Bear Grease - Ep. 381: Backwoods University - Pogie Boats

Episode Date: October 27, 2025

The menhaden commercial fishing industry has been around for over 100 years. Menhaden or "pogies" are a small saltwater fish that are used for a variety of things like fertilizers, animal feed, fish bait, and they are also a huge source of omega3 fatty acid so they are used in making human and animal dietary supplements as well. In this episode we will be diving into the controversy of this industry, specifically off the coast of Louisiana. Over the past few years there have been several questions pop up about the ethics of the practice, and more importantly the long-term impacts it's causing on the fishery and coastal habitats. Connect with Lake Pickle and MeatEater Lake Pickle on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and YouTube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places, and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both. Big shout out to Onyx Hunt for their support of this podcast. I'm your host, Lake Pickle. On this episode, we're headed back down to the brackish waters of America's Amazon. That's the Gulf, for any of you who may have missed that episode. Only this time, we're set in sale from the Louisiana coast to take a good look into the Menhaden fishing industry, or, or Pogi boats, as they're commonly known, along with the questions surrounding the amount of bycatch they bring in and the frequent conflicts they have with recreational fishermen. Let's dive into it.

Now, I'm an inlander, born and raised. Where I grew up and where I currently live, I'm anywhere from three to four hours to the Mississippi or Louisiana coast. But still, during the summer or early fall months, one of my favorite things to do is head down there to catch speckled trout and redfish. myself and often three to four friends will load up and make a long weekend out of it, which is what you're hearing in the background here. This clip is from a trip around Terrio, Louisiana, with my good friends Jordan Blissitt, Jimmy Primos, my father, Bobby Pickle, and Travis Lovell with really good charters.

Speckled trout, fun to catch, excellent to eat. But me personally, man, I love hooking into those big bull redfish. These things will pull and fight you to the point where you'll be thinking that you have somehow managed to set your hook into a diesel truck. It's a fight and thrill that's impossible to forget. But that is just one of the many crown jewels that make the Louisiana Gulf Coast what it is. It's the people. It's the scenery. It's the smell of the air down there and the boiled shrimp, if you're lucky.

There's a reason, or really, a whole lot of reasons, that this place has been a sought-out destination for thousands upon thousands of anglers. And the short clip that I've shared with y'all here is one of many incredible memories that I've gotten to make down there. Man, it's such a special place and an incredible resource. But now, I'm going to share with you a clip from another fishing trip.

I wasn't on this one. A man named Chris McAluso was, and Chris had a much different experience on his fishing trip than I did. Here's Chris. Well, we got the pokey boats out here, right up against the beach. They just strung the Persane net,

which catches everything that swims. And now they're pumping the... whatever they caught, Pogies, you know, Min Aden, Mullet, Croakers, Speckle Trout, White Trout, Redfish, whatever got caught in that net. They're pumping what will go into the hold, into the hold, and then the big fish are going to get kicked off to the side pretty much dead. Sharks, bull redfish or jacks. And right now they're pumping the water out of the hole to make room for more Minhaiden.

And all that water that's coming out of the boat right now is just no oxygen. in it at all. They're pumping it here. This water's hot, it's shallow. They're pumping it in here and when that no oxygen water comes out in here, it's going to kill everything there too. So just absolutely no reason for those boats to be this close to this beach. Well, they're about four feet of water at the most and we are, I mean, they're less than 100 yards from us right now, about the length of a football field, and we're 25 yards off this beach. So they're less than 200 yards from this beach. A beach that, by the way, just, got restored, just got $120-ish million invested in it to restore it, and you can clearly see this big boat when he's under power is chewing up these sandbars and chewing up the surf. Very clearly see that. We're going to hear from Chris later, but before we go any further, the stage has to be set. Two different fishing trips off the Louisiana coast, but they were conveying very different experiences.

The biggest difference was the presence of the Pogi Boat operating close proximity to where Chris was trying to fish. And we're going to dive off into that subject. But before, we all need to understand just exactly what these Pogie boats, or the Menhaden fishing industry, as it's more formerly known, actually is. And heads up, if you're a visual learner like I am, you can see the video of everything I'm about to describe on the YouTube version of this episode. Let's dive in. The Gulf-Menhaden-Persesane fishery has existed since the late 1800s and is the large commercial fishing in the Gulf and the second largest in the United States in terms of total landings. Landings peaked around 1 million metric tons in the 1980s and is averaged around half a million

metric tons over the last decade. Over 90% of that occurs off the coast of Louisiana. A Minhaiden, or a pogey, as they're more locally called, is a small, oily fleshed fish. They're bright silver in color and have a distinct black spot right behind their gill open. They are a flat fish with a deeply forked tail, and at full maturity, they can weigh around a pound and be about 15 inches in length. So a relatively small fish is what we're talking about here. They can be found in coastal and estuary waters, and they're filter feeders, feeding primarily on plankton. They're also a very important forage fish to several other predator fish species, such as redfish, cobia, dolphins, and many others. As far as the role they play for the menhaden fishing industry, well, they're the lifeblood.

of it, and they're harvested for the production of fertilizers, animal feed, fish bait, fish food, and since they're a huge source of omega-3 fatty acid, menhaden are also used in several human and animal supplements, like fish oil pills, for example. And for the record, I want to put this out early on at the front of this episode. I fully believe in telling both sides of every story, regardless of how controversial or my own personal beliefs or biases. You have reached ablick fisheries. For the operator, please press zero. Thank you for calling Dicklick Empire.

Your call is now being forwarded. Please hold. Good afternoon. There's security. Yeah, I need to speak to the operator, please. No one's here today. I have some plants all today. Okay, thank you very much.

So, just for the record, I have tried to get a representative from the Menhaden fishing industry to talk to me. I've called. I've sent emails. I even sent Facebook messages. And I was not told no, but I was never responded to. So, if anyone from the Midd-Haden industry is out there and wants to speak their truth on this issue, I am all ears. Get back to me. Anyway, let's get into it.

To kick this off, I'm driving straight to the source. I made a day trip out of it, and now I'm driving into Grand Isle, Louisiana, a tourist destination for Anglers far and wide wanting to come down here and experience some of the world-renowned inshore fishing that this place offers. The marshy waters hug up to both sides of the road, and looking out into the distance, I can see several charter fishing boats, not to mention driving past several folks that are trying their luck fishing off the bank. As I get into town, the roads are lined with stilt elevated buildings whose height protects them from high water incidents. This is a recreational fishing town, through and through. And I'm here to meet a man who has spent his whole life not only appreciating this place, but has made a man. It's

his living as a charter fishing guide. My name is Keith Bergeron. I've been chartering out of Grand Isle for since 2004, 21 years, going on 22, won't be long. I've been fishing all my life. There's no white sand like Florida and Gulf Shores. It's brown sand. It's all natural beaches. The wildlife is just abundant.

And the fishing is extraordinary. Anybody who's an outdoors person would come here and just fall in love with this place. So it was a passion for you, something that you loved to do long before it turned into? Well, even as like a kid, I was always amazed at how somebody could fish for a living. And I always dreamed about it, I guess you could say, but never thought I could do it. And I started out hoping I could do maybe 30 trips a year, ended up doing like six. 60. So the first year was just crazy. Ever since then, it's been booming. Just been booming ever since. I got more business than I want. I give a lot of trips away to other guides

because I just want the business to come here. Right. Even if I'm not fishing them. You just want to keep the area perpetuated? Yeah. Because if they can come here and enjoy themselves, they'll come back. And hopefully they'll call me again. And if I'm, if I'm, if I'm available or take them. Keith has a story and perspective that's rooted in love and appreciation for this place that he calls home, as well as countless hours spent on the water. I really think you're going to enjoy hearing it, but before we do, there's someone else y'all need to meet that shares some strong similarities with Keith.

Shane Mayfield, and I basically operate from Port South of Venice, Louisiana. I have been doing it full time now since 96, so I guess I'm coming up on 30 years. but I did it before that too, all through college and even a little bit when I was in high school. Garden? Godin. Yeah. How did you get into that? Long story short, my dad, he still does run a lot for a corporation down in Port Salfour.

So that's kind of how I got into it in high school. You know, I was working. I'd work there in the summers and my off time. And then I'd take some of their customers help when they had groups coming in and go fishing. And then I did that, you know, and then when I did that, you know, and when I was, I went to college, I, you know, I'd come home on the weekends and fish and, you know, put a little money in my pocket. Sure.

And then I got out of college and I went to work for a consulting firm. I have an environmental degree and I just like to fish better. So I only worked about a year and a half. And then I quit my job. And I always tell my customers, when I told my mother I was going to quit, she said, you're going to do what? I said, yeah, I'm going to guide full time. And I say, I wish you to take that black iron skill and beat me upside the head with it because

I don't know what I was thinking, but. But all joking aside, it's been good to me. Yeah. Yeah. So you still like it. You like going on. I love taking people fishing. I mean, I've done caught my share.

If I never catch another red fish again in my life, I'm not caught way more than most people ever will. So, you know, I just like taking people fishing. It's what I do, and I've been doing a long time. Both Keith and Shane are Louisiana natives, if their accents don't immediately give that away, as well as veteran charter fishing guides, which is a valuable perspective, Seeing as one of the big topics in question is the significant amount of conflicts that seems to be happening between the Pogi Boats and Charter and Recreational Fishermen. I want to hear some of their personal experiences with these Pogi boats as well as their thoughts on them. They've always been in this area, and it's only certain times of the year where the Pogi really get abundant on the beach.

They start schooling, and they might be laying eggs. I don't know their process of Pogi itself, but I know. No late summer when it's hot, we see a lot more pokey boat action. They're not scared to get in there and get on the beach and disrupt the fishermen. The boats? Yeah, the pokey boats itself. They're all about catching them poggis. You know, it don't matter what it takes, who they're going to mess up your fishing spot.

They're going after them pogies. So it got to where They were catching so many pogeys in a drag That they had a net busted on the beach Right here in front of Grand Isle I don't think they were very far out And the net When it ripped all those dead pogies were just floating

And they all washed up on the beach in Grand Isle And this is a tourist place Yeah So the town had to deal with the stench. And I'm talking about three, four feet wide, six to eight inches deep, just dead fish. So we had a bad issue here. Grand Isle ended up creating a buffer zone, which was passed by law, where they had to stay away from Grand Isle for three, at least three miles away. Gotcha. Gotcha. So before that, there was no buffer zone. They could come in wherever they wanted to.

Yeah, that was pretty. much free rains. How long ago did they pass that buffer zone, you know? It's been about two years now. So not that long? No. Wow. I would have thought it'd been, I was expecting to say 10, 15 years ago, something like that. No. Before this two or three years ago, they were able to come in as close as they wanted. I mean, the boats are kicking up sand. That's how shallow they get. These nets are, I'm going to just guess and say they probably fish 15 feet of water. water easy. That's how long they stretch down from the bottom to the surface.

So if you're in six, eight feet of water or less, they're catching everything in sight. Everything in that circle is being trapped in that net. It's not just pokey's ending up in that net. No. They got speckled trout. They got croakers, flounders, redfish, you know, even the bull reds, jack-revell. dolphin and they're catching torpun. The first talks about making some areas restricted to menhaden fishing started up in

2023. However, there was no formal law put in place until the early part of 2024. These laws established a coastwide buffer zone of one-half mile and a one-mile buffer zone at Grand Terry, Elmer's Island, and Holly Beach, as well as a three-mile buffer zone at Grand Isle. These buffer zones were put in place due to several factors, most notably after 18 separate fish spills, accounting for over 2.5 million waste in Menhaden and at least several hundred dead, breeding-sized redfish. This all occurred in 2023 alone. Some of these filed up popular beaches and seemingly increased the number of conflicts between recreational anglers and boaters with the Menhaden boats. There was also a significant amount of public outcry from local citizens and sportsmen about the potential damage that this method of fishing could be causing to the shallow waters, the fishery, and the habitat. I want to get Shane's take on this as well.

I'll say this. So for the first time in 30 years, or 30-something, whatever it was, the LDWF, they had done a stock assessment. The first they had done in a long, long, long time. And then they got the results and they said, we got a redfish problem. In other words, we don't have the numbers we'd like to see. We got to do something about it. Well, they had meetings and meetings,

and it's always a slow process when you're going through that. And finally, they came up and they recommended, okay, we're going to drop it from five reds to four reds. We're going to go from 16 to 18 inch minimum, nothing over 27 inches. So that's what they did because there was a problem, right? I mean, they've taken that 27-inch fish, like used to be we could keep one. You know, recreational angles.

And look, we never really did keep them. Yeah. They're not good to eat. You know, if people won a trophy, I mean, back in the day, somebody might want to keep one to mount it, but now you can get a replica. You know, you measure and girth and take a picture and you can get a replica to last forever. Well, they cut that out. They said, okay, you can't keep anything over 27 inches no more for recreational charter angles,

what have you. Well, yet the Pogi industry. They catch, I don't know, I can't say a definite number. I mean, I don't know. I'm not on those boats. I don't see. But it's incomprehensible to say that when I'm drifting through schools of Menhaden, and on a good day with three angles on the boat,

we'll catch, say, 40 to 50 of those things or more. And I'm drifting in a bay boat with popping corks. But when a boat pulls up with a big purse lane and nets a huge school of Menhaden that I know bull reds are in, there's no possible way they can't be catching them and killing them. I mean, it's just the nature of the way they fish. And if the recreational anger can't keep any mature redfish because it's supposed to be bad because of the changes in the fishery,

well, if they're killing as many as I know they're killing, it can't be good. Fascinating stuff from Keith and Shane. And believe me, we're not through hearing from these guys. I feel like we're just getting into the meat of their. stories, but I feel like now is also a crucial time to kick it back over to Chris McAluso. You remember him from his fishing clip early in the episode with the Pogie Boat operating close to him. Chris is the director of the Center for Marine Fisheries and Mississippi River Program Director for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. He works on conservation as well as

advancing habitat restoration efforts across the Gulf and improving federal fisheries management law and policy. Chris is going to give us a more detailed view around the menhaden fishing industry and why it's such a cause for concern. It is going to accomplish this by telling us about a first of its kind, comprehensive study on the menhaden industry that was just published earlier this year. Quick heads up. You're going to hear the term bycatch. Bycatch is unwanted fish or other marine creatures that get caught during commercial fishing for a different species. So, for example, a bull redfish caught in a Pogi Boat net is bycatch. Here's Chris. There have been studies in the past. They were not nearly as thorough as the study that was

released earlier this year and was conducted in the 2024 fishing season. And I think that was part of the problem is that when fishermen and I know and charter boat captains, you know, were starting to call me, you know, 8, 10 years ago and complaining about what they were seeing from the Pogi Boatts, and it really ramped up in the last five to six years. We just had a number of big spills. The boats were just getting closer and closer to some of these very popular fishing areas. And people were starting to shoot a lot of video of it. You know, when we would talk about it with fisheries regulators,

and we would go to the Wildlife Fisheries Commission or talk about it with lawmakers, the data had big gaps in it, you know. And so you could draw a lot of different conclusions about just how many fish from a bycatch perspective were being killed. You know, and the number I would use was, okay, well, they're allowed. up to 5% of their total volume to be bycatch. And if they're harvesting a billion pounds of men hayden a year, well, 5% of that's 50 million pounds of additional dead fish. But we didn't know those things for certain.

We were just putting out the numbers that were in the previous bycatch study, which had pretty big gaps in it. Like nobody had ever really estimated how many bull redfish, for instance, were being killed, how many croaker were being killed, because it was just too difficult for researchers or, you know, biologists or fisheries managers to get down into those nets. They just didn't have the technology that it took to count all of the things that were coming onto that boat and going into the boat and the things that were being kicked back off. Nobody had taken a nearly as close a look as was taken last year during that study. Before Chris dives into the details of this

study, allow me to read to you some of the numbers that came back as a result. The 2024 bycatch study of the Industrial Gulf Menhaden Fishery indicates the following. Approximately, 22,000 breeding-sized redfish, 81 million croaker, 25 million sand trout, or white trout, as they're commonly known. In 40 or more other species, including black drum, sea trout, cow-nose rays were all observed and counted in those poggy nuts. But yeah, it's just extraordinary when you look at some of the other numbers there. I mean, you know, the redfish part is what jumps off the page because it's a game fish.

Louisiana recently took action to make it illegal for recreational fishermen to harvest a bull redfish. Like you can't kill a 27-inch plus redfish anymore, but 22,000 of them were killed, according to the estimate from that study, by the Menhaden industry last year. you know, when I've talked to reporters about this or I've talked to lawmakers or others about it and they say things like, well, but it's just 22,000. I mean, come on, you guys thought it was a lot more than that or the industry is downplaying that number and you have to remind them that it is illegal for anyone else to kill those fish. It's illegal. What they're doing is illegal for everybody else. You know, and that's a point that I think can't be lost here. And the reason it's illegal,

is because those fish are important because the red fish stock in Louisiana is not nearly as healthy as it once was. And those are the fish that are out there that have escaped our marshes, escaped the wetlands, get out into the Gulf to lay eggs and make more redfish. And so that's why those fish were protected. That's why recreational fishermen in this state for the most part said we don't want to kill those fish anymore because we know that the recovery time to bring that species, that bring that population back up to a healthy level gets cut down significantly if we stop killing the ones that are making the babies. And so what those guys are doing, killing 22,000 bull redfish, that's illegal for everybody else. And so that's point number one.

The other thing is, though, you've got to look at some of the other species that are being killed, you know, 81 million croakers. I mean, the estimate is that literally every time those guys set a net, they're killing 6,000-plus croakers. Not only is that an important forage base, an important part of the ecosystem, but croakers are also a fish that recreational and commercial fishermen like to catch because they're very good to eat. And that could be a viable commercial target off of Louisiana's coast for commercial fishermen that don't have snapper quota or other things. They could be catching those croakers. and there has been just a stark lack of bull croakers that folks talk about all the time.

Now, in the 60s and 70s, when they would go offshore, they would fish like Pontch Train, et cetera. They'd catch these two-pound croakers. They don't really catch them anymore. Like, it's a huge deal. It's almost as big a deal to catch a two-and-a-half-pound croaker as it is a 25-pound red snapper. The two-and-half-pound croakers just aren't there anymore.

And maybe one of the reasons they're not there is because the pokey boats are killing 81 million of those croakers every single year. You know, so it was just those kind of numbers that really jump off the page to 25 million white trout, five and a half million white shrimp, you know, millions of millions of mullet, herring and other things that are out there. You know, that's all an important part of the ecosystem, and these things are supposedly being killed by accident, you know?

And another number that not a lot of folks have talked about or made a big deal of is a 240,000 specklet trout. Well, you know, speckle trout is one of those four. fish that generally doesn't get captured in nets unless it's a kill net. I mean, they're pretty good at getting out of trawls. They're, you know, pretty good at escaping capture, you know, in these persains. But again, 240,000 speckled trout, I would be willing to bet you that if you took 10 charterboat captains from Grand Isle, those 10 charter boat captains combined in their careers may not take customers to kill 240,000 combined speckled trout. If a charter boat captain was

taking four customers to catch a limit of speckled trout. And again, a limited trout now per person in Louisiana's 15 per day. It's still a lot of fish. You'd have to do that 4,000 times to equal 240,000 speckled trout. There's just not a lot of charter boat captains who are going to do that. I mean, that's the kind of numbers we're talking about, because that's the volume at which this fishery operates. On blood trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag.

And there was a full of blood. Oh my God, he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors. Where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper. from cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwards.

Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season two of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. We know the Manhattan industry has been around for over a century, the late 1800s to be more specific.

So why has the conflict around this operation seemed to have such a significant spike in these recent years? I think what has stood out to people in the last decade or so in terms of the change that people have seen, in terms of their interactions with the boats, is that they went from being domestically owned companies to foreign controlled companies that didn't really take the same perspective when it came to how they approached the fishery that they had when they were domestically owned fisheries. And that's not me making this up. I mean, that's reflected in some of the data that we see that in the last 10 years, a lot more of the harvest has come closer to shore than it used to.

and then, you know, hearing from fisheries regulators in Louisiana, who've told me off the record on the side, you know, there was a time where if we were getting a lot of conflicts and people were complaining about dead fish or bycatch, you know, if they complained to say the Department of Wildlife Fisheries, the department would call the Pogi companies and say, hey, you'll might need to back off a little bit. But those things stop happening. You know, if you're a lawmaker who's from North Louisiana or you're, you know, a member of Congress, or whatever, you know, you look at commercial fisheries and you say, well, you know, these guys are operating very close to the margins and this is a small operation. That's not the case. These are not mom and pop crabbers. This is not a sole proprietor shrimp or anything like that. I mean, this is a large industrial activity and they harvest and kill things on an industrial scale. And so you got to look at it like that. It's not a mom and pop shrimp in operation. It's a very large, internationally owned industrial-scale fishing operation. They got spotter planes that are telling these Pogi boats where to go.

They got planes in the air flying, and they give them coordinates. The boat goes straight to that spot. They encompass that whole area with that net. And whatever's in that net, when they're pulling that net in, the Pogies regurgitate, and they put off this slime off their skin, that's just, it makes the water like a slurry. It's real thick and it's nasty. So all of these fish that are in that net with the Pogies are breathing that stuff in

and it's clogging up their gills and they can't get oxygen and that's why they're dying. So they suck, they have the hose with the big cage on the end that only allows smaller fish in. So when they release all the rest of the fish that are in there, they did. this last instance we had it was about two or three weeks ago I got a call on a Monday they said they were right there on the beach right here in front of Grand Isle

and I got another phone call from a guy on Wednesday morning because I went out Wednesday morning in my boat we went to fish triple tail out towards the mouth of the river and on the way back I got a call from a guide

that said Grand Isle Beach has hundreds of Bull Reds dead on the beach. So we were coming back from the mouth of a river, and I saw at least 14 bogey boats in Fort Bayou, which is just east of here. 14 of them. They were all together in this one area. So we went straight over there.

So I got some pictures of some dead red fish floating. And then the Wednesday is when all of redfish were on the beach. I got pictures all that Wednesday afternoon. Thursday I got in my boat and I went to the island's east of Grand Isle, which is only accessible by a boat. And I have 40 pictures over there of dead bull reds. So all of those bull reds that they captured in the nets on Monday were all dead and floated against the beach. beach and that's the only ones I could find. There's, there was probably more than that. Redfish don't have babies until they over 27 inches. The ones that they're killing, there wasn't one dead

redfish out of the 140 pictures I got that was under 27 inches. So they're killing all breeding size redfish? Yes, they're killing all the ones having the babies. But yet they've stopped the recreational guy from keeping or catching them at all. party's extension, you may violate at any time. To leave a voicemail, press one. Hey, my name is Lake. I produce a podcast called Backwoods University for the Meteor Podcast Network. I'm calling to inquire to see if someone from your organization would be open to doing a quick interview. I have a flexible schedule, and I can do these interviews digitally, so please let me know if anyone from your organization be willing to talk with me.

And I would love to talk with you. Thank you very much. I'm going to put this out there again. If anyone from the Menhaden fishing industry is willing to share their side of this story, by all means, get back with me. However, I think we can all agree that everything we have heard so far is some moving information. What I'm curious about now is what do we do with it? Where do we go from here? I'll preface this by saying, I don't want anybody to lose their jobs.

you know, there's a lot of things we've done in wildlife and fisheries over the years that we used to do that we can't do anymore because they realize it ain't good for the environment or ain't good for the fisheries, they ain't good for the wildlife, would have you. So I think that's kind of where we're going with this. I mean, they've outlawed it pretty much everywhere else in the country, except for small ways, it's not nowhere near the large scale, industrial scale they have here in Louisiana. They have a, I think it's a half-mile buffer zone off of Plackeman's Parish, which look, half-mile is not that far. No.

Let me tell you, if it was three miles, we would never have conflicts. See, that's what's interesting. I mean, I interviewed a guy in Grand Isle today. And, you know, I was just trying to get honest answers. And I said, man, if you could have a magic wand and you can make the laws, you can wave a magic wand, what would you do? I thought he was going to say I'd make the whole thing go away. Yeah. And he said, I just wish they'd stay at their three mile buffer zone.

Three miles in front of Grand Isle is great. I don't know why it's not three miles all along the coast. So you think there could potentially be a way for them to find a way for everybody can work. Like you don't necessarily have to shut the pogey boats down. They just need to move out further. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. I don't have a problem with the Pogobos working, just not killing everything in sight.

And they probably still going to have some bycatch being that far out. But at least it's not on the beach where they're killing all the speckled trout, the croakers, all the smaller fish that can't go out in that deep water because they're going to get eaten. They own that beach because that's their protection. Yeah. And that's where they thrive at. So, yeah, if the Pogi Boots were further out, and I know what they're going to say, the Pogi industry is going to say they can't catch nothing out that far. I don't know what else to tell you.

Yeah. We're the only state that allows this practice to continue. If you pushed them out further, you would never have that conflict. Because I'm going to tell you, we don't never drift out three miles. Right. Never, never, never, never. Now, how it impacts their fishery, I mean, I can't say that. I don't know.

I don't know. But I do know if they were outside of three miles like they are off of Grand Isle, this would be a moot point. Yeah. Now, they ain't going to be good enough for some people. But you know what? I'm willing to give something. Yeah. Or they are you willing to give something?

Compromise. Yeah, compromise. I just, man, I feel like, and this is, I haven't been able to talk to anybody on the Menhaden fishery side. Honestly, just for the sake of having a balanced journalism, I would try to talk to one of them, but I haven't been able to do that. But everything that I'm pointing to that I can gather, points to this needs to be looked at just from a ecological standpoint for the health of the fishery. It's like it seems to be folks need to take a closer look at this. And two, I understand the Midden Hayden industry. I understand there's jobs there.

Yeah, yeah. I understand that. Yeah. also understand how much tourism dollars and big the business is for charter guide services. Well, okay, and not to cut you off, but that is, therein lies a big problem because look, you know, the commercial fishing has always butted heads with recreational. That is wherever you go, you know, and look, there's sometimes there's a disconnect, you know, people don't realize that, you know, that what's going on out there is that they don't see it.

Most of my people are from out of town. So not only did they pay my rate that I charge, but they're staying at a bed and breakfast right there in Port Salfour. You know, they're traveling through. We stopped at the local grocery store because they need to get something when we came back from fishing. They went and ate lunch yesterday. When they got in earliest,

they went to eat lunch at a small restaurant right there in Port Salfour. So it's not only my fee, my rate I'm charging per day, but it's the lodges. it's the stores and we're bringing all these people in how much are the menhaden boats how many people are coming in on the menhaden who's they ain't none of those guys are coming in and staying in the lodges and all that

yeah you know the boats are buying food maybe from a local vendor but as far as people actually come in and going down those guys going to Venice Marina or going to Cypress Cove or going to the you know this lodge or that lot But they ain't doing that. And our guys are. We're a small parish.

We don't have the oil industry like we used to have. Commercial fishing isn't like it used to be. So, you know, they pay property taxes. And I mean, so, you know, they've been around. They've been around a long time. So people want to protect it. And I get that. I get that.

Like I said, I don't want anybody to lose their job. But I say, what about me? I mean, what about what about what I do? What about people coming from all over the country? I'd say 90% of my people are coming from way out. It's an economic impact that I'm going to tell you, if you didn't have that for a lot of these small coastal communities, it'd be a ghost to have that.

Yeah. I think it says a lot about the character of these men, that the solution that they're seeking here is really just an even playing field. For both sides, I mean, really, after the stories that they share, and honestly, some of them didn't even make any, end of the episode due to time constraints, I thought for sure that they would be wanting to put an end to Menhaden fishing outright. But they didn't. They recognize that this industry is how some folks

make their living and support their families. They realize that this industry has an economic impact. I'm going to share my own opinion here, but based off of the information that I have right now, I think that what these guys are asking for is reasonable. They want to take a closer look at the fishing industry, the methods, the bycatch, the conflict between recreational and charter fishermen, is there a way that they can find more common ground? Is there ways to continue harvesting Minhaiden and it be more sustainable with less bycatch and less harm done to the habitat? These questions are not outlandish, and I think they're worth being asked, and more importantly, I think they're worth finding an answer to. We really weren't ever pushing, or haven't

ever been pushing to eliminate the Menhaden industry. But what we wanted to do was find a way that they could continue to operate, but to protect some of those more sensitive habitats that we knew were being damaged by those nets and by those boats making contact with the water bottom and getting very, very close to our beaches. I mean, I've seen bogeyboats setting nets in water that was four and a half to five feet deep. You know, these boats draft 10 feet at least, nine feet maybe at a minimum when they're empty. which means I have watched them plow through the water bottom. You know, I have watched them dig up the sand and dig up the sandbars to get the boat into where they were harvesting the fish. And I know that that person is making an enormous amount of contact on that water bottom. I see the amount of sediment that's being stirred up.

And the fact is, there's not a biologist who would argue against this, but that, you know, the majority of your biomass in, you know, in a coastal, situation happens in that area that's within a mile or two of the beach. That's just where most of your species are going to be. You know, there was a conservation element to moving the boats into a little bit deeper water, and it was that by not having those nets all over the bottom of the water, you are going to reduce potentially the volume of bycatch, but also reduce the number of species that were being impacted. And you were going to keep that water bottom more intense. And this is something I think we've seen borne out in that bycatch study. You know, as you move into deeper water, the number of species impacted go down, the volume

of bycatch goes down. And so there is a conservation value to move in those boats into deeper water. You know, it would be nice for them to make some concessions here and there that a little bit of conservation goes a long way, not just from a public relations perspective, but just from the value of our resource. You know, let's say you went to the prairie pothole region. right? And you told the duck hunters up there that there was this industry that was going to employ a few hundred people. It was going to have some economic impact on the communities. It was going to provide some jobs.

The tradeoff there is going to be we're going to have to kill 30,000 speckle belly geese, about 250,000 blue winged teal and mallards, and about 100,000 morning doves or 100 million morning doves. You guys cool with that? nobody would be cool with that. Nobody would be cool with that. And no politician would back that. Nobody would put their name to that. And yet, that's, in essence, what's happening here. I mean, that's sort of the level that we're dealing with.

I mean, redfish in Louisiana are a game fish. And the bottom line is it's not okay for those guys to be killing those fish. It's not because it's not okay for anybody else to be killing. telling them. I wish I had more education on the actual industry itself as far as, you know, why going out deeper would affect their profit margin or what would it, what would it, what would it, what would them being out three miles statewide due to their bottom line or their business? And I'm sure when people on the other side of listening to this, they're going to be saying, yeah, you don't know. You don't know. No, I don't. But tell me. And let me know, but still,

can we meet, let's find a, let's find a meeting place. I would say, hey, if you see boats over there, just don't go by them. What I'm doing is sustainable. Yeah. Because I ain't keeping nothing. I'm throwing them all back. Does a fish die in every now and then? Maybe.

But I mean, we fight them. We unhook them. You know, every now and you might have one that's hooked deep. It bleeds a little bit. But that is like very rare. Rare. You know, so I can say without a shadow doubt that what I'm doing is sustainable. And it can, and if you protect the fish,

What I'm doing, you can do this forever. You know, if you keep on keeping on the way we're losing habitat, eventually all that large-scale industrial fishing, that's going to be done. I'll tell you one thing. For my separate conversations with Keith, Shane, and Chris, all of them have an undeniable appreciation for the Louisiana coast. It comes from a place of authenticity, and I respect it. It's impossible not to. Before we wrap this up, I want to hear some final thoughts from both Chris and Keith about what they think and hope for the future of the Menhaden fishing industry. You know, my primary focus at TRCP has always been habitat, habitat restoration in the Mississippi River Basin, especially focused in Louisiana.

It's a top two to three priority for our center in particular, and it's a priority for our board and for the organization. And it will continue to be because I think there is a path. It's difficult to see it right now. But there is a path to not only better conservation in the Atlantic Basin when it comes to men Aiding fishing, but also in the Gulf. I'm opening as many eyes as I can to this right now. I'm hoping that something gets done. I mean, that's all I can do is try. If I don't succeed doing this, I'm just going to throw my hands up and say,

we can't do nothing about it. You know, that's all you can do. Yeah. Well, I hope something does change. Yeah, me too. For all of y'all's sake. It's not me. It's not about me.

It's about the kids coming up. You know, families coming down here to enjoy theirself and catch fish in the future. I'll be long gone. People will still be fishing. Yeah. And if you keep wiping them out, they're not going to be here. Regardless of where you fall on this issue,

hopefully we can all agree on wanting a healthy and sustainable fishery and coastal habitat in the future. The question is, how do we get there? What do y'all think? If there's one thing I am confident in, it's that we should never be afraid to ask questions. I want to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University, as well as bear grease and this country life.

I mean, really, the warm welcome that all of you have given me to this bear grease podcast feed means a whole lot, and I appreciate it. And hey, if you liked this episode, share it with either the worst or best angler you have in your contact list. Only, don't tell them which one they are. Leave them guessing. And also, be sure to check out Blood Trails, the newest podcast edition to the Meat Eater Network. This is the true crime genre and hunting and fishing world. Colliding. Hosted by writer and journalist Jordan Sillers, you will hear everything from missing

hunters, poachers turned killers, and fishing trips gone fatally wrong. It is a fascinating podcast that you will not want to miss. In the first episode, premieres Thursday, October 30th. Be sure to check that out and subscribe to it so that you'll be notified when the first episode drops. I'm telling you, this is going to be good. And stick around here, because if this podcast was an inshore fishing trip, we haven't even made it out of the no wake zone yet. We're just getting started. There's a whole lot more on the way. On Blood Trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping day. And there was a pool of blood. Oh my God, he doesn't have a hit.

Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper, from cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together.

He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, IHeart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.