishing abilities; how the production of strawberries inspire deep passions; a perfect degree of lustiness; Rick’s as an absolutely terrible angler; the logo Steve wants to commission for Rick; primordial muck; glow in the dark this and that; deep dropping with a bespoke reel; disagreements about what the pinnacle of fishing is; sea cucumbers as the gateway to sea diving: and more.
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00:00:08
Speaker 1: This is Me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten in my case, underwear listening podcast. You Can't Predict Anything presented by on X. Hunt creators are the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store. Nor where you stand with on X. While Janice's attendance record has been exceptionally poor of late, he's here with us in the studio, but he's uh, he's unable to speak up right now because he's reading about he's preparing a little school report on a on a character named Hobo. He's preparing a little school he's going to deliver it to us, the equivalent of when your seventh grader does a links report and yeah, yeah, he's gonna it might be grade. He's gearing up to prepare us a little report on links that did did what's his name? Holdo are the links did an extraordinary little thing? Uh So that's that's why he's being quiet right now. And even you're righty to deliver your report to the to the to the audience, speak up, uh now. Another piece of housekeeping we have with us, Miles Nolt and Joel Surmelli and they have like an announcement. We do, but you have a decision to make. Um, Joe's not with us, he's over in Jersey, Eastern p A. But close enough, Joysy. Uh home, you're not at your house? No, I'm at my house. I'm a guy. But moved across the river for the tax break. So so you're you can look over at it. Yeah, pretty much. I I moved one step closer to America, as I like to say. So, uh um, Pennsylvania is better on the tax man. There is not as vicious. Oh yeah, It's like it's like half get more house for your money and pay half the taxes by jumping the river. Does it kind of hurt your soul though, to have to claim p A because for as much as you love that Jersey, identity is lost there. Yeah. I mean I still just go with them from Jersey. I mean, I mean, but if you live here, man, you leave that close, you're kind of crazy to to not save the money and hop the river. Uh the river? You you can fish that river. I remember when Nice of fish the Delaware at the Pennsylvania New York line. I always thought that it was interesting that they allowed you to fish the river with either state's license, and they went above and beyond that and made this sort of simplified rules so that you didn't have that confusion of like you could keep on this bank of the river, you're allowed to keep like four large mouth bass or whatever. Hell right, but on this side of the river it's not. Or the season's open over here, but it's not open here. We still live on the St. Mary's River, which is between Michigan and Ontario. Holy sh it, the rules were vastly like everything was different. Oh yeah, and it was like this very arbitrary seeming line where what side of the river you were on everything changed, like the real major differences in REGs. It seems just like opening the door for people to take advantage of whatever reggs they want to abide. Yeah, there was a situation where some were sorry, remember I feel like we reported on this. Um Joe might remember. You might remember Miles that was a tournament bass angler fishing somewhere on the Mississippi had inadvertently crossed and into like waters where you weren't allowed to high grade fish or something like that. Yeah, it was Brandon Palink that had happened to and he was he was like totally killing everybody, and uh, it was a technicality. He didn't realize he was doing something wrong. And I mean he manned up about it, he owned up to it. But he would have stomped that tournament didn't have something worth retaining. He like straight into the state's waters where you couldn't retain. Yeah, you weren't supposed to call you weren't supposed to have fish in your live. Well, I forget exactly. So is a lot of years ago. I forget exactly what it was. He's on the wrong side of some islands somewhere and in yep. So anyways, I always thought it was cool that New York of Pennsylvania were like, hey, you got your rules, we got our rules, but on this shared water, let's just make it that everybody's one license either side. Anywhere in the river you have one license. And then we agree that the river has its its rags and the river as rags, and we don't bring geopolitics into it in such a confusing fashion. Well it's funny though, because up north that's that's completely accurate, and I think all the legs are shared. But I live actually on the title section. So down here, like your license, you can access the river from either side, launch from either side, fish either bank. But like with the migratory fish stripers in particular, Jersey guys can't keep anything. Pennsylvania guys can actually keep one out of the river, but it all depends on which side you launch on, so you can't be sneaky about it. But with the migratory fish on the southern end, they legs are not exactly the same. Yeah, anyhow, you live over there, you're not in Jersey, but you're joining us in Pennsylvania. Now the decision you and uh, you guys gotta make. Uh you and Joe have to decide if you want to do your thing now your announcement. Right, we talked about it. Now you go about your business, do what you need to do, or you sit here, participate where it makes sense, and then do your announcement. I mean, I'm gonna say, let's let's jump this at the front the front of the line. Right. Don't don't wait because she could go went south when something that should be done no time like the presidents, because you might wait and all of a sudden like Rick dies. I don't know that would change the whole, That would that would that would change the tenor was such a downer after Rick died? Like, Oh, by the way, I think it's more like good news. You'll go on a two hour tangent. That's probably depends on because, as we're talking about earlier, depends on what kind of people are listeners are, because if it's the last thing they hear, they might then take that direct action after that's fresh in their mind. They can't take the direct action yet. It's a seed plant. It's just a little m hm. Oh, we're wrong. Crin's also going to dig a hole even deeper in frenzy emerging. As I was telling earlier, Crins are are few, are not quite there yet resident GMO Expert's. Everyone's along for the ride as Krinn becomes a subject matter expert on GMO strawberries and where they end an Arctic char begin tell me more. Yeah, let's say that later, but no for folks listening now, Oh I can, I can just going back to whatever you're doing, Joe and Miles, Crin, I'm going to delete that. Oh you know what, just uh, No, I'll pick up where I left. No, I think we should do this. Have Phil people now we're talking, we're still talking about if people can hear talking about it, but have Phil put up right, and then we'd still be talking about it now. But then you've been beeped. You create a lot of like enthusiasm for totally totally, Like at this point, people are like, by the time Joe pregnant again, by the time that folks are are hearing us speak the thing, we'll already be known. Okay, I think we had a book ended. Then how do you do that? Well? We we we give the big announcement, big reveal, and then a little little reminder like, hey, by the way, I remember that thing we said, you can do something about that. I'll put it in terms that you would be able to understand, Um, Miles, it would be that there's a stinger hook m yep, you got you got your main the body of the bait, and you realize that he also had the stinger. Throw the stinger in there like that stinger come at the end though, ye, So you know, if you've been paying attention, you already know that meat Eater has been doing a bunch of phishing stuff for the past year year and a half. Now we got we got doss Boat Season one out. We have dost Boats Season two coming very very soon. We have another little h ice fishing project in the works that won't be gone too long. So a bunch of video stuff, all the all the great stuff we do on on the website. And now we got a new podcast. Yes we do. You guys get to starting for free for free. Well yeah, no, it's not a paid podcast. I don't do they have those. No, I'm just throwing it in. I don't know. Sweet deal, you don't even have. You do have to watch me do pitches about my underwear on Instagram to watch to get that free podcast. That's how this deal works. Well good, yeah, I think I think that's that's a price I can free media, free media, advertising, a free thing, more free media for meat Eater. For those of you who are even like mildly phishing, curious or hardcore fishing, we got a new podcast coming for you. And uh no, no offense to the whole like mediator podcast thing you guys have been doing here. It's great, but it's not just wandering. It is not going to be this. It is not going to be this at all. I'm really interested instead of you know, just throwing a few people in room letting him shoot the ship for hours on end. It's it's gonna be much tighter than that. It's gonna be mostly composed of short segments that Joe and I have been working on for God Joe, how long have we been working on this now? Oh? Months? Man? Since like the early pandemic days. Yeah. Remember remember the pandemic was just a new thing. That's when we started, Well, this is gonna be this will pass soon and then we can launch that podcast. Yeah, so we've been we have been digging into this for months and and it is going to be kind of the opposite of the standard outdoor media pot cast format in that you know, we're gonna ramble some, but mostly we're gonna try and keep it tight. We're gonna try and keep you entertained. You might learn something, who knows, you might, you might laugh, you might cry, you might come away feeling like you didn't waste your time. I don't know. That's what I'm hoping. Fast paced variety show. We're going for left and right hooks coming at you constantly. Here. We keep bringing the variety show thing in, but all I don't think of is Garrison Keeler, And I just don't think we're doing Garrison Keeler, Like that's all I can think about when I hear us are gonna bring on, Like I'm not promising that will never happen, but it's not in any of the ones we have. Garrison made a pretty fine product, he did, but he is not the template for this podcast. I can tell you that Yanny is a real um. Yanni has a lot of installed. Yanni likes those old NPR shows. He likes those shows that like you're up in whatever driving through Duluth on a Sunday, do that and you hit the search on your the scroll on a rental car and lo and behold here's you know, like the best of Prayer Home, Companion or cartar Talk. That stuff speaks to Yanni like he's nostalgia. He likes car talk. I can deal with car talk. I cannot just deal with car talk. I like it, Okay, I like it. I like I'm fallen with Rick, Like have I listened to it before? Yes? No? I like Companion. Well, he's I think that he is nostalgic for it? Is it? Is it a sense of nostalgia or does it do you actually feel satisfied? Like when you listen to definitely listen to it growing up. If you could put a bug in Yanny's brain when he hears car talk, you know what I think the sound would be that comes out of his brain. Oh, Joe, I have not I am not familiar. You've never heard car talk? No, no, never heard it. Those guys are from your neck of the woods. Fantastic. Not a public radio man over there Boston like too much death metal? Yeah yeah, not a public radio guy. Yeah yeah. I think this is the first media reference that you haven't gotten that I've been a part of, Joe, Like, no matter any media I've reference, you've been like, oh yeah, I know that one. Like you can roll movies and music, but other podcasts The Day, Chester the Fishing Guy, Chester Floyd. If you're in southwest Montana, book a trip with Chester Floyd. Uh. He had his COVID hair, gone, what's the COVID hair? Like when you don't cut your hair? And I told me, look like Kenny Loggins look it up. And he didn't know what I was talking about. He looked at you when he looked when he looked it up. He got a haircut very quickly after the next time I saw him, he had a haircut too young, No, Kenny Logs, Yeah, I mean he's he's He's not old. Kenny Loggins is in a American singer, songwriter and guitarist. Kenny Loggins is a dude who was in the right place at the right time and a couple of big movies. Man, that's what I was gonna say, Like from Top Gun and then Footloose. From Footloose, didn't you do the caddy check? Wasn't that him too? I think I'm pretty sure he was the dude they call when you got a big budget movie you need a tune for it. I mean I heard that he This is way off of this damn podcast because I think we got this problem you're trying to fix with your podcast. Is what I'm gonna say right now. This is the problem. Please demonstrate on Okay, let me show you what. Let me to solidify the importance of this new Fishing podcast. I will tell you a thing that would never occur on that show. You would never have someone uh tell you how they're understanding is that Healey Lewis was supposed to do Ghostbusters. He was spoke used to do a song for Ghostbusters and something fell through, and then who did Ghostbusters the song? I only know who did Ghostbusters too. I don't know. Yeah, yeah, I don't know who that one. Well, that tune wound up being I I could be wrong here, who you know? What this is actually would fit on your podcast because this is the age Angler, So this would fit on your show. I've got a uh yeah, so it it would be a great piece for you guys for your show. So just little heads up here. Um my understand is the song that came out was a little too similar to Huey Lewis's version and it caused some legal ruckuts. Huh interesting An, Yeah, you got a new podcast coming out, Parker. Might we might have to talk about Hugh Lewis if if we did do this form of a podcast, which we don't, I want to be clear, but we might have to bring Huey Lewis on to defend himself because Montana Anglers do not like that guy. I hear that he fought really hard to privatize this little stretched water that had been public for a very long time, was instrumental in that. So he just he's not very well liked among the angling community out here. That surprises me because he kind of had that sort of happy, go lucky everyman he did. That was his deal groove. And then he's like, but I don't want all these dirt bags trapes and up and down my creek. Don't be floating on my water. This this other one, I cannot I cannot confirm. This is rumor I heard through the guide mill from my guy days. But buddy of mine claims he guided him, and he's all excited about He's like, oh god, he would lose my boat. This is gonna be great. He said that guy got on his boat and sang from the moment they shoved off the dock to the moment he put the boat back on the trailer. And at first he was like, oh this is cool. I'm getting like my own private do you lose concert? And about two hours in he was like Jesus, just saying a lot, just saying constantly. He's like, wish I brought your plugs hip to be square, which again at first it sounds cool, but like four hours in, maybe it's not so cool anymore. I'm pretty sure the conflicting Ghostbuster song was I want a New drug? That's what sounded too similar to the Ghostbusters theme. Oh thanks for clarification, because as I was saying, I felt like I was wrong. No, yeah, yeah, I want a new drug d D. It's a pop culture nugget right there. Yeah, okay, So what's the name of this here podcast? Bent Bent? Short and simple? Yep, not get bent, not get bent bent, which speaks to a lot of levels. I feel like it's a layered concept. Yeah, your broad has bent, I mean on the most basic level. Yeah, your hook has bent bent in the hook people get bent, your hook might get bent out. You're fighting a real big it all bent out of shape. Yeah. Yeah, we might piss a couple people off that bent out of shape about their stream access. That definitely happened. And it's just a little bit because what we're trying to do is a little bit different from as we've been talking about other podcasts in this genre and in this network. It's it's uh, it's a little irreverend. It's a little different. We don't do things the way that you might expect us to, and we may not say the things that you're expecting to hear in a fishing podcast. So it's a little bit of a hook. It's got a hook to it. It's funny, I sure as I'll hope. So it's short and tight that that's what we're going for. We will not be rambling on about whatever we feel like talking about for very long. We have we have short, discreete segments where we cover off on topics and uh and then move on to the next thing. Quick cleaning in general, fishing in general leaves more room just for overall goofiness and not taking itself seriously. So we're we're totally vibing on that. I mean because because nothing has eyelashes. As soon as you start talking about uh, bringing harm to eye lashed things is a somberness. Second. Pick that out because a buddy of mine I always always used to say eyebrows. No I heard recently it's someone's like, you know what it is, man, eyelashes. That's why people will do stuff to fish that they would never do to it, chipmunk, it's not eyelids. Like the eyelids don't matter, it's got they gotta be lashed. Yeah, I think people care about because snakes, yeah or all they're I don't know they got something going on anyways, sharks. No, it's a little hairy liners on them. I I think that the idea is that we will avoid those those exactly those little little left turns, because we're also want to do them in this format of podcast, like, oh, I got a thought, but Joe and I are trying to rain ourselves in and and the problem with so much fishing media is exactly what you said, Joe. It takes itself too damn seriously. So we're not gonna do that. We're not gonna do that. We we don't promise that this fishing podcast will help you catch more fish necessarily, but we do hope it will help you enjoy fishing a little bit more. And it's already helped me catch more fish because yeah, because you guys. Let me listen to a couple of little pieces and give some notes and some feedback. And I heard all about Joe pitch the I'm gonna get the name of the lure wrong. Now was it the super zoom fluke That is a fantastically Oh yeah, And I ordered up some of those and I've caught trout on the elstone on them since then. Yes, sir, trout, you're fishing about the giant. I saw a picture. Didn't look too giant. Have been holding wrong or something. Well, that's the big part to making giant trout look about it. Was it a tussle, good tussle? Yeah, eat a dry no dropper, dropper, my God, would catch some nice whitefish. Yeah, keep tho, no excited, just come home with all the hell. But from the fish check and all the shrimp and salmon and everything, I just didn't feel like coming home. I just all I'd been doing is cleaning fish. I don't feel like clean any fish. But then I'm all go. I hear you. It's not very often I touch fish, Liza, tell about it. If those fish feel so specs where like, you know, just let me go. It's not amazing. When I come up and I saw him stand there, I thought it was done, the old man eater. I was like, nah, that that dude. So maybe it will help it help you you catch more. Fishing might help you catch more fish. But we're not gonna guarantee it at all. There are no fish catch and guarantees. The only guarantee we can give you is that we'll keep it tight. We'll keep it entertaining and be worth the time. How do people find Bent? Anywhere else? You get your podcasts? Like, you can come to Spotify, you can go to Apple, you can come to the Meat Eater website, the mediator dot com. Click down on that podcast, drop down You'll see Bent right there. You just get it. It's easy. Best fishing podcast every exist, definitely ever. I think I think it's worth mentioning to that. Yeah, I mean, be honest, you have a segment you're you're in Bent. Oh well, you know I was going to ask him about that, but I wasn't. Um. I didn't know if that was confirmed yet. I know I auditioned a little bit, but I don't know that it had made it in. You know, the wonderful job made the cut. All right, your little report. He's gonna do another report right now for us. He has a report whenever you Yanni is like a he's a Bent correspondent. He's a Bent correspondent. And he filed the report about a new record fish and did such a wonderful job because he brought in like like a personal angle, but didn't overdo it, didn't try to make it like it was all about him, but it was informed had a funny husband. Like a funny husband wife bit where humor was there was like some no, but he knew where the humor was. He knew where the pathos was. He knew where like the little marital tensioned me just like the um, like the humanity appealing to emotion, making an appeal to the to the emotional experience. And that's when the guy says the word and his wife doesn't want him to say it. You're gonna have to go and the about story. I can't wait till listen to this. Yanni's gonna file another report right now. Are you ready to report? Yannie? I am okay? What happened? Um? Links happened? Links have been uh forever, probably one of the most elusive animals to see all of us Links and probably wolverines. Have you seen the links? One I have red told my link story. I don't. I can't remember it right now. I've never seen one. We you know, the Hall Road, the pipeline road which never ends. So we're driving back from the pipeline road. And while we were parked along the Hall the Alaska Pipeline, a truck had thrown up a rock and shattered out the window. So that's a long drive with no side window completely busted eight hours or whatever. Yeah, as he's come back with the wind the windows gone. So I remember the drive because it's just like the worst drive in the world anyway, when it's dark, but yaw driving along, windows busted out, and all of a sudden there's a link stand in the road and we pull up to it and he looked his He looked at us like, um, utter incomprehension, like I would venture to guess, like zero interaction with a human, not like um, not like I don't see you, not like I know, I gotta get away, just like utter incomprehension to what was there in front of it? Did you just hang out? Wow? We got out, and then he's like, yeah, I would probably go but just no, he was just like, what in Sam Hill? Is this? Anybody else seen one? Yeah? Didn't you guys have? Nick's always doing all kind of fake animals. Oh that's all right now he's kind of like actual animals. I mean they're all actual animals, just some of them. Maybe that links was totally habituated. It was like, I know what you guys are do you have any snacks? So you saw one, tell me the story real quick. It was off the side of the road. We were filming thermal footage, nighttime stuff, so he saw in the dark. Yeah, I picked it up on a thermal camera. Mm hmm hmm. I'll share a quick story with about that. Thermal stuff is interesting. So I was talking to these dudes years ago. One of the highlights of my life is I got to go down and talk to the third Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg and I got to shoot ship with some of those kids afterwards. So he's a Green Brays and we got to shoot the ship and he was telling me a story. One of these kids is telling me a story that they were in some past in Afghanistan and they hit these Taliban guys coming over this pass and one of them had some kind of like some kind of anti aircraft gun or some kind of like big I can't remember what are you telling me what the gun was. He was carrying it, and they hit the dude and he drops the thing and then everybody drags him off. So they just sit there with a thermal scope knowing an eventually someone's gonna want to come out and grab this gun and they're just set up waiting to get whoever comes out to get the gun. And he tells me that as he's watching with his thermal scope in the middle of the night, he says, a snow leopard came out and sniffed around that spot. That wild Pretty cool, go on, Miles. All all my for the most part, animal setting stories were the same. It's when I was guiding in Alaska in the middle of nowhere and I'm like focused on whatever doing now. At the court of my I see movement, like, oh, that's what that is. It's not there's none of them are good stories, Like there is no art, Like nothing cool happens. I'm just like, oh, I saw Wolverine one time, but nothing happened, and there was a Lynx one of them. Yeah, I saw a Lynx. Once I saw Wolverine, what was he doing? He was basically slinking along the edge of the timber. I think he popped out to see what was going on, like what we were up to, and then saw Uce was like, I'm out of here. I'm gone. I don't wanting to do with it. Well, most of the time you were going to if if anybody has everyone would say no, even in places like Colorado in the lower forty eight where you have some Even in Alaska where you have a bunch out of six people in this room, I agree that. Yeah. Well, if I hadn't that one, all of us had one lucky moment. It's easy to picture having not seen well, no here, it's only in our in our of our group, I haven't seen one. Three out of five. That's not fifth count. Oh you ever seen one over there in uh Jersey, Pennsylvania. Nope, nope. Uh So they along just like they've been studying a whole bunch of other animals with GPS. Colleges are starting to do that with links now too, and they're finding out some wild stuff. Um Like, they're taking these crazy long migrations. This is where Hobo comes in with the longest known LINKS migration. He comes in just shy of twenty were hundred miles in a single migration in about thirteen months he did this. He started off I can't remember the name of the park in Alaska, but um like southern half of Alaska, and then cut over into um into uh I guess it would be Northwest Territories, and then headed south a male looking for me. They don't know, they haven't interviewed, they don't know yet. I know, but predators tending that to go yell crazy. I can answer all these questions you have after reading my short little article, because they certainly think that, and they used to think that they had like twenty two square mile ranges. But then one time, this one trapper in one year on a seventy seven mile seventy seven mile long trap line caught like over a hundred links is And they're like, well, how could that be because there's only one, you know, male that moves around every twenty two miles and you do the math, and he should have only caught whatever it was. Um, so they started wondering, and so they started doing more research on it or whatever. So they don't really know. They do know that part is probably related to the fecundity. And then that's related to super high numbers in snowshoe hairs, because this that is the classic snowshoet hair, the sick list seven year cycle, yeah I think it was. The article said like eight to eleven when the snow shoe hairs go up, So right now they're super high and they're they're seeing um litters sometimes of close to ten kittens. Yes, there's there's some pictures in that. It's a lot of little links babies. Yeah. I was reading one time that when links, when snowshoe hairs are down, they'll have a recruitment rate of zero percent links. It's that hard on them. When their food source collapses, they'll have a year where they like years or in the areas where they think that there was zero recruitment. You would think they divertify those food sources at some point, like they'd find something else to eat on. T's not a good strategy. Talk to the raccoons, man, are you doing this? The researchers were saying that it very much explains why um, there isn't like genetic diversity. That's pretty much like it doesn't matter if you're in the Brooks range or if you are in you know, the farthest eastern range of the lynx Is range in Canada. Somewhere a links is the links of the links. And they figured that's because they make these crazy, crazy movements around, they don't get the population segments. I read another that's why I read another interesting piece of links research. I don't. I can't remember if we covered it on this show or not a while ago. But they used to think that there were, uh that some of the major rivers were genetic barriers. And they had some links wearing tracking things, and they realized not only are the rivers not a barrier, but they had links that would cross some of these rivers they thought were barriers, would cross the multiple times in a day. Interesting, Yeah, Yukon river. Do you think about it? Swim across that thing you shoot across? No problem. Well they probably also crossed a lot in winter. No, no, no, that they were pointing out that they thought it could only happen when frozen, but they were pointing out they were squirting across these rivers in open water. That'd be cool to see. Yeah. So yeah, that's my that's my little report on links crazy links are up to I give him a plus thanks because he was able to answer, he was able to show his work answer questions A plus. What do you get? Yeah, a solid. He didn't he didn't refer to other sources outside that one article. I'm gonna be it was a single source, and he didn't have an original argument. It was just regurgitation. But I mean, that's the point of us, that's what the task for the audience. I had been meaning to read the article to which I had links link, not a links, I had a link, and I have been meaning to open that link and read because I saw the headline about a links going real far away. And so just before we started the show, I emailed the link to Yann and asked me if he could prepare prepare a report so for what he had to deal with in the time he had to deal with it, I thought that he took ownership with the material, delivered it as though it was something that was in his mind. On t counts for a lot, very timely. I'm sticking by the A plus. I don't think he needs extra credit. Do you want to give extra credit? No, I said, I don't think he needs extra credit. Like maybe yeah, like maybe I'm like some kind of poster board. He can pay some pictures. Oh yeah, No, he should a print out from a magazine or something. So, are you gonna dig your hole even deep round GMOs or you've done You've done the GMO subject. I will dig it even deeper. Okay, okay, can you first give it recap of what the problem is, yes, and then how the problem got worse. So Steve has oftentime referred to the superior tasting small strawberries that he's grown in his garden, and that if you go into the grocery store and you pick up a pint of really beautiful looking strawberries, they often taste like crap or nothing. Bigger the worst, the bigger, the worst. So a couple of episodes ago, I pulled out an old thing that I had remembered and not fully understood from a while back, and I was like, oh, that is because you know, strawberries made. It was ish. Strawberries have been developed in a lab with genes from Arctic fish to make them more frost resistant, and I guess robust and hardy, you know, refrigerated and to last longer. So we got a lot of mail, emails, mails. Some folks were really riled up. Deep strawberries I didn't know this but inspired deep passions, Yes, deep passion. Production of strawberries inspires deep pass Absolutely. There are some helpful, informative, even keeled messages. Other folks were up in arms. We got one man child right in if I may say um anyway, So so in a previous episode, I kind of I will absolute own that what I had mentioned was wrong. But the reason why it was wrong is that there is a certain list of genetically modified crops that are on the market in the United States, and strawberries are not one of those. Right, share with me the list again. So according to the f d A, we've got corn, soybean, cotton, Oh yeah, potato, papaya, summer squash, canola, alfalfa, tomatoes. How did papaya? What I'm wondering, I've got a thing about papaya. Hold your horses, so you can buy a GMO papaya. Yeah, papaias papaya is our GMO. But hold, I'll adjust that in a bit. Where did I leave off alfalfa, apple, sugar beets? No, no, tomatoes, nova tomato or something like that. So, so I was wrong exactly. I was wrong because I said GMO strawberries. But GMO we don't have demo strawberages in the United States. I just want to know about right, So, and folks, if you know more about this, please right in. Well, what I'm going to propose, I still want you to carry on. But what I'm going to propose is that, why don't you go and get us a great GMO expert. I want a GMO apologist, not an anti GMO person, because I can already picture what the anti person is gonna say. I want to find a guest you should track down for us, a guest who's a not a GMO apologist, but a GMO realist. Yeah, someone who could say like, oh yeah, man, I could see all these negatives and there's something to them, but I can also see some positives and there's something to those. So there's cursory research on this Wikipedia which is whatever that's I get a D minus for that for that for that source. Um, But there is I believe it is from Arctic chart like bacteria on the skin, where that there is something made from that that is applied and sprayed on strawberries to help protect the berry and transposent. Then it's washed off. Everyone. If I've said anything wrong, hold me to account. So they're taking some fish slime, something that's in fish slip berries and then getting the back off to the best of my understanding. And there is also something called bio prospecting, which is the search for plant and animal species from which medicinal drugs and other commercially valuable compounds can be obtained. I don't know if this falls under that category technically of what that is, but I didn't um that that's the relationship that I've found from Wikipedia. I have yet to delve into all this scientific journal articles about that. I'd rather have arctic charge line on my strawberries than a lot of other nasty things I can imagine. Me give me the fish line. I'm good with that. Yeah, no, it's not off putting to me. UM. When I was in school, I took this class the literature of natural history, and one of the books by bye Hank Caarth Hell's last name was died of tragic death. Him and his wife drowned canoe and the professor and flathead like biggest natural lake west of the Mississippi. Um. He had a cabin on wild Horse Island, which is where the biggest big horn sheep ever came from. But the point being about him, we read this this book as part of his class. He had to read this book. It was about like bioengineering, and it was looking at natural structures like how they how you look at cobb web elasticity and arrangement honey, and ways in which natural structures inform engineering, which is pretty It's really interesting. I would like to get someone like that bioengineering person on the show. Joe. Does this conversation feel familiar to you? You beat me to it. We were just talking about how there's something similar here with the study of carp scales and how it will translate to building better body armor for humans. But if you want if all the details, you're gonna have to listen to Bent. But Bent covers. Yeah, but just just saying, is it like a long window. It is much more suctinct than this. Basically I just said exactly the whole thing. Yeah. Wait, I've got one more thing about strawberries. So I know this has been weighing on you. So I spoke to a farmer in Georgia and he has a couple of things to note in response to your why do you homegrown strawberries taste better? And he says that the reason why, or one potential reason why homegrown strawberries maybe sweeter and more flavorful, is because they're under more stress than commercial strawberries, which I found very interesting. So, when you are farming strawberries for market. Um, everything is perfect, the irrigation, the nutrients, everything is just kind of like a well oiled machine to get as much yield as possible. Um. But perhaps in your garden, you know, I don't not sure how you're treating them. You're you're maybe watering them regularly. There's something maybe missing. Just I'll hacking my way through it. Yeah, there you go. You're hacking your way through it. And I'm taking a bunch of different types of things and giving them all a general treatment and not necessarily fine tuning all of their treatment. You're sort of like, you know, like a classic vegetable garden. You got like eight things you try treated all the same way. Absolutely, the amount of water, the aunt of sun, aunt of whatever. And maybe there's something missing that the strawberry needs, you know, more than the green beans. But one example this gentleman mentioned was that, for example, like carrots, let's say that they freeze. If the plant is under stress, they may release flavonoids and the flavor may development. More So, Let's say with carrots that have are are in the process of being about to freeze, the plant may produce sugars to help protect the cells, lower the freezing point, so when we're eating it, more of the flavor is actually more sugar content is derived from stress that we're that we're tasting. So he said he doesn't know the scientific explanation for all of that, but I felt like that was pretty interesting. Yes, when you find a wild strawberry which just has these like teensy teensy little leaves, and it throws off this compact but extremely flavorful little berry, and he's really up, he's really up against it. And I was talking about this with my brother who he's he works for the U. S d A. And UH does a lot of stuff with crops and plants. And we're out one day commenting on um this wild raspberry patch and I was like, I wonder why these wild raspberries liked this spot so much? And he has this interesting concept he explained to me where it's like, it's probably not that they like that spot, it's just that's the spot that they can be that they're not out competed and overstressed. So what you're seeing is you're seeing them where they can grow, not where they want to grow. Meaning if you took that same plant home until the patch of ground and pulled all the weeds and gave it its own piece of turf. It might be like, no, bro, this is where I want to be. I'm stuck on that rocky ass hillside on the mountain because all the things that kill me don't get me there. It'd be like if you find some like holdout person living in a cave in the mountain. People like to be in these caves way up in the mountains. He might be like, no, man, I don't know. This is where I gotta go, right, But he's hardier to get away from trying to kill me. It's like, this is where I gotta be. The takeaway from this is that the shittier gardener you are, the better your fruits, and you might be cranking out like really good, bad, really well for my gardens. Not to complicate this whole discussion, but I've eaten strawberries out of a big commercial, you know, growing area, just like riding my bike through south of Santa Cruz. They grow out of strawberries and just picking those strawberries, they taste amazing and they're big. We had other people, because we've been on the strawberry thing for other people, no, right, but we had people explained that, Um, we had a strawberry producer right in and explained that people shop with their eyes, and um, when they're commercially producing strawberries, it's like a thing that they know is a value. Is that it that it can turn red and stay not rotten for a long time. So it's got good shelf capabilities and it has it has eye popping appeal because people aren't biting it and then buying it. They're like, oh my gosh, how big and red that thing that looks like an amazing strawberry, and they just don't really care. You could have some weird blemished the ones on top of all moldy, but be like, these are the best strawberries you'll ever taste. To be like, I'm about buying app crazy looking wardy, half green, Yeah, strawberry. I want the big sons of guns. Okay, moving on, We're gonna come back, are we good? On? Bent for Knox? We'll come back. Remind everybody about it. I mean, we're gonna find opportunities wherever in like, as you notice. But the next moment, yeah, for the moment, the next ding I want to discuss Rick, why do you feel that you're so bad at fishing. Well, I was. I was just gonna say that there's no amount of podcasts that I could listen to, uh too to fix what I got going on what happens? I mean, I say that, but you know, mostly all the hunting fishing is like I understand in theory because you get to observe it and observe it just for background, it's we're talking to Rick Smith, he's one of our prize most cherished cameramen. There's a lot of work with us and now and then opportunity strikes and there's a down minute and and Rick gets to fish for a second, and just it's such bad fishing. And I consider myself like have an ability to watch somebody do something and like pick things up, whether it be like athletic activities or whatnot. Like I'm not an uncoordinated person. But the fishing thing, it's amazing how bad I am. I'll say, well, I think you're bad at fishing. I think that a big part of being a good angler is you just know it's going to turn around. Confident. I feel like I'm an optimist, but I don't understand the whole uh because you fish as though you can't picture getting one because I've never really caught what does that look like? Kind of passivity? The sort of passivity is sort of like, um, what's it called when? Uh not ambivalence? No, but since I can't a certain fatalism, I feel like this happens to every angler. You show up at a spot and until a person catches a fish, that spot is like unproven. So but as soon as somebody catches a fish, everybody was like, oh, there's fish here, and then there's like different you fish different, like an increased like, oh I'm not catching fish because I'm doing something wrong versus there's no fish here. I kind of have the perspective always there are no fish here, and they caught one, and that means now they're especially gone. That's that's right. You're like, oh, so there was like one year and now someone else caught it. What's the point, how could there be another one? It comes from I mean, to be an adult and never have spent any time fishing. Is I don't know. I'm probably in the minority, like every even people that don't hunt fish have fished. I I detected you too. When you're fishing a lack of lustiness. Uh yeah, yeah. My brother blames um like a lack of want. Yeah, he blames blowing shots on elk and deer with his bow to a lustiness, like he wants it so badly that the desire actually prevents him from getting it, like he's too If he could just somehow not want it as bad, he would probably have better luck getting Since I've never really caught a big fish, I mean, I kind of a rock fish I think is my only take from from Alaska. But since I didn't really catch anything, I don't even know what it's it's all, it's it's imaginary. Catching a big fish is like something other people do. I haven't. I need to internalize it more that it's possible for me to catch a big fish. What do you think is his problem does he have? Yeah, it's just lack of experience. This hasn't done it enough. Like a hook is such a thing that you guys obviously just understand that you have to explain, like, oh, if you're fishing with sea hooks, what are those? Yeah, point proven, but that you want to note, which that assumes that that should be the first thing that I do is is set the hook and I don't even. I mean, like, I see you guys doing it, but I don't really it's not a reaction of mine. Like fish bites and I'm like, oh fish yeah. Are you saying you don't set the hook with a circle hook or you do? So I can explain, I can explain it. I find that when people, uh so listeners always to think all the circle hook and circle hook uh think of a J hook as looking like a candy cane right when it's in something. I'm not telling you this, but it's telling it's like a candy cane hook. So when it's in something there there needs to be constant pressure to have it stay where it is. I mean, there's a barber and all that, but like generally speaking, you need to keep attention on it um or else just like falls out. Right. Imagine the old skit where someone's on a theater stage and you take you take them off with the hook, like if you just drop the hook that the thing falls away and the guy stays on the stage. So a circle hook has bent in such a way and gets hooked in the fish's mouth in such a way that it's not likely to fall away. It takes a lot more to get it in there, and it kind of has that generally has to be that the fish sort of turns and the hook assles into the corner of its mouth and gets in there. But once it's in there, gravity um is much has a much more difficult time freeing that hook up. Is it like a C like a lower case aerial fontsy You go, yeah, and you gotta jam that. That thing's got to get jammed in there. But when it gets jammed in there just right, it's likely to stay where you could cut the line and he's still gonna have that circle hook stuck in his mouth for some time. Jam's almost the wrong word though, because jam is sort of you're applying like a hook setting almost wedged, Yeah, lodged maybe lodged, Yeah, that's a good way to put it. It gets lodged in his mouth. And so static types of fishing like longlining, trot lining, all these kind of static fishing where there's no person there to like yank the hook and reel, you use a circle hook. I found introducing people to circle hook fishing who've been fishing their whole lives, they're so it's so ingrained in them to set the hook because recreational fishing is predominantly jayhooks. It's so ingrained in them to set the hook that you can't get them two use circle hooks properly because they get it hit and they just every adam of their body wants like yanked Rod. You gotta like Brodie's wife. I had to yell at her so bad it almost like destroyed my relationship with Brody because she wouldn't stop doing that. Um Rick, on their hand, doesn't even have that. There's a lack of which is where I'm confused on the like setting the hook not setting the hook thing. Okay, here's what he'll do. Let's say Rick bounces back like you give me a jay hook. He does that for a minute, but then he loses hope, and then he wants to try circle hook, and he does that for me. He loses back to jay hook. So or you're trying to help me solve, you know, give me a fish. If Rick's working a jayhook and I'm and he's jigging a jig and a helmet hits it, now a lot of people would be like very invigorated by this, and they would know that they're gonna for a couple of seconds at least. They will especially jig, They're gonna do all manner of things to get because like a hell, but often you don't get him till his third hit. They just they're they're I don't know what they're doing on there, but they're not getting it. And so you'll see people do all these antics like he'll hit, you'll miss him, they'll bang the bottom, they'll jiggle in his face, they'll like do something. Rick just this sort of like strange passivity to where all of a sudden he all but leaves the rod and walks at the moment, at the moment when anybody else on planet most doing everything in their post. I'm trying to figure out did I do something wrong that made the hook at the bottom. And then I'm like, maybe that's what it was. It wasn't the fish, it was at the bottom. I could be in a different boat. I can be a different doing ten things, and I'll be like, Rick, you just had a hit. Maybe he's too much in his head, are you think are you thinking through it too much? As you know, Steve assumes like and everybody else that is generally out there have spent so much time doing this that it's just natural that you just for me. It's like a foreign completely foreign. There's no hook setting response, there's zero, and that's that's what's funny about the circle hooks. And I think miles you were driving at this. Usually the less experience of an anger you are, the easier time you have with a circle Hume totally. If you chain them up where they can't get at the rod. No, but this is in the end. How many how but did we catch on a circle that week? We caught one? But this is what I'm saying. So yeah, but we were running a lot of jigs, I know. But still we also but when nobody was fishing them, Steve did a little fishing. Then I switched to shar Truce and it got good. But it also got later today, it got dusky. We moved to a new spots. It's not my it's part of my five year plan get better fishing. Now. I don't want Here's the thing is, I feel oftentimes we have a lot of laughs at Rick's expense, and I don't want it to be the case. So what we're actually I just work up a logo for Rick. We're trying to make up an acronym. So it's like ours like ready to go international, international because you've been, You've been more countries than anybody I hang out with. I don't know. Sea is like by seer Land and then uh no coastal because you're ready to go. The first guy in the water, colder the water, the cooker, he's into it is a sweet logo with flames and stuff, because I want to find a way to better celebrate Rick and not just fis fishing is not part of it, not just playing out his inadequacies. I am glad that the camera guys, uh, I mean Seth. Seth is a you know, he's a trained you know, harvest of angler background in angler. Yeah, he did good. Chris horrible fisherman, but he caught some fish. At least he's funny to watch. It's funny to watch him. Watch about him. He's just animated. He's trying to do everything. He just does it all wrong. But a lot of big movements to watch the rick and the fatalism and everything. There's not it's not that there's no big movement. What's the sound effect for that? What's the sound effect for watching? Oh, when you give Rick a rod? What is the sounds it's just straight or No, I don't. I feel like I'm an optimist, but I just have a hard time imagining actually catching a fish because I've never really done it. One time I did, it wasn't it was so easy that it. I went fishing for silver's in Alaska. No. No, it was like just with my dad and brother and um it was we limited out in like an hour. You ripped lips. That is what you're trying to say. Yeah, the guy got us. The guy got us on like the spot and it wasn't a Yeah. Maybe you've got to like envision, envisioned the success and envision, you know, and then like manifest. I get your call with my dad. Yeah, if you talk to Yanni's dad, Yanni's dad will tell you how you need to visualize. Yanni's dad. Yeah, I was not doing that. When he hunts or whatever he he imagined so strongly did it actually ends up coming from where he imagined it coming from. He conjures it all right. He makes a mind movie so compelling to reality that reality conforms to that mind movie. We need to switch out the sea for coastal with conjuring, and we wanted to have it be like day or night. This is like his cameraman logo. So we're gonna be like K and I g h D like night. But then we'll have a prince. He says, like, but like without a K. I can't wait for this logo. We got a good logo. Guy we've been working with. I'm gonna have them start working. Do you want flames on our lightning bolts? Lightning bolts? Good, We're on scales and lightning bolts. Um uh yanni? You want to take a stab at deep drop fishing? Yeah? Wait, let's set this up. Why were you guys in Alaska filming? We're in Alaska filming an episode of Me Eater Um which will go on, which will premiere on Netflix. And we were up there exploring um halibut fishing, exploring deep drop fishing, exploring shrimping and crabbing. Is it the first only fishing fishing only episode. It's not. No. We did like a giant catfish extravaganza, but we uh hunted squirrels. Oh really yeah? But we dove for we dove. You're talking about the one with Kevin. Yeah, but I thought we did something else. All catfish all the time we jug fished, we did everything behold a rod and then episode we jug fished, Maybe that would be better at that multiple because then we did a whole episode about we did a whole episode about flatheads. Yeah with that one we squirrel hunted m with Parker there have But yeah, we did one about jug fishing, jugging, limb lining, and trot lining. And in this we also dove for sea cucumbers, dove for scallops, shot of green laning, snorkel snorkeled for those things. Dove like kinda like you had to kind of go into water to get you did more diving. Uh, But yeah, we're up filming a show, and so we're talking about some of those adventures and and during this now and then in fishing, there's a lot of waiting and a camera guy can just sit there and wait and wait and wait, or if you hand him around, he can try to do a little angling, which is Rick was killing his downtime um trying to angle. And that's why and that's why we're getting so much fun out of mostly provide entertainment dogging on Rick. But do you want to discuss deep drop, which we have never covered nope. We went to roughly feet of water. Um, it's kind of it's kind of like a basin, right, would you call it a basin on the bottom of the ocean? And Um, these fish that we were after black cod also known as sable fish, also known as butterfish, which I don't think we talked about that when we're up there, but when I was doing some research, yeah, they call them butterfish. Have you eaten your flames yet? Oh? Just one. I shared it with some of my closest friends that knew would appreciate it, and they appreciated it. Yeah. I even had to preface it with I hope you efforts understand that I'm not serving this to like gloat. I'm serving this because I appreciate you guys. I'm really sharing it. I figured that you will appreciate it. It's not like ha ha, look what I have that. It's like taste this. Yeah, that's an interesting distinction. You did tell him that, Yeah, you sat them down? Yeah, okay, but yeah I did a you know, since we're on the subject, I did a basically like a soy ginger poach. That's how you do U, is it? Yeah? And it was I mean, it's butterfish, man. It's it's amazing how it maintains its firmness even onto the fork. But then when it gets into your mouth, something happens and it melts like butter. Tony Colagrassi, who who uh turned me on to the prospect of catching my own black cod because he sends me black cod filets that he catches with his friends. Um, he's remarked to that that, Um it's hard. You can't overcook it. Not you can't, but it's not. You don't need to worry about overcooking it as much when the window of goodness is a long window. I was surprised because, I mean it was a low temp poach. You know, you only you simmer it on low for five minutes and then uh no, it might have been tent total. But even then, I thought, man, because this file at wasn't you know, it wasn't a pound, might have been a half pound. I had two kind of pieces to fit into a small pan, and ten minutes with the lid and simmering. That's a lot of cooking for a piece of fish. You know it's gonna be thoroughly cooked. But it wasn't overcooked A bit is good. It is very good. So we're in feet of water steve ft aluminium skiff. Very nice weather that day, Calm Seas almost could like water ski out there that day so we could zip out. We actually talked about water skiing that day. For sure. I think when you're out there and it's that glassy, you can't not mention it. But to get down there you have to use a an electric reel. Now you don't have to, but it would be uh quite a task to reel up a line, plus the scope that you have, so it's probably even more out there. But yeah, three pounds of weight um two hooks above it was just circles, cut bait um, pretty stout rod. It's got to hold up three pounds of weight and you drop her down there. It probably takes what ten minutes? Yeah close, I was to say, so I wanted time. I never got around the time. And maybe it takes maybe eighteen minutes to hit the bottom, to hit the bottom long enough where you put in the rod holder because you get sick of waiting for it to hit the bottom and uh and you gotta you gotta chase it with the boat. Yeah, talk about that Yeah, I guess you just gotta figure out what the wind slash currents doing and just trying to stay and just basically I think all we were doing is trying to keep a line vertical right going out, drive the boat whatever direction the line is going. Yeah, so you can so you can stay over the top of it, which you think it's moving more or the boats moving and you're just having to correct the boat to stay on top of the weight. I think that in those depths the wind over rides the current because the current isn't being you know how like when you get to the top of a mountain the wind is really strong. It's because you're taking a massive moving air but restricting the amount of space that air has to pass through. So you have like this whatever thousands of you know, thousands of vertical fee to air. But then all of a sudden it's you're cramming it into a smaller gap on top. So when you're out in that huge, deep stuff, the currents aren't nearly as strong, and so where you might be in an area where you might have a breeze, it's not in alignment with the current, but the current might override there. I think that even a slight breeze is going to push you in a way that the current isn't going to push you. So you let it go to the bottom. And this is what I found the most interesting. It took a while to figure out. It took us, I don't know, a couple couple of drops at least, and and maybe twenty minutes of drifting along, because once you get down there, you feel the bottom and then it's like you felt the bottom with the weight, But then the weight keeps dragging your rod tip down and if it just it just didn't compute, because you're wondering, like, well, maybe that's because it's stuck on the bottom, and then the boat's moving and so there's just gonna be no slack. The rod tip keeps going down. But after doing this sort of slow jig up and down, what we realize is that the bottom was not firm, but it was more of this primorim I like to call it. There you go primorial muck. And I would guess that it's anywhere from six to eight ft deep. Yeah, the muck at the bottom fet and it might be you feel it hit, but it doesn't stop. It might be twenty deep, but you never let it go down that deep. I don't know how long the munk goes, so you kind of have to jig slowly pull it up. You feel it free from the muck, and then when you rop it you kind of again feel it, but it hits from where your rock tips started and then to where the lead hits the bottom again, and you think your raight tip would stop. It's like the whole distance of your jigging motions that make sense like um, So then again it gets sucked down into the muck. So you left to try to cover it, to try to hover it on the bottom. Did you guys get better at that when you guys went back and we'll just let it sit there. I got better to covering it. Yeah. Not letting it sing, no, because the sinker would drag the circle hooks and bait down into the muck if you just let it sit. So you kind of like lifted out it hits the muck, take the tension out and see if you got a hit. Lift it floated, Lift it floating, lift the floating. It's you never rest but that that we got that thing down there, and it wasn't I couldn't believe. Yeah, five minutes. I almost like I would say, like about ship, I mean, I probably about shat my pants out of just being astounded after all the reading and talking and thinking and figuring and gear rigging, and to go out in that depth of water. And yeah, I filmed you do a lot of different things and be pretty happy about it. But I've never seen you that happy. When you brought up that fish, I was extremely excited. That's what I'm saying. I have technical questions on this. I'm sorry, like I'm just curious. From an angling standpod, So you're talking about like a dropshot style rig with a three pound weight on the bottom. Yeah, Well, I be more like, uh um no, because the you got little uh you got little leaders coming come off. Okay, So you got a mainline and then they're quite a bit their space there, their space. The spacing is very exact aggerated, So from the sinker to the bottom circle it's probably thirty six inches and then there's thirty six inches more to the next dropper. And the droppers are maybe eight inches long. They have a circle hook on them and then all this and a lot of the droppers are coated and glow in the dark tubing. There's a lot of glow in the dark this and that so that they can And there's also a line one of those little lights that light that water activates a little light like a high pressure light. One of those little lights is rigged up at the top connection just to have something down there going click with light. And with a three pound weight, and I'm assuming you're running mono eighty pound braid. Okay braid, so you gotta you don't have to do this way that would work. There would be too much stretching, you'd never know when you hit the bottom. And so but you can still with a three pound weight you can feel the take. Yes, really absolutely far more than I thought you'd be able to. Yeah, there's no doubt. That's what it feels like. When we did the swordfish fishing in this roughly the same depth. Um, they're those guys have the rod locked off and they're just watching the rod tip. They're not feeling it because they're not hitting the bottom. They're floating it like and they see a tick tick tick. And I think we were using five pounds of wait, weren't we there? We had five pounds. Yeah, so whatever they see in that rod tip, you know, but with this with three pounds, yeah, you can very much tell that there was a fish on. Did you guys ever get a double? No? And we tried leaving them getting a hit, letting it sit. Um. No, never got a double, but we got it pretty dialed. We got a pretty doubt. We went out one day and and and didn't do it long and had four And I feel like we could have We had two anglers and got four, And I feel like me and fits were out there and we could have stuck around and got eight, which would have been allowed to get that day. It's funniest thing in the world. I told my wife out doing it, completely unimpressed. She so he just doesn't. It feels like cheating because of what because because it just reels itself up. But the whole the point of fishing isn't the reeling in part. And I told you this to No, it's your exerting effort or something. E Let's not told her this, And I'm gonna tell you it now. If I took all the things that it takes too deep drop up a black cod and threw all in a pile on the floor and gave you a boat and said, go get me a black cod. Figure it out. Uh or I took all of the things it takes to catch a large mouth bass and threw it on the floor and put you at a lake. What do you think you're gonna do? Quicker? M hmm. I'll tell you you are never you are never, ever, ever ever, I'm gonna catch the black hodon. I ran into this with the time I got introduced deep drop fishing was when we went out sword fishing. We're with these dudes, and we're with this guy. He's a commercial sword fisherman. He lives south of the line where you can where you can do plagic longlining, so no long lining is allowed. You can only hand line sword fish. Where where's the line, like somewhere around the Florida border. I don't exactly it's in that. I don't exactly know where to Joe, Do you know exactly where that line is? There's some lines in federal waters whatever. You can't longline, so it's um and you can't even rod reel for commercial. It's hand lining. And they wait. Swordfish at night come up shallow. So they go out and set these buoys and they got these these hundred foot lines on these booties, and there's a eight and you're out there and you got a light on the buoy and you're actually waiting for the buoy to start bobbing, and you run over in hand line of sword fishing at night or in the daytime, they spiral straight down two canyon mouths that aret underwater the same way points where he's catching him at night. He fishes that same way point, but he's catching him a hundred feet from the surface at night, and he's fishing that same way point, but catching fish one thousand, three hundred feet down in the daytime. Now he's black cow. They don't do I don't think that they ever experienced anything. They just stay on the bottom. So we go out twenty miles and the ocean is three dimensional. I don't need to explain. And he's like, I'm gonna catch a swordfish twenty miles out feet of water, and I'm like, you are not. And does all this, this and that and the other thing in the right And it gets finally gets that thing owner and tap tap, and he throws the switch and here comes a seventy pound swordfish. I'm thinking, in my head, you will never. I don't care how long you live, you will never do that again. Yanni's puking out the other side of the boat the whole time. You don't even know what's going on. He's so sick. We're in a twenty four ft boat and he's so sick. We didn't know he didn't know he had one on. That's not true. I was trying to puke. I couldn't get it out. So he then does his whole rigmarole over again. Bam, second sword fish. In that moment, I was like, this is the pinnacle. This is the pinnacle of angling. Like in terms of what I've often said about houndsman, if you're gonna take the knowledge required to do something and put it into a measurable unit, like how we measure digital information and bits of material. If you're gonna take know how two uh train a hound and then catch a mountain lion in the absence of snow, and then you're gonna measure the information that had to be in that person's head, it would be vastly, like exponentially greater than the bits of information that it takes me to sit on the edge of a alfalfa field and shoot a deer with my rifle. Not even comparable amounts of information, the information that that the bits of information that are in that guy's head to go out with that equipment and that ocean and pull up two swordfish. It's like, it's not even the same ballpark. Is what it takes to go into a lake and catch up and catch a blue gill off my mom's dot. It's not the same thing. So for my wife to be like, I don't really get it's not fair. It's like, what are you talking about. Well, maybe Joe and Miles can do a little report on the last time I deep dropped swordfish. We were with the captain in Louisiana and he he felt that swordfish were such majestic creatures that it was disrespectful to pitch yourself against him with an electric reel. And we fished those depths and hand crack artisanal. It was miserable, man, but we did with a bespoke real I here's my other thing about I like your way for the record, Like, I like the other thing about deep dropping is this is okay, it's not fishing. And I told this to Janni. I'm like, NI says, it is fishing. But I'm like, okay, let's say it's not fishing. I don't care what it is call itself. That's why I try to say deep dropping, because like it's it's it's not fishing, it's something else. Sure, whatever it is is fascinating, and whatever it is I can see is there is a lot of pun intended. There is a lot of depth. There is an enormous amount of depth to it where I could picture a world and I could picture myself becoming very, very obsessed with it. I take no argument with the level of depth of this and all the things that you just show just mean deep water, I don't. I mean more in the metaphorical sense. Yeah, Like, and your your analogy of dropping all the gear and saying like catch this or cats that, Like, it makes your point clearly. But the argument that it is it represents the pinnacle of angling assumes that the pinnacle of angling is based on what is the most technically difficult way of doing it, and that, to me, is not how I personally define the pinnacle of angling. Fair, I was totally fair. I think that there's more of an aesthetic, like felt experience to it, and I don't think that anyone can define the particle of angling for anybody else for the record. But that's a great point, man, I just don't That's not how I would say. Like, Man, that's the thing I aspire to be as an angler is the guy who like has the technical details down to the most fine minutia to catch the fish. I get. I get that it's hard. It's just not not how we go about it. When we were talking what I was with my brother Danny. When I was with my brother Danny and my wife and we were deep dropping and doing well, and my wife was um saying that it just seemed like somehow like not fishing like. And I'll point out that we only have one deep drop rig and me and Danny were kind of monopolizing the deep drop so so she wasn't. She was a year to go and do all the other stuff that you do where you get to like do it. So uh. In this conversation we're talking about like, well what does it mean? And I was saying, part of the fund for me is trying to visualize what these things are doing. This is it's another planet, man, at that depth, it's another planet. It's dark, right, It's like I can't picture what's going on down there when they come up there like an ice cube. How cold they are. It's so damn cold down there. That fish feels like an ice cube. So anyways, I was getting off on that, and Danny was saying, Okay, well, let's let's extend this logic to its extreme. He's like for me to see a fish cruising through shallow water and to pick the fish, and I can see it's world, I can see its moods. I can watch it respond to my cast like that's something how like? So getting off on how you don't know what they're doing is great, but it's also nice to get off on knowing what they're doing, which is fair. And when I say the aesthetic experience like that, to me personally, is that pinnacle when you you have to see the visual cues of what the fish is doing, read it's behavior, read all the different things around you make your decisions based on that in the moment for how you were going to plot your attempt to fool that fish and landed. Those are the pinnacle moments for me. It's it's definitely site fishing ice ice fish with a painter named Ben and I took him. He was a he was a fly fisherman, like fish shop, but I introduced him to ice fishing, and he was saying how he couldn't ice fish without imagining the hole in the ice as a birth canal, because he was like, I'm so removed from the fish by like a physical, impenetrable barrier that when we catch one, I feel as though it's passing through some sort of birth canal from one world into another. And that's how I felt about these black hat coming up. It was like they were being delivered. It was like they were being like imagine a hand from the past, sort of like penetrating the presence and ropping something. It was like they're being like birth from one reality to another, like one dimension that there's this orifice through which things pass one dimension to another, one being the the abyss and the other be in my hand, total darkness into sunlight. Yeah, that fish, when he's on his way up, he's gotta be like this cannot be good, No Joe for you. What's what's the pinnacle of fishing? Um? I side more with Miles on this, and I'll say though, like deep dropping, it's one of those methods sort of like wire line trolling. I have the utmost respect for the guys who are very good at it. A lot of people think that that's kind of easy stuff like go out there, drop down this heavy weight, catch your fish, go pull your wire line, you catch your stripers. There's a lot of art to both of those and I appreciate them very much. But I would rather throw poppers at alreny pound black fin tuna in Louisiana than deep drop sword fish just because same thing. It's just it's the visuals. For me, it's the interaction like that. That interaction is part of what's so cool about fishing and hunting. But fishing was what we're talking about, like what is that fish doing? What am I doing? And how where do those two things meet at the end of the line, my actions and their actions. That's white like watching rick fish more than deep dropping. Oh I'm happy to keep doing it. Yeah, yeah, what's your take on it? Though? After having done it? You were you were you were like a deep drop enthusiast. Last I talked to you, I was yeah, yeah, Um, it was tough just having the one rig, you know, like you're saying, you know, there's a lot of sharing a lot of Sharon going on. You definitely need to invest in another rod and reel get after most of them. But yeah, no, it's like anything. I like figuring it out, you know. And I told you I was talking with Well, I was talking with his brother. But Jennifer's got cousins there in North Carolina, and one of them deep drops for swordfish. And I was talking to his brother and I was explaining to him about the mock and all that, and he was saying, oh, that the muck is the same when we deep drop for swordfish. He says, you should call Rob and talk to him. He'll give you some good tips on how to work at the top of the mud and be right where you need to be. What I'm in visualizing is I might patent a sinker that has like uh some that steals some attributes from the Mars were over. It's a streamline three pound sinker that passes through the water, but when it gets near the bottom, it deploys a little. Yeah, and then it had and it lands like a Martian rover. It's got like a back burner. That's the rig. I got a feeling that with those circle hooks you can probably just leave it in the rod holder once you've got your depth and wait, five ten minutes will be in the primordial monk. Well no, not if you said it to not get into them, to not let it go into the monk unless you think that the muck is the depth is changing. I have it on good authority that you have to be dragging bottom by people who would know. Now I know, so you would make it so that the weight is like in the mock, dragging it and you have your hooks just above it. But did You're not so worried about feeling the fish because I think that those fish will just get on hook themselves and then probably stay on. That's I feel we should take this offline. I get what you're saying, but I think that there's I'm trying to be mindful of the limits of the audience. I get what you're saying, but I feel like we should discuss it later, just you know for sure for sure. Well, I need to talk to my wife's cousin too, get some thoughts on that. UM. I used to think of helmet fishing is being very impersonal, but now I feel like I'm in direct communication with those They're only three feet down. It's like they were like neighbors. I had a haliban experience. I share my story. No, I definitely need to share this story. Thought we were going to kick it off on this one. I wish that was on camera. Well, I'll tell you something. So, uh, we fish and halbit little boats. Um, there's like certain it's hard to bring a good sized halbitt into a little teeny boat because everything is there's too much junk in there. Anyways, Its like the average size or what's a good size? At what point does a halbit become annoying in a boat? Yea an eighteen foot boat? We're talking like a like what what I grew up calling rowboats? Just like a like we use lund skiffs, very seaworthy, rock solid but just no frills, bench seats, open bow, aluminum rowboat and as we fish out of because we need to be able to drag him up on the beach when we leave. So it's gotta be big enough for a couple of guys can carry it. That's as big as a boat what we can have, Um, and when you bring it, like to bring a fifty pound halibit into that boat? Is if he's frisky um. It's just a lot people on big help like people the gym, and break their legs, break their arms, break rods. They go bonkers. So the thing we do to prevent him from going bonkers is at us like smaller ones. You gaff him and just drag him in a little bit bigger. You want to buy some time. And so we have these harpoon shafts and have a detachable head on it that's hooked to a cable leader that's hooked to a rope that's hooked to a booty, And when the fish comes up, you just jab it through the head and this detachable head comes off. It's like a toggle, and then throw the booty over the side of the out and then the fishes on the line. Oftentimes this process the fish comes unhooked from a jhook. But all of a sudden, now your fishes harpooned and on a buoy, and that buys you all the time in the world. You can then do whatever you need to do. This booty is probably size of the volleyball the buoy. To blame the booty that I'm telling a story about, it's about size. It's probably a little smaller in the basketball easily easily fits into like easily fits into a five gallon bucket. You probably fit two them in a five gallon bucket. Inflatable buoy and the inflatable that's only like two p s I or something. I mean, it's like no real air pressure in him. Uh. And then what you do is you can grab the rope and the buoye's on it and you can pull the fish up. You can bleed it. You can just hang it there, wait until it stops thrashing it's bled. If it's like the next stage up, you can kind of put a rope around its tail. You can even tie its tail so he's bent into a c and tie them up like that and then bring him up in the boat so he's not going bonkers. Anyhow, We're out fishing and I and we're fishing to spot. The weather is too bad to go to the good spots. We have to go to the shitty spots. And we're fishing the shitty spot and it's shitty, and I'm like, let's go to another shitty spot in the middle, go to the other shitty spot. And I dropped down bam giant like a big Halibit and eventually get out of the boat, and we have the conversation we always have, which is like, you're not supposed to kill the big, huge halibit because they're females, like once they gonna do certain size. Just know they're an egg bearing female. They're like a reproductively viable female. And we know that this. We have this conversation like, yeah, but there's commercial longliners that work these same waters, like people are hauling out metric tons of right, and all the people in the world, and everyone wants to bring some HElib at home, and okay, let's kill it. This is every time him. The conversation goes the same way. Every time. We have this verbal acknowledgement that there's an argentry made for not doing it, and then we justify it with, well, why would we do something about global warming? China is not right. We have that conversation, so we decided to kill the fish. So it comes up and it's just head, I mean, like never ending head. It's just all head, like as deep down as you can see it still it's head. And fits takes the harpoon and sticks it in the head and it sounds and the hook pops out the fish sounds. The booty goes overboard like I've never seen a booey, like if you got a hit in the head, but this boody has been dead way. This booy goes overboard as the rope runs out and the boy gone from the water surface, and I just gotta will sink and feeling and we're like, well it'll pop up. It'll have to pop up, you know, because actually they vanished now and then they come up like ten seconds later. It three days later, it hadn't popped up. Gone. He's you know they say hook line and sinker, harpoon, had rope and booie. He sucked it down. Sorry, she you know what. My buddy fits was even making a point to say she and her just to rub it in. She sucked it down. And we sat there for an hour with waiting. Went to get binoculars because we went that far from our shack, went to get binoculars, come back out, spend a couple more hours, then we started doing concentric circles. The next morning we're right back out there, never to be seen again. How how much do you think that fish wade? Maybe? How big can hallib it get? And the state records like five forty or four ninety it was. I know they get over five pounds. I don't know the state the state records and nothing like that. And how old is a hell of it to weigh that much? You have to look that up. Yeah, I don't know their growth rates. The females get big. You really shouldn't be doing this to Hall of It, but we did it. Did you talk to Ron Layton about the whole experience? No? No, but I did call a couple of people. But the best theory is Danny's theory. One guy called it a halibut cat, and he said it'll pop up, like he said, I mean, I've never heard of one being gone more in ten minutes. But just hang tight, I said, when it pops up as a pop up far away, he goes, I've always been shocked how close by it popped up, because I think they go straight down then the booty flows them straight back up. So he said, just hanging tight. I'm like, why aren't you been sitting here an hour? And he's like, I keep looking. Danny's theory is this, and this is the one I think is correct. I think it sucked it down down in the air pressure collapse the booty, the water pressure collapse, the booby just so now it's just living with a booy. I don't think it's dead with a booby. The other theory is that it got hung up on something. I don't think it got hung up on something, and I think it went down the booty collapse. I think it sucked it down a hundred feet down or whatever. The booty burst collapsed, it would be deflated. But would you pull a rock fish up what's its swim bladder? Do? Yeah? Coming out the goals gets big going down the it just would have He thinks it just deflated it. Maybe even pop the cork on the buoy because it's an inflatable booth a threaded cork in it. And now that fish just died a slow, painful death at the bottom of the ocean, dragging around my deflated buoy. We'll continue to talk about letting those big ones live, and I might be more inclined. Now. I just have a question though, about like really really depressing. Yeah, that that was that was kind of a downer. We go ahead with your question. No, just you know, back to uh, if a lot of other people do it? Whatever, it is that makes it okay? Yeah, because it's like I mean, if you bring something out to its logical argument, you look at the end result of everyone doing it this way or everyone doing it doing X the the other way. I just well, let me tell you, let me put it this way. So we get a lot of questions about hunting ethics and fishing ethics and all this, right, and a point I've settled out and I think I think I say to people often it's like a great start with ethics, a great start, and maybe it is the end of your journey. Just do what's legal. Don't the law, Like, learn the law and stick to it. How does is not just state regulated, it's federally regulated because they move their migratory so we like share management authority with Canada. We have federal and state regulations on halibu. Those halibus say that as a non resid or non resident or resident recreational angler, you're allowed to halibate of any size every day. Juxtaposed that with this year, officially it went from one yellow I rock fisher year to zero yellow I rock fisher year. You can have to LINKD one in the inch bracket, one in the overt in bracket annual limit black cod eight per year, four per day. Right, they're not shy about telling you not to do ship. They're not shy about it. They're not like, we really shouldn't, but every we'll be disappointed. They're very king Salmon. They will at the drop of a hat say sorry, boys, even you people that have booked to King Salmon trip, Sorry, King Salmon season ends tonight. Tough ship. So you're allowed to held it per day, any size, any size, any sex. Yes, Okay. So if you look at the management authority and you say, man, these guys don't mess around. They're willing to do some insane ship like closed seasons, unexpectedly overnight. Uh, who do I? Who do I go? Where do I pick up my cues from? But then you're conflicted because these large females always have eggs in them, always have eggs in them, are important for the the or so I've been told, charter fisherman, if you're fishing with a guide, if you're a recreational fisherman fishing with a guide, you can't keep those big ones because they want to maintain the just reducing reducing a stress around the fish, but commercially you can't got it like longliners can. If you talk to the captains out there, they'll tell you that exactly the same amount of big old females are getting killed and brought in. It just is they're just letting other groups do it. So it's pretty sticky subject up there. Yeah. And the other thing is you can go catch small ones and then people will be pissed because you're not letting them get big. It's a real minefield. I mean ethics, you know, it's a whole field of study for reason. All right, So that happened. What else? Give me your give me? Like a me losing his fish isn't on the show. This is after we stopped filming and I was just hanging around my family. But the deep drop in his on the show, so stay tuned. And then Yanni was our little startling adventure is going to be on the show. That's a lot of fun. Oh, it's so fun, very beautiful, very educational. It falls into my little bucket of doing stuff that makes me a little nervous, a little dancing at weddings, yeah for sure. Yeah, except we didn't do any shots before we jumped into that fifty degree water, which wasn't bad and just becoming all that. The training that we did with Greg and Alex last year in California, even though it was a whole year later, it really paid off. I was so much more comfortable just getting in there. It was cold, but you warm up in like five minutes when that layer of water warms up in your suit, and uh, I didn't quite feel like Darth Vader, you know, the whole time we were in the water whatever, it was a couple of hours. Um, it's beautiful down there. And it just all came back, you know, the whole friends old technique of popping my ears. Like the first time I got down there and I felt it, I was like, oh, yeah, I remember to do this, and then my ears popped, and yeah. I just went about our business. I didn't find any scalps, which was a bummer, but it's one of those things I think I'm gonna have to look for. It's like Morrel's, It's like, uh, it's a learned thing. I think. It's like I remember being shipped here on the hillside. I remember being shocked when I saw my first rock scallop, and then now I just kind of know what I'm looking for. But I remember being like, oh my god, that's one, and then you wanted like how many of those did I pass? Up? Right, it's kind of that feeling a quick tibet on depth and the booey and all that and what Greg Fonds, the spear fisherman. He was saying that he dives in that that temperature water with a seven mill suit because the suit compresses so by the time you're down to um when you're at depth, you're in like a two mill suit or a three mill suit. You see what I'm saying, I do, but go on, it's interesting. Uh No, I just really enjoyed that. Uh. Historically, Ricky did too highlight for picking up those c cucumbers, and that is definitely the beginners, Like that's the gateway for free diving, right there are those c cucumbers. They don't get away, they can't get away from you know what. I'm hanging out like one or two and then all of a sudden you go down and you're like, ah, there's ten in a row. I was out of breath most of the time. I wasn't doing a very good job hold my breath. Uh what what what did you have? What? Were your impressions just in general closing thought of the whole shoot, Yes, the trip and everything. Oh, I mean, I think the fish Shack is easily one of my favorite places. Uh it rains all the time, which is pretty terrible for doing camera work, but um, I wouldn't trade it. But I'm always amazed how I don't know, just those coastal conditions out on the water. It's raining, it's cold, it's fifty degrees, it's uh yeah, it's it's fantastic though, thumbs up, thumbs up. You've got a couple of drone shots while we were up, Oh man, some beautiful drone stuff, which makes my drone enthusiasm very very high. We we had to write. We wrote a song about Rick as a drone enthusiast. It's, um, he's got that itch. His name is Rich, but it's actually Rick is how the song goes, so pretty good lyrics there. All right, let's close out with another robust plug for Ben hold On. I got a little comment on you know, everybody says, how of it? Just like pulling up a piece of plywood. Everybody says, everybody says everything. Yeah, Well, I'd like to just comment on that and I was thinking about that fighting a few how but I caught there a couple of weeks ago, and like, this feels like any other fish you're pulling off the bottom, head shakes. Yeah, if you didn't know it was a hall of it, it could be a big fat grouper. It could be a I don't know, think of another fish that just they don't go for screaming long runs at least I've never experience. It's that, you know, because you've got such heavy tackle. Yeah. Oh, when you're jigging, you already jigging your jigging way up over your head and also bamnam and then you buckle in and that head just going boo, almost like it like hurt, like if he was hitting your head with his head to knock you out. Oh yeah, they put up a good all that oh burn door, what suck? So I like Alibet for that. They were really fun to catch this time again, I've got a little more experience, so I think I just I lost one. So I feel like I had a good, pretty good hitting catch to hook to bite to hook ratio, which is nice. You know, I didn't let any go, But coming home and eating them, you know, I'm not like huge on the holb but usually for eating them, they're just it's just like a vessel, you know, like everybody describes, right, they're just it's me. It's there, doesn't have a lot of flavor. Everybody likes it. But I decided to blacken one with that blackening. So talk about that that stuff that we got in the pint. Yeah, Chef John uh White maybe is his last name, I can't remember. Just like Instagram buddies, we've never hung out, but he sent us. He asked we wanted something. I said sure, so he sent us like six pints of his blackening spice. I'm telling you follow his directions. Don't put too much on both sides, a little bit of oil cast iron, and then when you flip it after you see her, the first side you put in like depending how much fish you got in there, but you know, up to half stick of butter, and then just start basting, turning down like low and start basting that seared side with the butter. And after maybe five minutes when was getting to be done, a little bit of white wine. Squeeze a lemon in there, keep basting prime prime eating right there. Yeah, yeah, I'll give you something it's been I thought i'd go through that pint wicked quick, but I barely have a dent in it. So alright, one last quick, robust plug for Bent. A much better show about fishing than what we just had. That was real tangential. I will say, of all the projects fishing projects I've worked on over the years, I am more excited about this one than anything else I've ever done. So I just I just hope I think Miles would agree. Um, people have fun with this podcast, are entertained by and kind of occasionally walk away going what the hell did he just say? Is kind of my goal? And not because the sound quality is poor, No, not at all. Know if that If that's the problem, take that up with Phil. Uh. If it's a content problem, you can you can, you can write to us. Yeah, it's gonna be produced by meat eaters best exactly, it won't be any sounds fill the engineer. When can our audiences listen to the podcast every single Friday? Dropping earlier early in the morning. If you if you are up earlier than this drops, then uh, either you have really small children or you're doing more fun things that I am. I was gonna say, well, you fish more than Miles and Night. Yeah, exactly, all right, thanks everyone,
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