The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 040: Paducah, Kentucky. Steven Rinella talks with small-game and catfish aficionado Kevin Murphy, along with Janis Putelis, Garret Smith, and Adam Moffat from the MeatEater crew.

Episode Date: July 22, 2016

Subjects discussed: Cormac McCarthy and No Country for Old Men; how to get into good graces with the Latvian Eagle; Jani Day, otherwise known as the Summer Solstice; hunting black bears in grizz country; the delisting of grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and implications for the Endangered Species Act; the differences between poke poling, limb lining, jug fishing, and trot lining for catfish; the Big 3 of catfish species; Canadian Hunter whiskey; skanky salmon; pon hoss; best methods for cooking catfish; sending your kid off to school with a muskox sandwich; why the Mississippi River is a sham; and more.  Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meat. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We put the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. How many of you guys have seen No Country for Old Men?

That's good. Long time ago. I've seen it several times. Yeah, it's a good one. This guy wrote in asking this question where he's saying that he's like, he's like, if you were in that situation where he shoots that antelope, you know, in the beginning. Yeah. Well, just in case, like, so the were in that situation where he shoots that antelope, you know, in the beginning. Yeah.

Well, just in case, like, so the writer Cormac McCarthy, who I think is the, and I'm not out on a limb by saying this, he's probably the greatest living American writer, has his book No Clash for Old Men. The Coen brothers made it into a film. Anyhow, in the beginning, the guy, the main character, shoots an antelope and hits it bad, gets a bad hit on it. In the book, he explains the bad hit better,

where he drops short and a bullet comes off the hard pan and hit the antelope bad. But he starts trailing the antelope, blood trailing it, and comes across a scene of a major shootout and dead bodies laying everywhere and a whole bunch of money in a suitcase a guy recently wrote in saying like hey what would you do in that situation do you feel as though you should have finished trailing that antelope i was saying i think that i would forget all about the antelope

if all of a sudden I found 20 dead dudes mowed down in a machine gun gunfire in a blood trail leading off. He wanted you to say yeah, right? I don't know. That's so funny. I can't. It's hard. Funny thing about Cory McCarthy is that he uses so many, I can't, it's hard, but you know, funny about corn,

McCarthy, like in that, a funny thing about corn McCarthy is that he uses so many esoteric old timey references that I feel as though most Americans, most of the time don't know what corn McCarthy's talking about. I think you just got to skim past all the livestock, firearm manufacturing references. Because I'm pretty well-steeped in old-timey esoteric shit, and I have to look up stuff that he's talking about. In the end of that movie and the book, we'll just talk about the movie because I think more people have seen the movie than read the book. At the end of the movie, the character played by Tommy Lee Jones

is talking about a dream in which his father is on horseback and rides up through a pass ahead of him in the snow and says he was carrying a horn of fire. I know Kevin Murphy knows what a horn of fire is. Do you? Just a torch, is it not? No.

Powder horn. Oh, powder horn. Okay. Yep. You take, they take a powder horn, fill it full of embers in the morning, but you'd have to prick a little air hole in the powder horn just to keep some oxygen in there. And then at night, you'd have enough ember to get a fire going. So to say he's carrying a horn of fire is he's got embers in a powder horn with a pinhole bored into it to keep the embers alive.

I wasn't bringing it up for that reason. I was just bringing it up for the reason of the guy's question, because we do handle some questions. I want to do one more question, because this was a good one for Yanni. A guy wrote in, he wants to be a hunting guide. How does he become a hunting guide, Yanni? Oh, boy. Let me introduce everybody first. This is the Latvian Eagle, Yannis Petelis, Garrett Smith.

Dirt myth. Dirt myth. Walk on water. Tell them why your photography company is called Dirt Myth. I had a speech impediment when I was young, and I'd introduce myself as Dirt Myth as opposed to Garrett Smith. And it stuck. Now his new name is Walk on Water because yesterday he made the rookie error.

People who grow up around lakes, people who grew up around lakes assume a certain depth transition that happens from the bank outward. Like they'll extrapolate the pitch of the bank. It's like how quickly it gets deep. And they'll be like, and I'm six feet away from there.

Assuming that that pitch is constant, I am in two feet of water. And so Garrett made that quick calculation and pitched over the side of a boat into a 12-foot hole in the mighty Ohio River. With camera gear. I have so many times seen on a river where someone will beach a boat

and people just bail out. I have no idea. It's like a bottomless hellhole. So, Dirt Myth. And then the mighty Kevin Murphy. Paducah, Kentucky. Squirrel Master. What else? Engineer. paducah kentucky squirrel master what else engineer oh just all-around outdoorsman i think all-around outdoorsman hobby engineer

and then adam how did you mofat what that's moffitt but if you ask somebody like when you spell it i tell them tell them Moffat. And they're like, oh. But it's Moffat. But it's Moffat, yeah. Camera operator. What do you guys like to call yourselves these days? Like photographer?

Yeah, camera operator. Because cinematographer kind of went away, right? That's like a film. Yeah, it's more film. I know I hate videographer because I don't know that word sounds. Sounds like you're doing weddings. Right, right. So camera operator, I think.

Shooter. I say shooter, but no one knows what the hell you're talking about. I think that if I said I'm out with a shooter, people are going to think that I'm out with a dude who's shooting stuff. I've had people like, oh, I shot that. They're like, oh, so you shot it. I'm like, well, I filmed it.

I have to sometimes clarify. So your business card will say what on it? Camera operator, I have to sometimes clarify. So your business card will say what on it? Camera operator, DP, director of photography. I mean, you guys just operate. Because people always ask about a camera guy on a show. You guys just like operate, like independent freelance. Yeah, independent freelance.

You fall in with something and it becomes more regular. Yeah, yeah. You have your, let's call it clients, you know. know so yeah you get more regular clients who work with the show they like your stuff do a bunch of work with them you know so the latvian you'd say the latvian eagle is a client yeah yeah i would say the latvian eagle would be a client i'll send them a nice card at christmas you're gonna send them a card? Yeah. But don't do it for Christmas. Do it for one of the Latvian pagan holidays.

Send them a card. If you want to win them over and get more business. Yeah, because I get hundreds of cards from all kinds of clients at Christmas, and it'll just be lost in the mix. If you want to win with Yanni, send them something about a lunar phase, or send them a summer solstice or equinox kind of thing? Or Yanni Day. June 20th. Because all Latvians are named Yannis, so there's Yanni Day.

When's that? June 20th. Summer solstice. Oh, Yanni Day is the summer solstice? They do a combo? Yeah. Oh, okay. Did he build a bonfire Monday night?

He was talking about that on the telephone with me. No, but they'll get a little molten lead and throw it in a bucket and then pull out the lead and then hold it up to a candle and cast a shadow on the wall

and figure out what's going to happen next year. Whoa. Really? Good times. What's going to happen? Gather the family around.

Yanni don't like him eating too much sugar, but he don't mind him playing with molten lead. Gather around, kids. I think those days are changing. The new Latvian parents are rethinking that whole lead game.

Gather around, family. I'm going to turn a blowtorch onto this here lead. So we mainly were going to discuss catfish kevin murphy's going to lead the conversation about catfish but it's an interesting thing that happened to us it was two weeks ago that we went and bear hunted um we were bear hunting southwest montana for black bears and we spent four days five five days very solidly glassing i mean like glass and good looking stuff where bears had been found in the past um and couldn't turn up a single black

bear and i feel like you wouldn't be able to do that again without finding a bear. But the interesting thing is we found in four days, we found seven grizzlies. If you accept, and this isn't a loaded statement, but if you accept, I just want to touch on this briefly, but this subject really starts to make its own gravy, and it's kind of hard to touch on it briefly. We were in an area that is known in people discussing habitat or ecology, is known as the center of an area of the northern Rockies, but not the northern Rocky continental divide ecosystem, but a portion of the Rockies centered around Yellowstone National Park. You'd call it the GYE, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is kind of like about the size of Indiana. Within that, are you actually right now reading the the i just wanted to make sure i wasn't drinking too much sugar no yeah this is reading the ingredients list on his beverage right now in the middle of my explanation so we're in the greater yale stone ecosystem it's size indiana now hold that thought in your head for a minute and I'll explain something more. We're talking about grizzly bears here. So in 1975, grizzly bears were listed as threatened

under the Endangered Species Act and given protection under the ESA. They had been subject to 150 or 200 years of a fairly focused persecution in the form of wide open, unregulated hunting, meaning hunting no bag limits, no seasons. Poisoning, where guys were poisoning predators. You know, like a poisoning trick would be that you would take a horse or a mule or any number of things and shoot it and then inject it with strychnine before its heart quit pumping. And it would get in the vascular system,

and so it would kind of distribute the strychnine all throughout the animal's body, and then whatever would come up and eat it would eat the strychnine. They would target coyotes and wolves, but you'd invariably kill all kinds of other things. So poisoning was going on of grizzly bears. A lot of habitat destruction, division of areas, breaking up different habitat, you know, with barriers such as developments and roads led to problems. And after this long period of persecution, there were only about maybe about 300 grizzly bears left in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. And so they got all grizzlies in the lower 48 got listed as threatened under the ESA.

Now, you got 50,000 grizzly bears like in Alaska and. And they've never been threatened in Alaska and Canada. But the lower 48 was declared threatened. Grizzly bears were present on the landscape at the time of European contact. They were present on the landscape very roughly from the Missouri River westward. So when they got listed as threatened, they got listed as threatened, they got listed as threatened across their historic range in the lower 48. So everything from,

you know, including, let's just say, including San Francisco was former grizzly bear habitat. So they're there. Years go by and we have, and years go by and we, we cover grizzly bears in two areas. One, the northern continental divide ecosystem, which takes in Glacier National Park, Bob Marshall Wilderness.

Bears come up to thrive in that area, probably have reached carrying capacity of that area the other area where they've recovered by many people's definitions of the word would be the greater yellowstone ecosystem so portions of wyoming montana idaho you have now about 1800 grizzlies maybe, 2000 Grizzlies in the lower 48 in those three states, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming. What they did in order to try to manage this population is rather than treating all the Grizzlies in the lower 48 as this one group, which you will never recover. Like we're never going to recover grizzly bears in San Francisco. We're just not going to have, like we're not going to meet carrying capacity in the Bay Area because of human conflicts.

So people within the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages species that are listed under ESA protections as these are threatened or endangered, came up with this idea or this concept called distinct population segments where they broke the grizzlies of the lower 48 into these smaller management units. So you can start to think about management units in a more nuanced, detailed way. And there's five, I think five distinct population segments with the vast majority of the bears living in two of them.

Northern Continental Divide ecosystem, Greater Yellowstone ecosystem. Unfortunately, right now, those two are not connected by a very viable corridor. So you don't have any genetic interplay moving from one to the other. Bears that are in the Gye or the yellowstone area do not have a a protected readily usable corridor to connect with bears that are you know a couple

hundred miles away in another area but you got a ton of bears in those two spots. So we're hunting the GYE and saw seven in four days. If you accept the population estimate of approximately 700 grizzlies in the GYE, which is a very contentious estimate. Basically, it's a number that everyone on both sides of the issue that I'm about to present to you, it's a number that everyone will agree on. Because there are people who find advantage in the argument that I'm about to present to you. It's a number that everyone will agree on because there are people who find advantage in the argument that there are fewer, and there are people who find advantage

in the argument that there are many, many more. And you can imagine which side holds each viewpoint. But they agree on the 700 figure. If you accept that figure, we glassed up 1% of the entire grizzly bear population in four days in a in a landmass the size of indiana um what just happened and i wrote a i wrote an op-ed about this in the new york times a few weeks. What just happened is the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service just came out and said this.

In a decision supported by the man who is in charge of recovering grizzlies in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, who works for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, they said, we're going to take this distinct population segment and declare it recovered because it's met our recovery objectives, which have included a minimum of 500 bears.

People agree that that was a number that was a good number. They've met that every year for 12 years. Forty-eight females with cubs. They've met that for over a decade so they want to deal what we call d list that portion the gye only d list the bears of this indiana sized hunk of land they're getting tremendous amounts of blowback on this because once you d list something it goes back to state management so idaho wyomingham montana the state fish and game agencies, would have to draw up or will have to draw up a management plan for the bears in their states.

And that management plan will need to be approved by the feds. Once that happens, they will assume management of grizzlies the same way that they assume management of all other large mammals within those states so these states are already managing including but hardly limited to mountain goats bighorn sheep, black bears, mountain lions, wolverines. You name a couple. Elk, deer, white-tailed deer, all kinds of upland birds. They manage all of it. They would also be managing grizzly bears.

I think it's good to note, too, that management and management plan doesn't necessarily mean hunting plan. No, because everything has a management plan even things that don't hunt have a management plan yeah so but here's the catch though the catch though is that it is very likely that wyoming montana and idaho are going to use hunting as in their vernacular, a management tool. Meaning that they're going to, it's not inevitable. It's highly likely that they're going to use hunting to some degree to minimize human-grizzly conflicts.

Because there are areas where most people who have a stake in this agree that just are not going to work as grizzly habitat. Subdivisions are not going to work as grizzly habitat. Some mountain ranges or some island mountain chains, they feel it's not plausible that you're going to have grizzlies there because the potential for human-grizzly conflict in the form of livestock depredation and human casualties are high. And they're going to discourage bears from moving into those areas.

And a tool they'll use is hunting. Because right now, drugging and relocating a bear is very expensive. And once you get a problem bear that's habituated to humans it's very difficult to to to prevent them from doing it you can move them into the middle of the bob marshall wilderness area and they tend to have like a high level of recidivism where that bear will once he's got it in his head that human human occupied locations are a good place to find food he just is going to continue finding that spot so they'll they'll move a bear again and again and again bears in those areas and bears

like that are likely to be there's a good chance that those bears are going to be subject to hunting or they're going to try to use hunting in a way that would target those bears even to the point where it might almost be like a hit list but rather than having government agents go out and drug it move it they would have a hunter who would be awarded some kind of permit through a lottery system would get a permit to hunt bears in some area in a hope to do that the prospect of hunting is what leads people to really feel as though we should not delist grizzlies because you want to talk about charismatic megafauna they're on top of the list back when we had wildlife calendars they always made every wildlife calendar people look at them and they and they feel um a spiritual kinship to grizzlies and are very opposed to the idea of hunting them because we haven't hunted them since 1975 um in the lower 48 i don't know something magical happens at the border where

grizzlies become they're a hunted thing but people just have a hard time getting their idea around another criticism of delisting is that um a lot of people pay a lot of money to go to yellowstone and see a grizzly and they feel that if you were going to hunt them, you could potentially put at risk that tourism drive. But here's the thing. Here's my stance on this. When we listed bears in 1975, you go in and say to all these state agencies and different stakeholders, you go in and say, going to list these bears with the with the object of recovering them because the endangered species act is meant to be a thing where things go on it we recover them and delist them there's a process for all of this we've listed about 2 000 animals 2 000 species plant and animal species, we've recovered less than 2%. Okay.

Some of those things we've removed more from the list because we removed them from faulty data, meaning thinking there were fewer than they were. And then they get listed. Then we realized there was a lot more things that have been taken off the list for taxonomic reasons where you might've been thinking you were looking at a distinct subspecies. And then you learn that it you were looking at a distinct subspecies and then you learn that it's not in fact a distinct subspecies and that something that maybe on an

island is very rare but it's very abundant on the next island over doesn't warrant ESA protection so it could get removed. But as far as actually recovering something, for instance the peregrine falcon, the bald eagle are examples of this. As far as actually recovering something, it's been very few species.

Less than 2%. But the grizzly, in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, has for well over a decade reached recovery objective. But now people want to use the ESA as a tool to protect their favorite animals from any threat of human exploitation. So they're not even looking at the wording of the ESA. They're just saying, oh, I really like them. I like looking pictures of them. I feel as though they're very cute and cuddly. And if removing them from endangered species protection

means they might get shot i think we should change the entire meaning of and usage of the esa in order to protect my favorite animals from human exploitation is kind of what we're up against anyhow none of this really has anything to do with anything from your perspective as a listener because the public comment period just ended on this plan. I feel that the plan will move forward, and I'll make this prediction, and I'm not pulling – this isn't me. I mean this is – it will spend a decade in federal court because what I regard to be fringe wildlife groups are going to go and sue the federal government and cost state agencies and federal agencies tens of millions of dollars. They will enrich a handful of lawyers in order to put off delisting

and it will go on to make the ESA, the Endangered Species Act, which is an extremely valuable tool and a very helpful tool. They will increase public disapproval of the act, frustration with the act. Western ranchers and landowners and other people and people from fish and game agencies will more and more feel as though their efforts are not rewarded,

that the carrot is constantly moved farther away from the horse, that recovery is this slippery, highly objective notion that just gets moved around. And it will increase some level of animosity towards the animals themselves. What do you think, Yanni? Well, I think the main point that I try to tell everybody, too, is that with all that going on, they will not probably save a single grizzly bear's life no because all these bears that turn into problem bears they go out of that that core management area they they get classified as problem bears or whatever they get classified as and they get taken out i mean some of them are drugged and moved but there is that threshold of

whatever it is x amount of bears that basically they're allowed to kill when they get you know outside of that area and they start to there's human conflict or they're you know hit by cars so in the end they're not helping the bear out you know by and the other thing about it is they can't lower the bear population like you think that anyone who's struggled to get bears recovered wants them to go back on the endangered species list so they've already drawn up a mortality threshold which includes everything right up to natural cause deaths the number can't go below a set number like let's say you decide it can't go below 550 bears and i don't the number's not decided

can't go below 550 bears that would mean it got relisted. Do you think anyone who's trying so hard to delist bears and take some of the regulatory burden off of state game agencies who do a phenomenal job of managing wildlife, do you think they want to see them go back on the list? Of course not. So this idea that they're going to delist them and then go out and eliminate them from the landscape would be like kind of a classic

example of of you know shooting yourself in the foot now there's some complexities that i don't because i want to talk about catfish more. There's some complexities that are worth considering here. I have a friend. We're kind of more email buddies than anything else, but he's a hunter. He's a fisherman. He's involved heavily in wildlife politics. You met him, that Kit Fisher.

Maybe you haven't met him. I don't think so. Anyways, guy in Montana comes from a legacy of conservationists. He has some concerns he he he doesn't he's not that he just like categorically um opposes the idea of delisting but in in conversations we've had he's brought up some legitimate things montana fish and game you go to their website and read it like if you look at their grizzly plan their long-term grizzly plan would be that you would establish a corridor for bears in the glacier area or northern continental divide area to have genetic interplay with bears in the greater yellowstone ecosystem

not just bears but you'd have a corridor that could serve for all manner of animals that are imperiled now or may become imperiled in the future. You can move mountain lions between those populations, wolves between those populations, wolverines between those populations. Now, you go look at Montana Fish and Game's website. They talk about the viability of that corridor. If you talk about delisting and they're going to start trying to remove bears, they might use hunting as a tool to control human-grizzly conflicts, is that going to wind up contradicting efforts to allow bears

to have genetic interplay between those two populations? I'm in a situation where I strongly support delisting because I strongly support state management of wildlife. And I do not like the idea of people using just emotional-based arguments to take management decisions out of the jurisdiction of professional wildlife managers and to put it into the jurisdiction of a lot of people who have never even laid eyes on one of these bears. But at the same time, I strongly support the idea of that corridor. And having viable, thriving populations, wolves, bears, wolververines mountain lions on these landscapes so yeah i hope these state management plans come in um and i hope that they are not

a little too reactionary overly eager to control depredation on livestock and allow for, and kind of prove as I believe that they will prove again to the world that state management of wildlife is the best system ever been demonstrated on the face of the earth. And it has the interest of the people and best serves the interest of the people. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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kevin murphy we break down for us what catfish. Kevin Murphy, will you break down for us what catfish live here in Kentucky? Well, this week we targeted three species. The blue cat, we were pretty, very successful at obtaining several. Can I interrupt you, Kevin? Let me set the stage. We're down in Kentucky. All kind of famous rivers flow through here. The Ohio meets the Mississippi not far from here.

The Cumberland River, Tennessee River. Give me some more famous rivers. Clark's River is a smaller river. The Green River, everybody knows John Prime's song. Oh, Lord, take me back to Muhlenberg County. Down by the river, the Green River flows. That's here? That's here.

It flows in the Ohio. We didn't fish that one, though. No, it was probably up about 80 to 100 river miles from where we ate catfish yesterday. So years ago, I was doing some bow fishing down in the Ohio, and I ran into some guys who were doing something called poke poling where they were fishing catfish with set lines where they jab a pole into a bank and hang a line with a bluegill baited on there and then you come around and watch and see if the pole's bucking and you caught a catfish I was done hunting squirrels with Kevin Murphy last winter explaining this to him and Kevin got to talking about limb lining so we made plans to come back down and fish catfish and do other fun activities in the hot-ass Kentucky sun. Triple-digit heat index.

Yeah. And so now with all that set up, talk about the three catfish you guys got around here. We've got the big blue cats that are out in the main channel of the river, the largest species in Kentucky and in the U.S. Yeah, the biggest catfish in the United States. I think maybe Kentucky state record's 120 pounds. Don't quote me on it, but it's over 100. But the least known catfish, because channels and flats are everywhere.

Yes. In most parts of the world. I find that people know what the hell of blue catfish is yeah yeah pretty much and they like what is it like main channel main channel out and out in the out of the deeper water uh uh feed on cut bait uh just opportunities whatever's out there you know they're pretty much after and they're like a suspended feeder too yes yeah they feed up you know the feed up and from um the brighter the sun the better off they are you know a lot of fish like walleye if there's bright sunlight they go down deeper uh hard you know they're not surface feeders but the blue cats are the sunshine pops out and been out there many a

times be a little bit overcast all of a sudden the sun pops out. I've been out there many a times. A little bit overcast, all of a sudden the sun pops out, heating up. I don't know if it's plankton drawing bait fish up to the surface or what's going on, but that kind of triggers the blue cats to start feeding when it gets real hot and sunny. What was the biggest blue you ever caught? Right at 50 pounds, the one I showed you from last year. We got into a creek that was rising. Water was coming up. It was triggering the blues to come in and feed on earthworms.

My friend and I, Brian Womble, we caught the 48, 50-pounder, and then the smaller one in there was probably right at 40 pounds, kind of back-to-back on a— You said those blue catfish were packed full of redworms. They were full of redworms, yes his stomach was was giant from from red worms water's coming up and the red worms are getting drowned out and coming out of the ground out of the ground yes like they'll do when you leave your garden holes on for on accident you realize there's all kinds of drowned worms laying there afterward it triggers the fish a lot of fish to feed. Bluegill, the shellcrackers will come in.

Some of these nicely manicured lake lawns that when the water gets up into those, starts driving out earthworms, shellcrackers come up and feed like crazy. I have not been fortunate enough to hit one of those yet, but it happens. It happens. Was the mulberry feeding cat was that blue the way that he came into service when we saw those were channels okay they will occasionally also come up oh yeah that's interesting we were underneath i'm gonna do a quick uh digression here we were messing around the mulberry gang yeah getting ready to set it i don't know

what we're doing but yeah yeah, the Lavian Eagle. Oh, no, you guys are still setting lines. And I had my foot on the old trolling motor, so I worked down the bank, and I had a little crappie rod in my hand, and I was working the bank, and I look over and just happened to be looking at this little eddy,

and a mulberry hits the water, and about maybe a half full second later, up rises a big, I thought, I didn't know for sure what kind of fish it was. I thought it could have been a carp, could have been a catfish, but it was a good-sized fish, two feet plus, maybe three feet. And he just sipped that mulberry off the surface like a brown trout eating a mayfly. And then we had that trotline under there, and all the hooks that sat under that mulberry tree had a fish on them yep so the next catfish flatheads flatheads is to me kind of the top

predator of the catfish prefers live bait um very good very good meat um like i said um this time of year i think when i we started out i told you guys well so this is the spawning season uh the boys around here that like to tickle and noodle hand grab for fish they've got lots of bathtubs concrete vaults pieces of pipe anything that i hold a catfish they have around the edge of the lakes is it legal to go out and place infrastructure to lure in flatheads you know explain that first okay uh this time of year uh the flatheads are in the breeding mode and the males help find nest and guard nests for the females so they they're looking for holes up in the riverbank uh sunken logs that are hollow like

beaver beaver beaver entrances somewhere where they can get in where they feel safe where they can lay the eggs and they pretty much their feeding activities somewhat shut down and they're interested in mating and finding a place to mate And what generations of hand grabbers have found is they put in artificial structures to imitate a sunken log, basically. We talked to the commercial fisherman yesterday. He's got, what did he say, 16 hoop nets out there, and they imitate a log also. They will coat those nets with black tire and the hoops on them too. So when it's underwater, it feels like, looks like a sunken log.

And the catfish go into the hoop nets, and then they get caught because it's got two throats in there that keeps them from. Yeah, it's like a minnow. It's the same idea as a minnow trap, a funnel-mouth minnow trap. Yeah, but like I said, getting back to the local boys, what they do is around the shoreline, gravelly areas, they'll place some type of infrastructure to house a catfish. They come around. Someone will dive down, kind of reach around, fill in there. And if they fill a cat in there, then they come back up.

And then it's kind of like a two-partner deal there. One guy will stand, put his feet in front of the hole where the catfish enters to keep him from going out. The other person dives down in the water anywhere from, you know, four foot to six foot depth. And he will run his hand in there and let the catfish bite him. Yes. And everybody knows how painful and raspy a catfish bite is. There's one of the guys that I know, he's about 6'8", big, long, gangly guy. I saw him, it's been a couple years ago.

And his hand, arm from like his shoulder down to his fingertips, it looked like somebody had taken a wood rass to it. I said, what in the world have you been in? He said, oh, I've been catfishing. And I'm thinking, you know, I might run my hand up into a hollow log or hollow tree to pull out a rabbit. But if something has got like a catfish, nah. my hand up into a hall of log or hall of tree to pull out a rabbit but uh something that's got got a like a catfish nah i'll do i'll take a bang stick down there or something a sharp stick harpoon whatever but no i'm not gonna sacrifice my trigger finger something like that and there's other critters that could get you right snap there is you know occasionally it could be a

snapping turtle down there it could be a beaver whatever you know i haven't heard of anybody being mangled by that but it's that possibility but the catfish bites you and what you do you you don't the hardest thing to say that you that you do is the automatic reflex of pulling back so you've got to mind over matter type deal you've got to leave your hand in their mouth and let them bite you then they kind of relax a little bit and then you run it up and you hook it over their gill plate jody's boy joe he's a he's a noogler i think a 60 pounder flathead is the biggest that he's he's pulled out of course he's a big gangly boy there yeah but you you pull it out and get him right there and you bring him to the surface

there no we're kids oh go ahead i was gonna say do you catch bigger catfish by noodling as opposed to like rod and reel or the other ways or like uh is that kind of the lore you typically are going to catch a bigger catfish if you put your hand in it yeah you know that's what everybody is whether rod or reel whatever there you can catch this big with with a rod reel you know you got these target areas you know you're making when you're out there fishing yeah you've got some fishing hoes where they may be whatever but you know you can come out there maybe you've got 50 boxes out or sets i don't really know what they call those i've never been on one of those trips but you've got 50 so you go out there and run of those and so you you know you may have five or six catfish in those 50 or if

you're out there fishing you know just kind of fishing here there so it's kind of like you know you're building a home for them it's a holiday inn you know coming for the catfish yeah so you know when i was young in the lake i grew up on in the spring bullheads would you know do the same exact thing but they would go in and find cracks and sea walls any kind of thing and we would even put out little areas that we knew about areas you just take a couple three hole bricks and stack three whole bricks up knowing that a bullhead is gonna veer in there and set up shop. But what we would do, I mean, you know, these things are big ones,

a couple pounds, nothing like a flyhead. But we would just go around to those spots and just take a little Cleo, like a little spoon with a treble hook on it, and just hunk a line and just dingle it in front of their face or dingle it down in the mouth of the hole, and they would come out and grab it. I remember one we went out we'd go out with flashlights i remember one night we went out and had nine of them like big bullheads just by doing that and i'd even done it where they were down so deep that we would get a snorkel and mask and just have some string on your hand with a thing and dive down and jiggle it in front of there into his little crevice catch him

and then just haul him up and throw him in the boat and the end of a hook you know i just thought it was like something completely unique to but on a on a much giant scale like from going from two pounds to 40 pounds then instead of hanging a little cleo you're just sticking your hand i mean because they wouldn't hit it like they were hungry. They'd hit it like they were pissed. And that's territorial. I think that's what it is. They're protecting their little turf.

They don't want anything to get near their eggs. So that's a territorial response, and that's what the flatheads pretty much do. Yeah, because you could do it and sting his lip with the hook and then do it again and sting his lip with the hook and do it again and then hook him. He just kept slashing at it something eating for food Uh, I was one time up on the north slope of the brooks range like on the arctic plateau leading out of the arctic ocean

and I was fishing for grayling in these little streams and the streams would be like Riffle, you know, like there'd be like a little riffle in a hole a little riffle in a hole Every hole have a grayling in it Like in a territory like a fish riffle in a hole and a little riffle in a hole. Every hole would have a grayling in it. Like in a territory, like a fish in there, not letting anybody in there. And you'd land a fly on it, and he couldn't help himself but hit it. If you stung that fish's lip with a hook, he'd go down to the bottom of that hole, and there was no way in hell he was going to come up and hit something again.

But it was funny because you could test his memory. you come back to that fish 24 hours later and however fish's head works you'd land a fly on it he'd come up and nail it so he's like you could be like an hour is not enough for a grayling to put that out of his mind 24 hours he's like like what are the chances that's going to happen again or like whatever switches in his mind it was like you could sort of find out like how how he perceived danger and how he perceived the past like what the passage of time is to a grayling because if i stun gunned you right now and i walked up to you tomorrow with a taser there's no way you're gonna stand there and let me tase you again. Right?

That's correct. Maybe 10 years later. 10 years later, I might walk up to you and tase you. I probably wouldn't let you tase me in the first place. I've been around those things all of my life. It's a danger, Will Robertson, danger. That's like getting into a bottle of whiskey too hard. Oh, yeah.

I still have a hard time with Canadian Hunter. From me and my brother Danny being in our teens sitting on the bank of the White River at the Hesperia Dam, I still can't go near Canadian Hunter. What the hell is that stuff anyways? I have no idea. You know what I'm talking about? No.

It's like one of those things they mix like really shitty whiskey with sugar. There's a bunch of them. Southern Comfort. That's cough medicine down here in Kentucky. That's what I was raised on.

I still can't drink that stuff because of what you're talking about. Getting stung by Southern Comfort. Did you have more right now? You cool? I'm cool. Adam? Cool.

Dirt? I'm curious of the third one because I can't remember it. Oh, we haven't covered it yet. Yeah. Oh, okay. Channel Cat. Oh, no. I was going to say don't tell because that's something.

But if he can't remember Channel Cats. I was just trying. He thought he was one yesterday. Yeah, I went and knew himton you guys didn't know but all right so break down channels channels are like by far there are there have to be if you put all the channels in north america in a pile and put all the flatheads in north america in a pile and all the blues in a pile the channel pile is going to be by a magnitude of out of hundreds bigger than any other pile, right? Probably so.

I would say they're the most common by far of any catfish that's out there. And it's the most commonly one for aquaculture. Yes. Like when you go in and buy some cheap-ass catfish sandwich and it's from a pond catfish they can do other ones but probably a channel probably channel most likely most likely the smaller of the catfish other than we get down into the the very smallest catfish in kentucky is a mad tom a little bitty catfish maybe three or four inches long um in some of the the backwater estuaries and swamps were the mad toms. Yeah, and all your bullheads are in the catfish family too.

Yeah, right. Bullhead being bigger, but the mad tom being the very, very small. As far as I know, nobody ever goes fishing for mad toms out there. But the big three. The big three. Channels, flats, and blues. We got the flatheads, and then we've got the channel. So break down the channel for me.

Smaller fish, noted with the specks up and down its body. When you skin them, it's got a yalla streak that immediately turns some people off. That's what we were talking about yesterday. I trim it away until I learned yesterday you don't need to trim it away. Yeah, smaller fish, you just leave it in there. And I've never been able to tell any difference. Predominantly, people call the channel fiddlers. But any small catfish can be in the category of a fiddler.

But usually – Let me discuss that because I never heard that term until you told me. A fiddler in Kentucky lucky lingo i thought it was kevin murphy lingo but i realize now it's like kentucky a fiddler is a small catfish small catfish now we had a gentleman yesterday show me on his cutting board a mark where he has such a high level of specificity about what a fiddler is doesn't matter what species it is but if it if he puts his tail at the end of his cutting board and its head is shy of a mark that's a fiddler and he prides himself on the uniformity of his fiddlers where he doesn't like them that are much

smaller than that he doesn't want to use them He wants his fiddlers to hover right around that specific mark. And the other name for a fiddler is a? Little dinky catfish? I schooled you on this. Whole fryer. A whole fry. Not a whole fryer, but a whole fry. And I didn't learn that term until like four or five years ago.

Somebody was talking about, oh, there are some whole fries. We're going to have some whole fries, I'm'm thinking potatoes hell i didn't know what to think a whole fry and they finally said oh you know what you take a whole small catfish and fried i said you mean a fiddler i know it's a whole fry you know that was their term on it where you just take the entire catfish chop it you skin it uh cut its head off leave the fins on it and fry it up crispy a lot of people like eating the tail fin of that uh it's got a real mild flavor i like the fiddler catfish you're picking the meat yeah you just take a fork and just pick it off and you've got this uh you know fred flynn stone skeleton when you get done you don't have to worry about bones uh um you know as far as small kids and things probably shouldn't do it but there's really not any bones that come out with the meat there it's nice crispy

skin it's got a very unique flavor not strong whatsoever uh you know when you get into the bigger catfish is when you have to start trimming to get that strong stout flavor out of them there's some some things on the catfish that you as my friend leon says you take a not so good fish and make a really really good fish out of it that's the thing i learned most out of all the hanging out and catfishing we've done the last is the importance of properly cleaning and trimming catfish fillets. And when I was young, we would now and then get into these big-ass flatheads, doing other stuff, we'd catch big flatheads. And we had them in our heads that they were inedible. And I don't say that about much.

But we had in our heads they were were inedible and i don't say that about much but we had in our heads they were pretty inedible because we just flam and skin them and not trim them and it was the muddiest nastiest or as your friend leon said you don't want that in your mouth and it's trimming that son of a bitch trimming and processing even after we got it we got it all trimmed up laying there in a in a bucket floating the water all kinds of fat still there a lot of blood there so it you've got to go through like i said all the processes you have to to clean it you have to trim it and then chilling it down too that's another thing that's new uh makes the trimming process you can kind of makes the fat congeal on it you can kind of feel it better see it better and then after you get it get it trimmed out cut all the red meat that blood vein that's running

down the middle then you put it in the in the bucket of water and let it soak for you know or have a have a misting water hose on it a slight trickle and as we all saw it started out a bloody red mess it was like you're it was like you're rendering it was like you're rendering fat too yes because fat's rising up out of there yeah so after a while uh it starts clearing up and at the very end you know the water looks clear enough that you could take a a drinking glass just down there and dip it out and you could drink the water and if you smell the meat at that point in time it doesn't smell dude it's gorgeous fish it does smell like it smells like fresh meat no fish smell on it whatsoever so yeah we've talked to some leading what i'll regard as some leading catfish experts in the last couple days.

Being like guys that handle thousands and thousands of pounds of catfish for commercial sale and other things and supplying fish fries. Lifetime devoted to catfish. And the message I got is two things on a catfish taste like shit. Fat and blood. When you get a muddy piece of fish or an off piece of fish because you're getting fat or blood in your mouth. Catfish, fat, and blood. Catfish flesh, one of your friends, Leon, said if there's a criticism of it, he didn't put it this way. He said if there's a criticism of it, he didn't put it this way. He said, if there's a criticism of it, it's too mild.

Yes. In that, a good catfish guy is a guy that's good at seasoning. Compare that to a good piece of tuna. A good piece of tuna, the less you do to it, the better. Right? Because it carries its own perfect flavor. Or like a good oyster. You don't want to flavor or like a good oyster. You don't want to do anything to a good oyster.

He's saying a good piece of catfish properly trimmed is a platform on which to apply flavors. It's like a clean slate on which to apply the kind of flavors you like. It's that mild. So in getting the fat off, the fat, once you do your filet, you got fat rides,

the fat rides between the skin and the meat, and that's an important area to get off, and you got fat that rides along the belly, and fat that rides along the top. So they'll pull a filet off, like imagine, try to visualize this, lay your hand flat out on a table or on your leg or whatever.

Lay your left hand down and look at it. Imagine you're looking at a filet. You want to remove, as you view your left hand laying flat, you want to remove the outer half of your pinky finger down to your wrist, and you want to remove the outer third of your thumb from the thumbnail down to your wrist and you want to remove the outer third of your thumb from the thumbnail down to your wrist get rid of that and then the cert the face of the fish that lies between the fish's skin and the flesh get rid of anything red let's when we uh cut the skin off the catfish, we don't try to ride down on the skin. Yeah.

We do a sawing motion, and we cut a lot of the red meat off. Yeah, they float the blade. Yes. I always skin fish by basically scraping that son of a bitch and it comes out like uh clean but these guys yeah they're floating the blade down there and leaving skin and fat in the red muscle on that piece of skin yeah rather than like scraping the skin and then shaving that junk away it was like intuition for him like muscle memory he showed us a knife that he had skinned somebody fish with that he wore a bevel into the handle.

This is the angle that you want to go with. I like too, Leon said, in regards to using all the meat you have on them, the stuff you're trimming is not waste because it's… Because it is waste. It's waste, yeah. Yeah, he goes, people say you're wasting meat when you trim it, but you ain't wasting anything. Waste is waste, and that's – you take a not-so-good fish

and make an excellent fish out of it. Now, Adam, talk about your wife here for a minute. How long do we got? No. So explain her gripe with fish. You know, she just doesn't like the texture. Because she was brought up in the desert. Yeah.

Well, that's what's so interesting because I think even from my background, we both grew up in Utah, and I think a catfish, we catfish as kids. We throw a piece of steak over a boat and hang it out all night and then wake up in the morning and reel a catfish in. And they just don't, I mean, unfortunately, they just don't look, when you pull a catfish out of the water, they typically just don't look appetizing. Does a sausage look appetizing coming from a hog that's laying in a mud?

I mean, no, but that's a good point. No, but I think it's just- See that animal laying in that pile of shit that's gonna be good later but I think that was the how we looked

but you pull other fish out like you know trout or yeah they look a little better I understand and so I think coming out here

I was like okay I mean I've had blackened catfish before and I like it but I was like I was kind of curious and then like watching you guys trim the meat,

it's almost clear in color how white it is. It looks amazing. It's the whitest. If you laid that meat from a blue cat, if you laid it on a piece of printer paper, you wouldn't be able to see the thing.

It's snow white. I mean, snow white. It's so weird to see catfish flesh like that. Yeah, and that looks appetizing. But your wife, God bless her, doesn't like fish, but she wouldn't even like that fish. Yeah, she doesn't like any fish. And she doesn't like anything like crustaceans or anything from the sea.

She just doesn't like... But it's a texture thing. Yeah, I don't know. But you're a water-based dude, though. I know. It's tough. So what does she eat? She loves meat.

Stuff from the land. Yeah. She just... Like tuna or swordfish? You won't eat any of that? No, I won't touch it. Trust me, I've tried. Will she eat eel? No, I don't touch it. Trust me, I've tried. Will she eat eel?

No, I don't think she'll eat eel. That's pretty fishy. Yeah. Yeah, but you're like, it's just, yeah. And I love her. I never met her, but I love her. I'd marry her. But it's just, so she's not going to eat that.

Like if you cook that up for Jesus, yeah. Could you trick her? Because see, that's the interesting thing. What are you going to eat that. Like, if you cook that up for Jesus, could you trick her? Because, see, that's the interesting thing. What are you going to tell her it is? Beef? This is the lightest beef. This pork.

The lightest chicken you've ever had. Yeah. No, but that's why probably she doesn't like any of it because it's a very unique texture that couldn't be imitated by anything else. Yeah. Dude, I think what you need to do, maybe make a chowder, a soup. But at this point, it's psychological.

Here's what you can do. I was a real finicky eater growing up. Yeah, Kevin grew up eating nothing but beans and cornbread. We were out one Saturday. When I was young, I could eat my weight every day, maybe twice a day. But I was helping some of my friends cut tobacco, and his mom was the most excellent old-timey cook in the world. I mean, we'd eat country ham over there. Steve loves country ham.

I mean, the best country ham. They had three or four apple trees. They had a big orchard, and she'd cook up some apples and stuff. By country ham, you know what I mean? If you took a ham and somehow made it saltier than salt. Yeah, can you really explain country ham? Country ham is the American variety of prosciutto ham from Italy. And what you do? That statement, it's almost offensive. He said that like ten Italy. And what you do.

That statement, it's almost offensive. He said that like 10 times. It's almost offensive, but okay. But the early pioneers had no refrigeration. So when you did hog killing in the fall of the year, you go out and you saved everything but the squeal from the hog. You know, they made the head cheese out of the head of the hog, make souse, pig's feet, cracklings. You know Pond House?

It's a term in Virginia. Maybe it's souse. You just render it all out and then mix cornmeal in there and make like a cornmeal bread that's full of jowl meat and and i wish my buddy ronnie was here because that's his favorite food no i want to make it bad i don't know that one process the hawk okay and all the trim and scrap and everything they cook down into a gelatinous that's souse okay so then they stir in cornmeal and cook it in there. And you eventually wind up with like a, like a.

It's a big loaf. It'd be like head cheese. I don't know. It's like head cheese, but cornmeal. And then you slice that cornbread and fry it in a pan. They call it panhas. Like a soy burger. I don't know.

A little bit of meat and some soy beans. Anyways, Ronnie Bame, it's like, he didn't know about it until he moved to Virginia. Pond hocks. And their hams in Virginia are so salty that you don't get them off the refrigerated section. They got the things in a burlap sack laying on the shelf of the grocery store. A desiccated ham in a burlap sack next to the canned goods. But he likes pond hocks. I'm going to make that with a wild pig someday what about the soup beans last night oh oh good man country ham right now country ham

what were you getting at yeah you got over your food oh you're gonna tell him how to fix his wife up yes yes what you do get some pawn hops it's taker alex it i was in the tobacco patch and man i'm thinking, you know, I would go cut tobacco for these guys for free if I just did get to eat at Tommy's mother's house there. About 7.30, I'd been at work for 30 minutes, and about 7.30, I says, man, what are we going to have to eat today? Oh, mama had to go to town there. Says, she's got a big old stack of pimento cheese sandwiches in her maiden so we're gonna go over there in a darn watermelon patch and bust one open there and eat the heart of

them watermelons and i'm thinking i hate pimento cheese i hate pimento cheese so we got around to lunchtime and we get in there and she's got this big stack of pimento cheese and i reached in there and i took a bite it was the best damn thing i ever had my entire life because i was hungry and to this day i like pimento cheese now there's different grades of pimento cheese so you're saying he needs to starve up his wife starve her up starve her up right there and give her some catfish give her some catfish cheese too yeah i don't know until i met my wife's family i had never had a pimento cheese sandwich. Yeah, Yanni married into the South.

Pimento cheese is basically a couple types of maybe grated up cheese, a hard cheese, maybe a soft Velveeta type, mayonnaise, and pimento peppers. Yep. And that's what I was scared to because for first probably 12 14 years of my life i would not eat cranberry sauce because it was red red was off my my menu there you know we go through the school lunch line and they had this big gelatinous loaf of stuff in there that they was carving off and it looked like maybe raw liver or something to me so i would not even try uh cranberry sauce now i love the thing right

there but pimento cheese had these little giblets of red pimentos in there and there's several different uh recipes i think some people uh put a little sugar in the thing give a little extra taste you know either mayonnaise salad dressing something like that and just make a spread out of it and it's out of this world my mom would take pimento and olive and make pimento cream cheese, which is, oh, man, that stuff's good. So, yeah, the missus. Starver. Here's the thing.

I know more guys that have problems, Ridge, his wife, all, you know, and I've had girlfriends in the past they had oh i don't eat this and i don't eat that oh my god i listen my wife my wife is mad at me quite often but one problem i do not have is uh she eats everything yeah It doesn't matter. I could be like, that's rat. She'd eat it. Because she don't like to cook. And she likes it that we eat wild meat and the kids eat wild meat, and she doesn't care.

She will eat any kind of food I cook. Doesn't care. And she'll have friends over, even people she works with over. And she don't ask me, like, oh, what are you going to make? And don't make friends over, even people she works with over. And she don't ask me, like, oh, what are you going to make? And don't make this. She could bring the whole crew over. I'd be like, it's rat.

And she'd just dig in and be like, you don't want to eat it? But you make it good. You eat later. You make it good. Yeah, but I'm just saying, after having lived through all kinds of ex-girlfriends who had like, oh, I can't eat a rabbit.

It's with her, but she'll eat. But I love your wife. I'll bring home, we brought home pig, and I've cooked everything we've brought home, mule deer, and she likes it. Some stuff she's like, eh, I'm not nuts about it. I'll eat it. But yeah, it's the fish thing.

I mean, she's even to a point, she loves Thai food, but they cook a lot with oyster sauces. And she can be like, yeah, they put oyster sauce in this. I can taste it. I don't like it. Really?

Yeah. The one thing my wife doesn't like, skanky salmon. Oh, yeah. If you leave salmon in the freezer too long and it gets skanky, no matter what you do to hide the skank, she don't like it.

That's weird, because most people I know love skanky no matter what you do to hide the skank she don't like it that's weird because most of what i know loves skanky um yeah my kids man too it's like they you know we don't have to deal with that either but we've never done the thing where i know people that cook separate meals for their kids at night which is just just, I think, the worst idea. You're going to pay for that the rest of your life. We sent our kid to school with a musk ox sandwich not long ago. I told my mom back, I said, I guarantee you the only kid in Seattle Public School

will ever go down to the musk ox sandwich. They don't even know. They don't even know it's weird. We were in Mexico. We were riding horses, and my little three-year-old said she wanted to get a horse i said we don't have anywhere to keep a horse she says nowhere to eat it yanni's two-year-old this morning that's right yeah we cut the lawn on our at our house and it was it was quite tall so we didn't know all the critters that were running around there now we know that we have cottontail rabbits

running around on the hillside. I guess this morning they were watching the cottontails out front and my two-year-old looked at her mother and said, we're going to eat that bunny. Back to cooking catfish. Why is the flathead belly? This is interesting. Have we covered fiddlers to everyone's satisfaction? Back to cooking catfish. Why is the flathead belly? This is interesting.

Have we covered fiddlers to everyone's satisfaction? Oh, no, because I did a little Google research in here, and the best I can find out without getting heavy into it is that, because we couldn't, do we ever find out where they got its name? No, I mean, just local term that they grew up with. They are the catfish that fiddle with your bait oh i like that and i've had a lot of those fiddling with my bait like a bull bullhead kind of the second answer that is called a bait stealer around here the second answer was that they make a fiddle-like noise when they're pulled out of the water,

which I'm not going to accept that. I've pulled plenty of up, and I haven't yet heard any fiddling. Have you? That croaking. Yeah, but that looks like a fiddle. Maybe it's a bad fiddler. But that's the only thing I can...

Yeah, if it was all man or fish, I mean, like all the grunts and, you know... They look like a little fiddle. Yeah, I don't know about that. Well, then a big one would look like a big fiddle. Or if something was used from them. Like a cello. We're done talking about that.

I'm making an executive decision. We're not discussing where the name came from. Have we covered the consumption of fiddlers? Kevin, could you tell me a weight and or length at which a catfish ceases to be a fiddler? In my opinion, like 12 inches. He's making two fists. Extend your thumbs out from your two fists.

That's 100. Touch your thumbs tip to tip. Yep, right there. That's a fiddler. That's a fiddler that's a fiddler pretty much a grown-up adult two fists put your thumb out like you're making thumbs ups touch thumbs tip to tip you're looking at a fiddler that's undressed that's head to tail yes yeah head to tail that's that's probably the truth if you get a big fiddler it doesn't want to

fry good. It takes longer to cook. So if you've got him, he's 12 inches long, you skin him, chop his head off, gut him right there, then he'll fry consistent. You won't have to. The big ones, if you get one down here two pounds, then he's this big around. So to get him cooked all the way through there, his tail end is going to be overcooked. Incinerated, yeah. Another word you guys like, and it's not specific to your area,

but you guys use it heavily. Like where I grew up, you clean stuff. You guys dress stuff. So be like, are you going to dress it? Like yesterday, we dressed a turtle. Growing up, we would have said you're going to clean the turtle. But your buddy Jody was like, did you dress the turtle yet? That's Jody's term.

I pretty much say clean. Oh, you do? Okay. I hear it both ways, but I'm pretty much a clean guy. So again, just real quick, small catfish, break down. You're heading them, gutting them, skinning them. Well, the first thing you would do would be to skin them. Head on.

Head on. Because it's easy to get a hold of. There's a little bone that sticks out right below their fin. If you're going to be a catfisherman, you need some catfish skinning pliers. They're all-purpose. We use them to skin a turtle. Yeah, yeah. They're, you know, get you a good pair, keep a sharp edge on things.

Ideal. Many, many uses there. But when you hold the catfish kind of sideways, then that, I don't know what that bone is. It kind of sticks out. That bone's a pain in the ass, actually. You just snip that bone right there, and that's where you can get a start on the skin. Because you've got something hard to get against. Instead of flesh, and the catfish skin is slick, as we all know, it's starting to wall around.

But when you poke that bone out there, it becomes like a little grab point, set point right there. So, nip it with your knife. Just nip it with life. Then you've got your skin open. Grab your skin then and just slow, steady pull all the way out to the fin. Skim both sides. Leave the tail on it. Yeah, leave the tail on it.

The skin just kind of peters out at the tail it just pulls free yes and then do both sides uh you might clip the the um top fin off or the side fins with the with the catfish pliers so you're not impaling yourself on there and then when get it gutted and then then the last thing, cut your head off. And a little blood vein along the backbone, take your thumb and index fingers, whatever, take that off and pop that open, wash it out. And very mild. You don't need to trim it because it's a small fish. Right, right. There's no need going in there looking for blood or fat or whatever.

It'll cook up and not have any type of off flavor whatsoever. And that's probably one of the reason why i used to like eating fiddler so much growing up uh when i was small the big thing around here we didn't fillet fish because you was going to waste a morsel of meat or something is a luxury of is a luxury of like wealthy countries, cultures. You go to, you know, you go down even into Mexico, South America, Asia, they don't play shit.

You cook fish whole head on and get every bit out of there. We would either have fiddlers or we'd have catfish steaks. You'd go to a restaurant somewhere and that would be the two choices. You want fiddlers or you want catfish steaks. Well, to a restaurant somewhere and that would be the two choices you want fiddlers or you want catfish steaks well when they steak those things up got all that red meat in there

and so and it cooks up black is what it looks like black gray nasty nasty nasty nasty there so you just kind of pick around that. Sometimes you could do that very successful. Sometimes that flavor would go ahead and impregnate the meat. Be very strong. Be very strong. Is that steak fried? Yes. Yes. Oh, they fried a catfish steak.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. We fried catfish steak. Yeah. Hardly any bait will blacken. You know, a lot of racers will blacken catfish now. But the catfish steak would be like this wide or so chunked up yeah same way same way you stake out a swordfish or a shark yeah yeah and

you'd have the bones you know still in there and you just pick around rick around the bones there but very could be very very strong very strong flavor they ever smoke catfish? Yes. It's good. I mean, you know, very good. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And, boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated.

Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, It makes it that they can't join our northern brothers. You're irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking a high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast.

Now you guys in the great white north can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit on x maps.com slash meet on x maps.com slash meet welcome to the to the on x club y'all so that's everybody cool on fiddlers adam cool? Cool. Now, other cats.

Why do guys eat flathead belly, but they don't eat blue belly or channel belly? I've got a friend that's very particular about what he eats. Another one of my friends said he was raised on vanilla wafers when he was a kid. He admits that? Yes, yeah. He admits that. And he commercial fish fish for a while and he tells me he said if i could get just one source get flathead catfish bellies i could put every catfish

restaurant in the area out of business the texture is a little bit more like meaty meaty texture and you know it does have a very good taste. But what do you do about that silver skin inside there? Do they scrape that off or just fry it up? Just fry it up. Just pull it out there, and it has no off taste on that. We do cut that off, too. So you're pulling the skin off the catfish, but then the whole damn belly part.

Yeah. We'll cut that out. You know, catfish, you know, we're looking at a 20 to 40-pound flathead, so it's going to have a pretty substantial stomach on it. Like size of a pie, laid out size of a pie plate. Yes, pie plate there. Cut it in long strips. You know, pull the skin off, cut that inside out there, and you've got that meat texture. I think I showed you garrett

i said open that piece of fish up and you could see the meat texture running in there wasn't flaky it had more structure to it there it was like i said i said this looks like a flathead to me and that's when i went up there to the waitress and ask her said this is this flathead catfish you said yes that's what we serve here is flathead. Kind of like crab meat in that stringiness. Stranulated there, granular form there. And how do you guys cook up belly? They just fry it up? Fry it the same way, yeah.

Yeah, fry it the same way. So another thing I noticed when they're cleaning, so that's the anomaly there, or the difference. Like flathead people keep the belly. Now I noticed everything else they flay. Flaying blues and flaying channels around here. They not only

don't take the belly, but they don't flay out and over the ribs. So when they come in to cut that flay and they get to where you get that thin piece over the ribs, they run their knife out and leave the rib and belly meat on the carcass just pull off the flay skin it and then pull the vein out of the flay but not even keep the rib meat now i had a guy mentioned to me that

it was twofold that once you trim there's nothing left it's not good and um you know it's it's been widely reported that if you have high levels of heavy metals in your fish they tend to accumulate in belly fat fat fat of the belly so that's your understanding of why they don't keep that rib meat. I'm going to adopt, because I've eaten the best catfish down here I've ever eaten in my life. Meaning, another way of putting that

is the mildest, least muddiest catfish I've ever eaten in my entire life. I'm going to adopt wholesale every aspect of how they flay catfish in Kentucky. I will never handle a catfish another way. Why should you? There's no reason. I can't think of one.

All right. We fished catfish three ways down here in Kentucky. I'm not even going to touch on regular fishing pole fishing, rod and reel fishing because everybody knows what that is. We jugged, limbed, and trotted. I don't know if those are actually verbs.

I recently learned that golfing is not a verb. It would be like saying tennising. You play golf. You do not go golfing. Another little thing to keep, if you want to speak the language properly, you can't give away something for free.

It can be free of charge. It can be for a dollar, but it is not for free. Well, Jody said he was going to learn you English. Did he tell you this stuff? So, break down jugging. Jugging is a technique where you take some type of floating device, whether it be… Two-liter pop bottle.

Yeah, two-liter pop bottles uh silicone together to give you four liters that keeps you from when you get the big big daddy catfish on there you don't have to chase it all day long and they fit very conveniently in a nice uh liter bottle rack uh in the state of kentucky you're allowed 25 jugs per person. No more than 50 per boat when you go on a jugging expedition. When I was a kid, you could throw out... Is that jugs or is that hooks? That is jugs. But by law, a jug can only

have one single or multi-barred hook. That's correct. That's correct. Some people... You can run a treble or a J-hook or a circle, but only one hook per jug. Oh, that's a bummer. when I was going to come back. You're going to run droppers? Yeah, I was going to run droppers.

Some people use pool noodles, the pool floats for the kids. They're like three foot long, four foot long. But can you imagine having 50 of those things dangling in the wind? That's what Leon doesn't like them because Leon uses the same thing. If you ever see a guy deliver pop to a store, they got those little cartons, those little crates that are fit to hold two-liter pop bottles. So he transports all of his jugs in an actual pop carrying deal, and it's organized.

A double pop carrier because I made the mistake. I was at the local store the other day, and the Coca-Cola man was there delivering, and I'm thinking, my opportunity. My opportunity. I says, can I buy a couple of those cartons right there? And he says, I'll just give you some. How many do you need? I'm doing the quick calculation.

It holds eight in each one. I says, can I get six from you? How many do you need? I'm doing the quick calculation. It holds eight in each one. I says, can I get six from you? Would that be a problem? No, no. So he just hands them to me. I get them back. I needed 12 because he cuts the bottom out of one and glues it, silicones it together to give it that height.

I put on a two right there, so I'm halfway there. Man, that dude's level of organization and tidiness. Loved it. Anyhow, we haven't even explained what jugging is yet. You've got to float, a buoy. You've got a buoy, float with a line on it. One method to jug is if you're going to be fishing an area. You keep leaving out parts that I think people should know about.

Not much line. Well, that's where out parts that I think people should know about. Not much line. Well, that's where I was going, and you interrupted me. My friend Leon has been jugging for 40 years. It's pure science. And you do Leon's way or the highway. But everything he's got is there for a reason. And he'll have his jugs color-coded. He'll have, like, orange.

We'll have a five- to seven-foot leader on it. Green, three to four. And then red, maybe one to two. Are these any secrets that he doesn't want the general public to know? The color-coding? No, no, no, just in general. Oh, his leader lengths. Leon told me.

No, because he said he's old enough. Yeah, he said 15 years ago I would have told you boys shit about anything. Leon's words. But he said, I'm old now. And I had a little talk with him. I said, yeah. I said, you know, when they come down, and I took them squirrel hunting, I said, I pretty much, everything i knew about squirrel hunting i told him because you know if you're

some young kid if he can take a little bit of what i've told him and go out there and have a good experience we've got to get more people in the field hunting and fishing and having success and having success that's what it's all apart in cooking you know from from uh catching cleaning to cooking we need to be out there showing people there this is what it's not about killing out there it's about the whole experience of being outdoors yeah and just like you know we witnessed yanni witnessed that mulberry falling in that water yesterday to me that's better than catching any 50 pound catfish whatever that i saw that i was able to go out there and experience that right there and it registered on my hard drive up here saying hey let's put that to use see a fruit and mulberry

yeah yeah if you see that i mean it it it and we when did, and we were successful. That's being outdoors. That's being an outdoorsman, is observing nature to see what's going on out there and utilize it to the fullest advantage there. But now my friend Leon, he would not care. Like I said, he would like to see some more people. You know, as I told you earlier there, they used to have jugging tournaments out there on the river there the local fire department would put on for a charity fundraiser and said they

would last two days saturday and sunday he said two days out there on the river from daylight to dark said it'll make a man out of you but uh no i will explain but like i said he color codes them that way you know i was fishing with him the other day, and he said, don't throw none of the orange ones out. He said, we got too low of water in that one area. They're all going to hang up. He says, when we float over it, we'll throw them out. Oh, I got you. And heavy, like braided line.

Heavy braided line, you know, we're not fly fishing. It's not a trout that we got to fool. All we want is something on the end of the line that's going to hold them not like paracord but like maybe about a third diameter paracord yeah i think it's like it's like a hundred pound test braided line but not braided like not like a spider wire but like a like a cord it's a braided nylon line yeah like in alaska they call it canyon okay it's not you actually buy that at the bait and tackle shop yes you do and he runs a number nine jayhook a numbered nine alt nine alt jayhook big hook big bait big fish not so much big bait with those um the catfish kind of go through a stage where they're out in

the river they may be what what Leon says, sampling out. And they'll come up and hit a jug or something. They may take it under. And all of a sudden, they let go of it. They're just out there hitting whatever. And you guys, I think, saw one go completely under the other day. And then he let go. And then when they're feeding, they're up there gobbling.

And then that hook is way down in their mouth let me let me interrupt you again i feel like i'm like i feel you're playing you're playing i'm playing bass and you're in your in your in your playing your solo guitar but i want to like just set the stage because everything you're saying is great, but I feel like the order of information on jugging. I'll backtrack. Yeah, let me just lay it out for a second because then you're going to give all the nuanced detail, but you're not understood because you grew up around, you've known about jugging your whole life.

I didn't know what the hell it meant. So I'm going to give you a very awkward but very layman's explanation of jugging, and then you will lay on all the things i don't understand you got floats jugs with small two to six feet a liter name and address on them name and address on them and a hook and a white in a weight a washer any kind of weight to get it down? In the river, more than a washer. In the Mississippi. A nut. Specifically,

stainless nylon lock nuts. Big ass stainless nylon on some of the rigs. Oh, wait. You get above suitable area in a river. You get above where you know a catfish to be hanging out. Kevin will explain what that is.

You bait all your hooks and you start throwing the jugs overboard. Then you drift down in your boat with your flotilla of jugs. And when you're throwing them, it's not just like all in one long. You spread them out. Yeah, they're kind of spread out in a line, and it's important to know, and Kevin probably said this earlier too, but they start on the inside because the current's faster towards the middle of the river. So they start dropping them there.

That's the nuance, though. Oh, sorry, sorry. I'm trying to lay down the baseline. Yeah, yeah, sorry. And you're not killing it exactly right either. All right. So you throw your jugs overboard, yes, in a very specific, timely way that we'll get into. You're floating along with them.

You throw your jugs overboard. You drift downriver watching the jugs for the telltale sign of a fish being on there, which would be when you're running two two-liter silicone together, the jug stands up and a big fish will pull it under. At which point, you use your paddle or trolling motor to very stealthily, not running your motor, but very stealthily go over, grab the jug, raise the fish up, net him. What's holding him there, he's not not slack lined because he's fighting the jug the jug is performing the function of your rod tip like he pulls and there's resistance and so he's never getting slack lined um and you pull him in a boat now yanni add you know all your color

into it but i feel like now the listener understands what we're talking about yeah totally totally no i think kevin should because obviously i already have to tell him kevin okay But I feel like now the listener understands what we're talking about. Yeah, totally, totally. No, I think Kevin should because obviously I already effed it up. Kevin. Okay, Garrett, you don't have to raise your hand. Well, just because I want to let Kevin free rap once he gets going. But for me to understand as a born and raised in Montana and then moving around elsewhere. Where Joggin's illegal, I'll point out, and you can set out,

but you can set out a set line with six hooks on it that's a fix to the bank yeah but what equated how i wrapped my brain around observing what was going down it'd be like if you were ice fishing on a mobile ice chunk yep down the yellowstone you know i mean but like the jugs were like tip-ups. Yeah, exactly. Kind of like... 50 tip-ups. Yeah. And the ice is moving. Yeah. And you're moving with the ice. All right, now lay down the color.

You're getting ready to throw your jugs out. You look at your river conditions. See how much current's going. The wind. The wind plays a big factor in those jugs. You've got the big two liter four liter sitting on top of the water acts like a sail so you've got to take in consideration the current is the main factor and you're trying you're trying to deliver the bait to a river feature the same

way when you're casting you're like oh cast into that seam or cast into the edge of that hole or cast into the shade line you're trying to drop these things in when they're going to be 200 yards down river and deliver them right into where you want without your boat going in there and spooking the fish i think one of the rules of thumb is that 10 of waters hold 90 of the fish yeah i hear i keep hearing that 10 of the fishermen catch 90 yes and that's what you're trying to do you're trying to manipulate those jugs uh you've got to watch out for barge traffic too you know we didn't fish in the channel uh we did have three jugs get hung up on a buoy from a log that was out there so they took those immediately yeah the log got hung up on the buoy

and the jugs got hung on the log but like you said you're trying to figure out okay the current's running this much this morning we've got this much of a wind there where do i need to set those jugs to make them hit those locations and the location that you want to go you want to transition most of the time from shallow water to deep water they lay in that that little relax bit of current. They lay in those areas, those river jetties that are built out there to redirect the flow of the water. You know, they come out. It's scouring the bottom of the river, pushing the current over, keeping the channel cut, and then you've got maybe in four foot of water,

and all of a sudden it jumps off to 25 feet of water right here yeah you spend your life around rivers you learn to know you know you can look at the surface of a river even if the water is not clear you can look at the surface of the river and tell a lot about what's going on in underneath the river and you're looking for those little edge what's he called the little little edges? I think reefs. No, he had breaks. Breaks, yeah, current breaks. Using current breaks to find out what the underwater topography is like. Yes, yes. But, you know, that's what you want to fish for.

You put those jugs out, and hopefully, you know, sometimes you might want them all concentrated in one area, or if you're not for sure where the fish have been feeding you've got them spread out from close to the bank all the way out to the main channel and then as that was you know we've got the confluence of two rivers the ohio and the mississippi quite a bit of current coming in there and you just have to know the river you know that part where if you're up here on kentucky lake or whatever you may go into a bay and you know that that uh the wind is is blowing uh into the bay so you'll go out to the mouth of the lake the old river channel set your jugs there let them blow into the into the bay

and collect them there instead of going into the into the bay bay. And then it may be blowing out of the bay, so you'll put them on the windward side and do that. So you take the factors of, it may be an area where there's very little current, and then the wind goes in to be the main factor of jug manipulation or motoring from that away. And there's a wide variety of baits cut bait live bait um chicken gizzards chicken liver chicken gizzard garlic and jello deer heart you know deer hearts

out there um like cut bait you mentioned that yeah i mentioned can you do live bait yeah people run live if they can prefer um since the asian carp has hit our waters uh they are in competition with all the bait fish and we just not see the bait fish are hard to get in certain times of year they're hard to get anyway yeah and like i said one of the methods leon is i've got a good bait it might not be the best bait but consistently it's a good bait. It might not be the best bait, but consistently, it's a good bait. And it smells so damn good, man. Chicken gizzard soaked in garlic. God.

Every time you open that cooler up, I start getting hungry. And we know what the issue is to getting bait. We really needed some bluegill when we went fishing, but didn't have the time, opportunity. I tried to get my buddy, Raymond, to catch us some bait. Two weeks ago, we went down to a little spot, threw out one cast of a throw net, had 14, 15 bluegill. Well, rains came in. All the little places that he had fished, it filled in with water. He made several flows, and he come out with one shad out of that time. So, you a bait it becomes an issue that that yes if we'd

had some uh a small bluegill we would have fared and we were much better we were running shiners in the short nose gar i think we're taking those shiners off as fast as we can set damn hooks yeah so anyhow so getting back like i said he's got a bait that he doesn't have to spend an hour or two uh you know fishing for uh her. We got down there. It was a short night for you guys. I got up about 3, and we met down there at, what, quarter to 5. We was in the water about 5.30 right there at daybreak. The reason he likes to do that is we started out by fishing a bar, a six foot deep bar. And he said the minute a pleasure boater

or a not so smart jug fisherman runs his boat over that bar, it pushes all the blues off the bar. Like they're very sensitive to that. He likes to be the first boat on the water because he wants the first thing that, he doesn't want anything to spook those catfish off that bar so he can run his jugs over it.

He said once that happens, he says he sees a lot of guys, well-meaning guys, zoom across the bar, come from downstream, drive over the bar, and throw out their jugs. He said it's pointless because you run all the catfish off the bar. We kind of proved that to ourselves because we went back and fished that bar, one fish. Yeah. The first time we pulled, I don't know. We caught 24 total that day. 200 pounds of fish.

Yeah. And then, like I said, we went the second time, we caught one fish. After someone had went down. There was a boat. We don't know for sure if they were jugging or limb line or. They were jugging. They had a good float. They had a good float.

But we came in right behind those guys. We came over and I don't know, we caught 15 or something the first time, or I don't know, some number of them. But, yeah, 200 pounds of fish. 38 pounds of trimmed boneless fillets. No belly meat. No belly meat. Yeah, and I don't know if you guys got to see it because, you know,

there's a certain monotony that kind of starts to after you figured it out and you see what's going on and it's kind of like all right all right i kind of got this jug and thing but there was an instance because you're watching most of the jugs when they're getting hit they're kind of flopping around a little bit if it's a bigger fish it's the jug disappears for half a second it pops back up you know it starts to really flop real well and that's when leon was starting to get excited but we were about 10 feet away from two jugs i just happened to be they were like in my you know periphery and all of a sudden one of those jugs just goes bye-bye i mean just just is gone and i'm going what what and and the guy was driving our boat it's just like holy shit

holy shit he's like let's hope it doesn't come up. He's like, let's hope it doesn't come up. It ain't coming up. Let's hope it doesn't come up. And I mean, we never saw it come back up. And obviously it did because we recovered all our jugs. And you just lose track because the river's drifting. The fish is dragging it around. You don't know where it popped up and when it did.

But I mean, for at least 30 seconds, a minute, this jug was gone. So we had a giant on. It gets exciting when that happens. Yeah, he gets some fish that approach 100 pounds. He's got a 100-pound pitcher one there on the wall of his garage. And he said, you trim that thing up, flay it and trim it up. He says, you can't tell the difference between that and a four-pound cat, taste-wise. This is all the same.

All right, lemon. four pound cat taste wise this is all the same all right lemon there's nothing like seeing pulling up and having a big flat head on there and this limb is going boom we gotta we gotta lay the groundwork okay doesn't everybody know how to limb line no No. Limb line, that's a technique where you take a single hook and you tie it onto a limber branch sticking out over the water. If you deadhead it to a snag or whatever, if you get a big fish, he's going to tear off. He's going to tear off of that yanking and pulling. But you take one of mother nature's fishing rods that's hanging out there for you tie you uh one wrap around a double

hitch real easy to pull off it will hold the fish uh have a whatever small weight maybe a washer maybe a nut maybe a lead sink or whatever to keep your bait down in the water somewhat. Anywhere from, know your river conditions. Know what your river's going to do because you don't want to be fishing in air the next morning there. Because you're fishing so like a foot to three feet full of water surface. Yes, what I like to fish in. Even better if the river is rising somewhat. You mark the river bank after we got everything set to see what we're going to be the next day.

And I think it actually had risen just a little bit. So we had pretty much a steady river elevation. But there again, you need some type of marker marker it's real easy to lose your limb lines i use a black tar uh braided line if you use a white one it shows up much better but everybody else can see those too and we put a small orange marker on them plus we had our names on each one of the limb lines by law you have to do that and how many limb lines you're allowed to run per person you're liable to run 25 per person you're supposed to check them every 24 hours yes yeah yeah every 24 hours and you let that thing dangle there and fish yep put it in we baited up in the morning uh probably all in all we used shiners which were very easy to tear off

want to try to keep live bait. We were going to target flatheads is what we were going for, the flathead cats. And their number one food is live. Probably one reason why their belly meat tastes better on a flathead is because everything they eat is live protein there. It's not whatever's floating in the river. But bait them up. I used 8-0, just a straight J hook with a swivel in there,

and then our weight was a shiny washer. Hopefully that that's a fish attractant with it turning there in the water. It looks like some type of bait fish in there. So it's dual purpose. It holds it down maybe maybe attract it and um we baited with um with the shiner minnows and deer heart deer hearts and another very very excellent uh um fish attract it so i would say on average these things are set from three four yards from the bank out to 10 12 yards from the bank right whatever

tied to an overhead limb the limb was probably typically five six feet at the most above the water surface 10 feet of line tie a knot put a bait on let it dingle in the current and uh live bait and then let it do its job illegal where i grew up set line all this stuff's illegal all illegal huh yeah you're allowed one line one line in the water has been around real so that's pretty easy one to understand and we by the time we got them baited up, we had a fish on. Yeah.

Pulled up a nice little channel catfish off. Trot lining, I think many more people are familiar with trot lining. Oh, another version of limb lining is the one I was talking about, which is poke pulling, where if you don't have good overhanging limbs, you take a big limber sapling,

cut a sharp end on it, and just jab that son of a way into the bank and then tie off on that and you're basically making a limb you know you're making like a a limb in the perfect position you want it in and then letting that hang there and come back through and check it which is poke pulling variation on limb lining um trot line a sports trot line uh can have no more than 50 hooks uh per line uh 18 inches apart from one hook to the next is the minimum amount of distance and needs to be some three feet underwater why is that i didn't recreation boat props so three feet has to be yeah three feet lower than three feet yeah it can be lower than three feet three feet and under yeah three feet yeah like

we've run our own set lines over doing that and you know like cut them off at the prop you know and what you have is a little square box um that's holding about it's got little notches cut in it you've got a main line that's big it's like probably like a 120 pound 160 pound test and then you string what we call the tugs the tugs are a smaller braided line let's say it's it's 100 pounds other folks call them droppers or leaders yeah well, okay, okay. And it's got a swivel on there. Mine were made up where it had beads on each end so the tug can spin around, whatever it needs to do. We had some small hooks.

We had some, well, fiddler hooks on there pretty much, number two hooks. And we baited those up mainly with the little chunks of deer heart and about the size of your end of your little finger i think we did put a shiner or two on there dead shiners like i said when we made the yanny made the observation of the local quick stop for the fish to get the mulberries and i tasted some of the mulberries and i've been eating mulberries for 50 years or longer my grandmother had three big mulberry trees in her backyard and the ones that we got to sample the best i've ever had the the best and the biggest like hydroponically grown on the bank of the ohio river and they were just outstanding the mole that's why they call us the mulberry gang that's right because we all got purple hands it is pretty hard to get off pretty hard but uh

you've got uh your main line of your truck line 50 hooks tied up to tugs you have a special box box built that's four-sided holds has about 12 to 13 14 slots in each side you call with a screen bottom in it so water can run right through when you retrieve your line you don't have a moldy mess in there and so you you take the lead in of your trot line put it in the bottom of the box and then each of those notches you put a tug with a hook attached and so then you just put them in there in order to go around and then when you get ready to uh place the line in the in the in the water you may need a um a piece of braided line to tie off to uh some type of structure like we did and we just start feeding line out you bait it up before you start fishing you got your bait on there tie off to a tree structure whatever or if you want to go out in deep water you may drop an anchor down with a float

get the depth of your water maybe 20 feet you want to fish 10 feet of water so tie your line 10 feet have a float up at the top and then you've got a line suspended out in the deep channel and then do the same thing on the other end but you just start reeling your your box line out and went fairly smooth. I mean, you know, you got 50 hooks right there. And you got to string that son of a bitch banjo tight. Banjo tight. Which I didn't realize. Yeah, you get her banjo tight,

and that way it stays at that elevation that you think where the fish are going to be. Doesn't flop around in the current. You know, there's all types of debris in the water sticking up, roots, limbs, and all that right there. So you get her tight. You know, she's out there flopping in the current. There's all types of debris in the water sticking up, roots, limbs, and all that right there. So you get her tight. If she's out there flopping in the water, she's allowed to get tangled up on all kinds of stuff.

Yeah, we lost fish because of having the fish wrap the thing around. Like that one time we had it hung up, we lost two cats or three cats. Cats right there. Yeah, yes. Trying to retrieve them.

Because we got some slack in our line. Just trying to get it unsnagged. And it's got your name and ID and address on that also. Like I said, you're allowed to fish 250 hook boxes per person, or 150 box and 25 set lines. Yeah, so we set out two lines over probably 100 yards long maybe. Oh, yes. Yeah, every bit of that.

50 hooks on each. And we strung them parallel to the bank affixed to snags and fallen trees. So you're basically running it a little, I don't know, 30 feet off the bank, parallel to the bank, all baited up. And it's fun, man. It works good. Adam, concluding thoughts? It's a trip, man.

I love catfish. It's good. Thank you. You had a good time? Yeah. No, I had a great time. A little warm for me, the humidity. But you've seen all manner of fishing.

Yeah. I've done a lot of bill fishing a lot of sail fishing yeah yeah big big game fish i guess you would call them you know sails marlin tuna i've seen a lot of it so i always i always think it's fun to i like fishing so it's fun to see how it works other ways and do you think all those yachtsmen with helicopters on their boats and whatnot are going to come start fishing noodlers tomorrow probably not you never know yeah any concluding thoughts i had one can you come back to me i forgot it i got two dirt all right two all right

uh first one i wish we had time to talk about the swamp night because that was pretty wild. Yeah, I do want to mention something. Oh, no. Use your concluding thoughts. If you can do it cleanly and efficiently, use your concluding thoughts to mention any aspects of the trip because I'm going to mention two, the paddle fish and the snapper. Okay. Don't worry about those.

Okay. Okay. Well, before I get to that, the other question I had, like these are big rivers. I'm bad with geography. He can't even barely say it. So when I came down here, I knew the Mississippi was big, but I didn't realize that a lot of these rivers are huge. The Mississippi is a sham.

The Mississippi is the Missouri. They just named it before they realized the missouri the missouri heads yeah yeah up in montana yeah flows all the way across the continent is gigantic when it picks up a little pissant crick called the mississippi which then assumes the name of the missouri and then picks up the ohio which again is bigger than that yeah yeah but it's a bullshit river calling it the mississippi is bullshit we call it the ohio yeah is that right yes all that stuff he just said sham too but my question actually just to give the listeners an idea these are big waters there's a lot of trees there's a lot of there's not many uh like landscape markings and like you guys are

setting on specific fishy areas and you never use gps's and i'm curious yeah like a lot of people and other sportsmen activities will you know mark certain areas in this net and i haven't seen you guys do any of that not you know you nor leon you know i take a stab at that after kevin answers it um we look for landmarks that come into our eyes like when we stopped putting down we you know i knew we were going to start, putting limb lines in, not far from the boat ramp. Pretty easy right there. Well, when we put the last limb line out, I looked there, and I saw a feature, a snag into the bank right there.

But there's like thousands of snags. Well, it was a special snag. Here's the other thing. What do you say? Think of what Leon was saying. He goes, oh, there used to be a bar right here that ran 400 yards, like basically from here. He goes, but it's gone now.

It's such a dynamic waterway. Yeah, it's always shifting. Those whole islands that weren't there when he was a kid, and they're there now. Yeah, and there's no GPS. And the channels move around all the time. It just is like it'd be irrelevant. Oh, yeah, with the GPS.

He's like, oh, sometimes this bar, like this bar used to be a mile down, but now it's up here. So you mark it. Because you got these flood cycles like he's talking about. We've been going around, and he's talking about, you'd be looking up a hill at a gazebo on top of a hill, and he'd be talking about the water being knee-deep in the gazebo. Yeah.

They built Smithland Locks in, like, 82. And before that, the chute that we fished in, you could pretty much walk from there over to Hurricane Island. It was just a – there was a big, huge sandbar out there. My buddy Paul said that's where we all learned to swim, out here on the sandbar. But there was very little water through there yeah and now now they raise the pool like six seven feet and it's become a big big lake yeah um but it may change it won't change anymore um they're getting ready they're in the process of building homestead down yeah that's that's

halfway between there and leon's most expensive Corps of Engineers project ever. And it's going to take out a couple more locks out there. We're going to have a huge lake pool from about 60, 70 miles down from there all the way up. It is cool, though, too, because you're taking note in real time as opposed to being hooked to some screen. Right. You're being more engaged with your surroundings. You may look on a riverbank and see a tall tree. Now, when we motored to the other side, the river feature that I noticed,

I told Steve, I says, see the tree with the, it's still got the leaves on it that's been knocked over? I said, that's where we're going to start, you know, with our jug. So I knew when I come across. Yeah. And then when I got across there, I says, well, we put the trot line up river at the mulberry tree. So I had my one landmark to go and go on up river.

If it had been nighttime, I might've had a GPS out there. Cause it get real confusing out there on the river at night time. Going to a deer stand in the morning on the far side of the island. Very confusing. Very confusing. You got your thought yet or do you need more time yeah we because i can go another item we are just not going to get to talk about too much but the e-town river restaurant yeah that's that's gonna be your concluding thought yeah all right break it down um it's just it's super cool because it really is like uh the maybe the the last place where you can get fish like that close to the source

going back in time yeah so this guy processes thousands and lots lots i wasn't gonna say how many thousands i thought was going to say ounces is what I thought he was going to say. Many ounces. Many, many ounces of fish. Yeah. Of catfish that are brought to him by commercial fishermen. His restaurant is on a barge on the Ohio River. Yeah, and I'll point out, or I'll let you.

No, I will. on the ohio river yeah and i'll point out or i'll let you no i will this is one of very few commercial freshwater fisheries in the nation is it for native fish yeah we'll name some more canada runs some commercial fisheries michigan has like a commercial fishery for lake whitefish there's very few commercial fisheries smelt maybe some in canada some in northern great lakes often with try only with tribal fishermen anyway it's one of the very very few commercial fisheries for native freshwater fish go ahead and so the the fish is bought there it's clean right there i mean literally the the little cleaning station is not jumping distance, but certainly a stone's throw from where the fryer is. You walk right on there, and you're getting fit.

You're eating on top of the river that the fish grew up in. And the live well is within jumping distance of the cleaning station. Yeah. And I was talking with the owner a little bit about us filming there and whatnot he owns another restaurant up on the hill just a couple blocks away and they serve catfish there too but they have on the menu they have pond catfish and river catfish and uh he told me that the river fish stays on the river so if you want to eat that actual river channel cat no flathead you have to walk out onto his barge you cannot you cannot buy it you know two blocks away up on the hill

which is like it's pretty cool yeah and he has turned customers away he was saying so when he turns them away he sends them up to his other place but they got to go get pond calf they got to go get aquaculture fish they can't get river fish stays on the river yeah that was a good ass restaurant elizabeth's town in illinois and there's a really nice house on the river for listed yanni called in on it what do they want for that place 104 a buck and a quarter buck and a quarter yeah kevin thinks you'd get it for a hundo i'd be afraid to offer him 100 for it really so it's because of water raising and stuff? No, I think they would sell it in a heartbeat for $100.

Yeah. I'll do my concluding thoughts, then Kevin can go. One, I'm getting a little sick of this, and nothing against you, Garrett, this like, oh, GPS. Like, oh, you know, this kind of like, oh, I don't need GPS. You know, I'm a woodsman. It, oh, you know, this kind of like, oh, I don't need GPS. You know, I'm a woodsman.

It's like, are you, here's why I have a hard time with people who are saying that. And I know you're not saying that. But what is wrong with an enhanced understanding of what's going on around you? We fish halibut in a place that you can look at charts and get like a somewhat of an understanding and i'll point out at one point in time charts were a damn sure newfangled technology like a chart like columbus wasn't sailing on good maps so he could have said oh you bullshitters now that use maps when i was a boy why right yeah okay so then charts also they had a way to sound depths electronically and they drew up charts now people are like i use charts by god i don't need a gps it's like okay

it's the same guy like i don't have a cell phone i got my regular phone hooked to a wire and at a time someone's like you mother scratchers with these phones hooked to wires i use a blanket in an old campfire it's like so we fish halibut in the spot i never understood the spot i never understood why i was there you look at a chart and you can't tell anything about what's going on you get a rough sense it was like a high plateau i got a gps now and a sonar on my boat i'm like oh no shit there's a big underwater mesa yeah and it's really good to fish in a saddle between that and another mesa i wonder why that is that's so interesting that fish like to hang out there i wonder if i can replicate this by going to other places and

understand the mysterious ocean depths better but But it's like, I don't need no deep, deep. My second thing is. That's good, though. I got it. We were out setting limb lines, and down the river, who spotted that thing? Down the river comes a paddlefish. It was in your guy's boat.

I spotted it. Jody spotted it. Dirt on his GPS. Dirt on his GPS. Dirt on his GPS. Those are paddle fish coming down the river. A crippled up paddle fish coming down the river that got hit by a boat prop, clocked it in the head, cut off part of its gill cover. Down the river, like great shape other than a gash in his head.

Jody tried to scoop it up in a net and it squirted away from him. But I had my bow fishing rig and we just pulled up to it. And you could probably grab it. If you kept that, you could have grabbed the net. We just put an arrow into it in order to get up on the boat. And it looked like it just happened. It wasn't infected. The fish was fat, perfect, shiny health, but just had been dealt a death blow by a boat prop.

And so we were able to – how much did that thing, 12-pound paddle fish? Oh, every day. Yeah. So we staked that thing out. And then we were out frogging the other night, and before it got dark, I think it was you, saw a turtle head pop up. And it was funny, because on our way in there, i had saw what i thought was a turtle head i saw it the night before and i said oh is that a turtle and kevin said i thought that was a turtle last night it's a stick so we're out there and all of a sudden adam says hey there's a turtle head

and i'm like no it's a stick because it was six inches away from where the stick was i'm like no we all thought that was a turtle too as a stick goes no i saw it come up and go away i'm like bullshit there's a stick i go over there and shine my light in the water big old snapper laying there underwater so i grabbed my bow fishing bow arrow and put a bow arrow into his shell and that was he was 18 pounds every bit of that every bit of that he was 18 pounds after we trimmed him up a little bit and then we dressed him as jordy would say michigan might say we cleaned him yesterday so we got a bunch of turtle meat too and down here you're allowed you can't trap turtles in conventional turtle traps but you can take turtles any method that you can use to take rough fish so you can

set line jug line trot line limb line for turtles no limit and with paddle fish was a paddle fish season for conventional tackle but a bow fisherman if you're using a bow you're allowed two paddle fish and you can use a turtle trap a tilt trap where they come up tight turtle trap but i've never i don't know how you would catch a snapping turtle in because i've never seen one on a log. No, they don't climb out in the sun. But you can hook and line. You can gig. You can spear, bowfish, turtles.

When I was a kid, you couldn't do any of that. However, you could turtle trap. And we used to use funnel traps or cage traps. Concluding thoughts, Kevin? Wait, could you tell them real quick about when we got on the land looking for frogs after you bowed the snapper? Yeah, it was pretty wild. It was harder than doll sheep hunting.

When people ask me, I was saying, when people ask me now, like, what's the hardest hunt you've been on? I'd be hunting bullfrogs in Kevin's marsh. And then doll sheep. And then doll sheep. And we probablysheet. And then Dollsheet. And we probably wouldn't even have gone

if I'd shown them a snake poster that I gave them last night. Oh, and I got bit by one of those giant water bugs. I got bit by a giant water bug I'm assuming on my ankle

which for about 30 seconds hurt like holy hell. They pinch you. I got pinched by a water bug. Steve said, they just got bit by something. Everybody could have

got bit by it. I thought it was a snake. I'm going through my hard drive trying to figure out then i always said giant water bug i said it's an amazonian bug feature there it looks like it come right out of amazonia river but uh when i first got hit i thought i got hit by a snake it was that like it was that like intense yeah it was like that sudden intent didn't last at all but it was like basically if someone reached out and grabbed you the pair of needle nose pliers on your leg well It was like that sudden and intense. It didn't last at all, but it was like if someone reached out and grabbed you with a pair of needle-nose pliers on your leg. Well, it was like number four on the bite index, right?

Yeah, it's got a high on the Schmidt pain index. Does it score high on the Schmidt pain index? I don't know. It was pitch black. Yeah. All I know is the guy in front of me goes, ah, something's bit me. It's pitch black and dark.

And I'm standing in like three feet of water going, uh-oh, what do you do? We might have a one. But here, the bullfrogs in this area were tricky because they all were in the heavy cover. They're all in overhead cover. So you got this giant marsh, and there's no, all the bullfrog calls, you think like,

oh, the marsh full of bullfrogs. They're all on the edge, in the nastiest, thickest willows and shit, with a lot of overhead cover tucked under little things. And it's so thick you can't see anything. You can't see the end of the spear. So all you hear is that you're going toward a bullfrog in the night. Boom, boom. He's going off.

And the only thing you hear is him spook. You know, the whole what was going through my mind the whole time. How's this gonna look on camera when i jab steve and ass with this this is this gig i said maybe we'll get in there too deep but that was pretty much of a trick too is having that that gig 12 foot gig and then then the tallest cameraman was right behind me adam and i was bopping him in the head all the time so So I had Steve. I couldn't manipulate it there.

So it was pretty tough. Something big splashed in the water, too, coming towards us. It was never identified. I would say a raccoon or an otter or something. A raccoon or an otter down there. I guess cotton. Yes, mouth. Cotton mouth.

So big you can't even be quiet anymore. Yeah. He just breaks. Cotton mouth that breaks and brushes. He's got no fear. You know, we waited through there all night we didn't see one water snake you know which i thought we would have seen some water snakes in there and i had zero bug uh repellent on none i heard a few mosquitoes kind of buzz my um ears and stuff, but no swarm.

I think y'all wore a little bit of bug repellent. Did anybody really get mosquito bit? No, not there, no. Are you trying to sell this place? No. List price. Pleasant area. Pleasant area.

Underage it. The misconceptions of a swamp. When you've got an ecosystem that's in balance, everything is pretty much taking care of itself. The fish and the frogs, we saw lots of small bait fish swimming around. They keep the mosquitoes in check down there. It's not bad. We had all kinds of small frogs, a green tree frog, the bird voice frog. And, you know, it's just one of those places.

It's just very unique. It's a nice little patch. Definitely. When those frogs get going. It's like loud like the jungle. The Bolivian jungle. Yeah, it definitely reminded me. My full moon calculation was off by about 15 minutes or so.

But when the full moon did get up, then the whole course started. The whole swamp became alive. Owls in the background, all the frogs, the insects. So it's a very special place. So Kevin, concluding thoughts? Well, when you boys come to town, it's like hunting and fishing boot camp.

I go back, I feel like I'm, you say 12 years old, but I didn't have my driver's license, so I'm, say, 16, you know, out prowling around doing what I want to do. You know, and that's why I spent almost 30 years in utility business. I had an opportunity to retire early, and I'm still very fit and can get out and prowl around with you guys. And I enjoy y'all coming down, and it's just like a new adventure.

You know, just the way I was always raised. I always wanted to go up this creek, down this river, whatever. And I like showing you guys around, showing you different hunting techniques. We eat good, cook good food. You know, there's lots of really good sportsmen out there that's more than killing. Like I said, they like being outdoors to see what goes on. So it's a pleasure when you guys roll into town. Well, thanks for they like being outdoors to see what goes on. So it's a pleasure when you guys roll into town.

Well, thanks for having us. Yeah, there you have it, the great Kevin Murphy. Thank you, Kevin. You're welcome. Take care.