The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 080: The Fish Shack

Episode Date: September 4, 2017

Steven Rinella talks with Dirt Myth, editorial contributor Brody Henderson, and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.Subjects Discussed: Dirt's dad's activewear; cheaters; the straight dope version of Dirt Myth's wounded eye saga; Steve's jealousy of Janis's cannibalism; drinking breast milk; sexing rabid mink; the salmon moochin' madness of 2017; limp dickin' vs. reelin' down on 'em; retaining bi-catch and roadkill; pelagic fish; the intricacies of fisheries management; i kejime; Steve's one rifle conundrum; Dirt: the would-be ranch caretaker; 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 meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. All right. Dirt myth.

Back from the dead. It's been a while. Explain your eye situation. Well. I'll tell a part of it. Yeah. No, no, no. Okay.

I'll tell the first part. Then I'm going to have all the other parts to tell. It used to be that you couldn't really see anything. Yeah. You couldn't see critters. Yeah. Shitty game eyes, how a fellow might put it. Yeah.

Real bad game eye. You saw things that didn't exist. Saw things that were not there, and then didn't see things that were there. Then you went in science you went in and uh explain that got lasik which was phenomenal i recommend it to anybody was like a rebirth really yeah it was crazy like you opened your eyes and all of a sudden like oh shit there's all the animals yeah yeah and it was quick it was quick. It was like, it was painless. You know, there is inherent risks in cutting into your eye with a laser, but it was like

maybe 15 minutes procedure. And then maybe two hours later, like it was, it was, it was crazy because the glasses I had two hours later. Yeah. I could see like, and it varies hours later? Yeah, I could see. And it varies, the recovery, because they just assume a swelling and stuff. But on the drive back, Andrew, my girlfriend, drove me back to Bozeman. By the time we got home, I couldn't go in the house because everything looked so cool outside.

I was seeing critters everywhere. And realizing that ones you thought were there weren't back there they were probably scratches and eye boogers on my glasses or something and then after then you started wearing glasses when uh 2000 like early 2000 so not my whole life but too you saw my setup i had i had that jerry rigged croaky yeah and i hear it garrett's father oh he's gonna love this invented active wear a thing called active wear where he takes a piece of lawn trimmer cord yeah like like the the the actual cutting cord from a weed whacker yeah and he fixes uh it as a yeah like your arms yeah but it isn't like croaky like band-aid right it's like a company used to make those oh yeah what's like the other what's the other word for it eyeglass retainer yeah

makes the eyeglass retainer out of weed whacker cord and his work but he's like his are for reading glass yeah which i need now bad yeah and you so you would like his like i couldn't read i was trying to read the dosages on fuel stabilizer yesterday and nothing it's very difficult i've got that too tying on hooks small hook yeah brody henderson you tie a lot of small hooks yeah professionally yeah the last couple years you've been putting readers on i haven't caved in yet but i need to dude i was in a restaurant the other day with some friends i want to get back to you dirt because i want to talk about you poking a hole in your eye with a pine needle the other day i'm in a restaurant

and dirt we're gonna come back to your whole little saga. Rebirth. So a friend of mine, she had on a pair of cheaters that she just got. 1.5 magnification. I put those sons of bitches on, and it was like, holy. This is what menus look like in real life? It makes you realize what happens to you after you turn 40. It's so degrading, man. They do say 40 too like the and it happens fast i'm now like i dread you know like you wake up in the middle of night and your

kid's like sick or something you're trying to figure out how much like children's like whatever to give them ibuprofen i'm like this can't be happening to me just i've been thinking about getting a magnifying glass just to keep my pocket when i get readers but i'm like well that's my why people wear glasses rogan's got cheaters yeah i think everyone eventually he carries them around all the time when he needs to read something he puts them on i'm like god i'm so jealous man i gotta get some of those things well you gotta try i'll get you some of what dad makes well that's what i need i need the weed whacker cord put on them yeah yeah it's like it's not gonna try to like meet girls anymore yeah i don't care yeah dad yeah it's not like i'm married i

can wear a weed whacker cord around my head with my glasses hooked to it give a shit so dirt there you are you got glasses when uh early 2000s So you've been running around in glasses for 10 years. And here's what happened to Dirt. This is Yanni's theory. It's an accurate theory. I think it's Yanni's. Didn't you come up with this theory? About why Dirt poked a hole in his eye with a pine needle, like, days after getting LASIK?

Mm. Well, it was if he had gotten you. Tell them your theory, Yanni. Well, I think we should tell the story of how he got poked in the eye first but i don't want dirt tell his own story i do he might leave out my favorite parts go ahead you tell what happened to you well i do gotta say it was luckily it was like two months after surgery because yeah but i like to tell them like i like to immediately yeah i like to just for dramatic effect like to mess with the facts when it comes to talking about you and your eyes okay so so you tell the straight dope version

without making uh two months later two months later make an epic tv steve setting up his tent the big belt mountains of montana and usually i can just freely headbutt pine trees with eye protection, but in this case... Because for 10 years, you've been walking through the woods with goggles on. Yeah. And not having to... Well-secured goggles, nonetheless. Not having to worry about that. And just...

Like, actually, I was holding a branch down, and the branch slipped from my foot as I was lowering. So it was like, you know, the angle of the dangle was worst-case scenario. That's what happened? Yeah. I thought it would go away because everyone scratched their eye, I'm sure, or, you know, if you're out in the woods often. But this thing was uniquely just whatever, however it happened it's got worse every day got wherever you guys luckily luckily i work with good people because by the end of the day

you guys are like you should probably get out of here i mean it was well scratches don't get like worse the next day and it wasn't even a scratch it ended ended up not being a scratch. It was a puncture, right? Well, it was an abrasion, a corneal abrasion. But it was, during that day, like every once in a while, it was pain that would almost cause me to like puke. And what was happening is it got infected and swelled up. This is the next day. Well, I had to hike out and go to the optometrist. He said every time I'd blink because it was so swollen,

it would re-tear that flap. And that was where it was like, you know, I had to stop a couple times when we were hiking. But the place I went to had this thing called, I can't remember the name. I want to say Procara, but it was a stem cell from placenta that they put on my eye. The optometrist said it was the largest abrasion he'd ever seen.

He said if I would have waited another day, I would have lost vision in that eye. He doesn't know that. No, no, no, not complete though. It would have scarred up to the extent that there would have been a you know lifetime fog yeah i'm a little sensitive to this because right now my wife's freaking out that she got a welding helmet from someone oh the kids could watch the eclipse through a welding helmet then she got to reading about how there's like gradations of protection in a welding helmet like you know eight up to whatever or below

eight up to whatever you're supposed to have anyway she's worried that didn't have the right glass in it that she'd like permanently damage the kid's eyes and i'm like yeah yeah but i just feel like they're a little more durable yeah oh for sure i did on that note i was using one of those uh you know they have the automatic welding mask. Where as soon as you, you know, make connection, it will. Yeah, I know. I've used that stuff. Yeah.

But it was a delay. Well, unbeknownst to me, I mean, I was younger too. I was like in my early 20s. The battery was dead and it wasn't actually going dark. So I welded for, you know, like an hour. And it wasn't, you know, it's tinted. Yeah. And so I thought it was, I was like was like man this is great i can see perfect during the welding but it wasn't actually dimming and that felt i ended up burning my yeah my eyes from that but it heals up um i got snow blindness

yeah it's like yeah twice once ice fishing on pendles lake in michigan's upper peninsula and we all got it we were out there in the blazing ass sun before we really kind of got onto sunglasses yeah and um like the wakushi indian yeah drinking uh like it was real cold out and you'd put boone's farm out and like everything would freeze but the syrup would rise up to the surface. So we're just drinking the liquidy, the boozy elixir that comes up to the top of a frozen bottle of Boone's.

And pound in Northerns and Yellow Perch. And then that night, man, get back and all of a sudden it's like, hey, did you guys rub gravel into my eyeballs? And then another time I was with this dude, Rick Weirstrom, we were welding up back and also it's like it's like hey did you guys rub gravel into my eyeballs and then um another time i was with this dude rick weirster we were welding up snapping turtle traps we're

just making them out of woven wire oh yeah this we had this really yeah we had this like really heavy gauge woven wire and we're we're against a building that had been sided and corrugated. Oh, yeah. So sided and corrugated, like what you put for corrugated roofing. Yeah. But it was sided in that. So when Rick would strike the arc, I would just turn and look away. But I'm looking at that unpainted corrugated building.

Just getting zapped. Yeah. So after we got this trap welled up a couple hours ago, and I had to go down in the emergency room oh yeah dude that hurt well that's what i would say your kids like they would know that's what i was telling my wife yeah it would be bugged i'm like he wouldn't have stared at it for eight minutes but apparently you can i don't know yeah eyes if you had like if you if you um are married or whatever if you have children with a woman, it's a lot better that the woman worries about the kids than not. Yeah, that's true. So you can't be critical of someone for worrying about their well-being.

Because there's the opposite, right? They just don't care about the kid's well-being, which is very alarming. It's more alarming than when they care too much. Yeah. No, that's good. That's good mothering. So there you are out in the woods pine needle whacks in the eye yeah tears your thing yeah you walk out and my favorite part

of the story is you had the foresight to practice driving with one eye knowing that you might have to make a long drive the next day with only one eye. Well, the whole hike out, I could not see shit, man. That's something you learn to appreciate to anyone who's lost or had to cover their eye for an extended period. Depth perception is critical for the world being

manageable. Yeah, it was a decent hike, too. It was probably four miles-ish. Yeah, it was like end of day kind of. I mean, i was just stumbling over stuff yeah yeah depth perception is uh critical for driving too oh yeah man it all worked out though is that curve up ahead or yeah driving real slow my favorite part of the story is that like three days go by we're texting with garrett he's all right he's got his patch on his eyeball and everything and uh he had taken uh we'd rented a

nice suburban for the trip we've been left with like the big cargo van and uh like three days go by and we're on our way home and uh it's like so uh this is a nice suburban. I'm like, what do you mean? You haven't taken it back yet? He's like, I don't know. I kind of like driving around. With my one eye. We would. Me and Andrew would just go take like evening drive just because it was so nice.

You know, days after that happened, I get a picture of my little nephew up in Anchorage. Oh, yeah. Who had the same similar thing happened where he got a devil's club thorn got a devil's club thorn in his eye yeah and it got worse and worse and worse and worse and he went and had to have surgery yeah well they say he's in a like in the picture he's in a wheelchair like i think they had to put him under to work on his eye yeah they say that organic materials will cause infection faster than like metal shaving or which is surprising to me like a pine needle or devil's devil's club

but the stems that's what blew me away was when the doctor's like we you know usually you could use this protective lens and it just allows the eye to heal itself he's like but now recently they passed the stem cell lens and it's like he said it would have been like three weeks with the old one the new one was three days it took longer because of the you know just because the damage was so extensive but they make this this eye patch out of placenta yeah and it's i mean it just it was awesome and they he's saying they're doing it in knees and stuff i mean did you get the wondering about whose placenta it was what i jokingly was saying i should track down the placenta like film my journey to find the gal who donated her placenta i know and tell her she saved dude

if i ever had like a piece of some other mug put in me, like how they do, you know? Yeah. Little bits and pieces. You want to track down the... I would just spend all my time reading about that person and finding out about them, going to visit them. It would haunt me, man.

It does. It pops up in my mind. But, I mean, they... From what... And you guys may know, all parents, but friends of mine that have been asked if they would donate their placenta for such causes, it's like they're in the chaos of being pregnant and stuff. You don't even think about it. Like this, whoever's placenta ended up in my eye, they prayed. Didn't think about it.

Yeah, it didn't even cross their mind well my when we were having kids the first time we had a kid i was talking like like i got a friend bruce who well let me back up when we were having our first kid i was gonna eat the placenta then i was gonna um drink the milk my my wife's milk. Oh, yeah. Just to be part of the whole. I just was like, how convenient. Why? Well, I don't know why. I just had it in my head that I had read that people can eat.

Oh, yeah, a little bit because I've pushed the limits of what a person can eat. And the next frontier, the next threshold is that you would eat folks yeah so um it just seemed like a good way to be like uh to be like if you're talking to someone oh yeah you ever had the monkey how about squirrel i'd be like you ever had folks i have we i think we we sent uh from the second birth, we sent it off and they, I want to say they dried it or dehydrated it and then turned it into capsules. Yeah, there's some hoodoo jibber that like, some like pseudoscience that you like eat the placenta and it makes you like super healthy again. Well, that was, it's the same.

So you have been, you've cannibalized. If eating the, yeah, dehydrated. If you've eaten meat. It's a muscle, right? Or a thing, a body part. You've eaten human body parts. That explains... He's got one up on me.

You didn't end up... So what happened? I think you turned down the... You chickened out on the breast milk, too. Chickened out. No, I got a friend, Bruce, who when he goes into the fridge... Like, for you guys that haven't been through this yet,

like, a woman will save save up a mother will like she produces more milk than the kidney can produce same same with dairy cows right that's why like when a dairy cow not to equate not to equate the mother my children do a dairy cow uh but when a dairy cow drops a calf the cow can produce vastly more milk than the calf needs so what they do in the big commercial milk facilities they just take the calf away and raise the calf on formula oh yeah and then milk the cow to death because it's produced within a couple cycles you know like you used to. Like a cow used to be good for like 10 lactations. Now with all the things they do, the trickery they have,

they can get all the milk you're ever going to get out of that thing in a couple lactations. So they take the calf away, feed it on formula, and then milk enough milk out of that cow to feed a whole herd of calves. Yeah. milk enough milk out of that cow to feed a whole herd of calves yeah so ladies will uh do the same yeah because like if you're going to go out like for instance if you're going to go out let's say

you have the kid then you're going to go out and drink a couple glasses of wine and you don't want to go give the kid milk that you're producing when you drank the wine you'll just pump a little bit ahead of time put it in the fridge in little bottles go have a couple glasses of wine come home pump that milk dump that milk out and give the kid the milk in the fridge can you take like with cattle you can taste we had a milk cow growing up and if it got into different plants you could you know if they were like strong well i don't know because i don't drink enough of it but yeah like i know that if a cow gets in the wild onion you gotta like throw the milk out but i'm wondering with the uh with the woman's milk like could you taste the difference in the wine milk i didn't i just used it for coffee creamer but you did that too

bruce bull would go in pour a cup of coffee go over there and just tip a little of that milk in there and stir it up. I tell you. Oh, I cannot do it. You don't need any sugar. That stuff is- Oh, yeah. It tastes like- So you drank a lot of it.

Condensed milk. Yeah, because I'd look at it and be like, man, that's some high dollar shit right there. I'm not just going to dump it down the drain. And there ends up being a lot in the freezer at times that's not going to be used. Oh, yeah. My wife would stack that stuff away. my wife came to understand hunting better uh by stacking up milk because she was like i get it man because she's like you know she always did i like to get all that meat like just fill that freezer up with stacks of meat you know and then be like now we're set right

and um she's like and she always ate it but didn't think about it then when she started saving up those little bags of milk she's like i totally she always ate it but didn't think about it. Then when she started saving up those little bags of milk, she's like, I totally get it now, man. You open that freezer door and you got all that stacked in there. My wife grew to hate that pumping machine, though. She just would look at it and just get angry. Oh, dude, it's so bizarre, man. I don't think it's a real comfortable process. No.

No one looks forward to pumping. And then you're at work and you got to go like, you know, you're sitting at your desk, that thing pumping away on there. People like, you know, like a lot. Yeah. No, it's a big deal. It's a big deal for people. But what happened to one time, my wife's friend had a health emergency and had to do a bunch

of, had to do some narcotics for a health emergency. And then my wife was able to dig into her stash of milk for that baby yeah so it doesn't matter yeah mother to child it can be any no but to answer your question i heard some research um i heard a radio program on they're talking about how kids grow up with like basically different palates you, and how you could be like somehow. Like sweet or spicy. Or at a year old, yeah, be used to like Indian food, right? Yeah. Because like Indians are used to eating Indian food from whenever. And they were saying that like, yeah, the kids get a lot of sort of the flavor.

You get their palate built up by drinking breast milk. Because mom's eating everything she's always eaten, you know, and that goes in there. Yeah. Yeah, if you have like a super bland diet the mom is just like a bunch of yeah a bunch of processed grains and uh yeah so uh did we kind of wrap up the whole thing with your eye so now you're back in action yeah feeling good spot game spotting dogs got dirt got one of his like uh like a just a good just felt good yeah a good honest spot and it wasn't like we're because oftentimes camera guys do this you'll be looking way off yonder right trying to spot the faraway mystery animals into the fog and you forget about

that there's all kinds of area right around you and a camera guy will turn around and see one right close yeah which happened yeah and you're like oh that's cool that doesn't really count though dirt had a game a spot where there's deer over there and i'm like dirt bullshit so i said did you see it move yes it moved i said 100 and i started getting interested. Because when someone sees, like, I think I see a deer. And then a wild animal hasn't moved at all. No. It's still possible, but then I started getting more skeptical

looking at an off-color rock or deer. But dirt's like, no, it moved. And it took us a long time to confirm, but you had game-ed a very difficult spot well too i would say it was critical timing as i remember and this may be just to boost my energy want to be a hero it had been a slow couple 30 minutes of no no deer being spotted and it kind of reinvigorated everyone let me say if you're in a spot where 30 minutes without seeing a deer isn't a big deal, you're in a good spot.

That's a good problem. Well, it was a good spot. No, his spot. Yeah. Oh, the spot on the mountain was good and dirt. Yeah. You said all other species' confusion and lack of spotting was forgiven. It was so good that I forgave you all the times you haven't spotted game

or spotted game that wasn't game. And I forgave you temporarily mixing up one animal from the other. Because the rabid man-eating mink that we had, the rabid man-eating mink that we had the rabid man-eating mink that we later encountered i was quick to correct the marmot the the the bleeding rabid man-eating mink the local dirt kept describing it as a marmot i did once i did once hanging around my cabin eating salmon carcasses as a mar as a marmot rough looking eating salmon carcasses. But turns out the fellas we were talking to

last night, that well-known mink. It's been there for years. I wanted to get to Mooch and Coho's and shoot a little box with humongous guns. But we'll touch on the mink.

So when we fillet salmon, we'll use the, like we'll filet a salmon and then we'll use the trim, uh, for chum, for halibut. You just take like the bone, you know, the spine, use it for chum, for halibut or take the head and use it for shrimp bait whatever so we don't immediately discard it we'll like clean fish and set them out when there's bears hanging around we're pretty careful about and we hang the chum up but there had you know whatever just left the the bait bucket the chum bucket sitting out and i noticed that some on him and gnawing on the on the bones which is fine and it turns out this little mink uh has been coming in there and it's got at the up top of the base of its tail has a very the size bigger than a quarter yeah yeah a fat i would go so far as to call it a festering wound yeah oh yeah a festering wound yeah and this mink has absolutely no uh i should say absolutely

virtually no fear of humans yeah put away to the point where it even gets like a little kind of aggro on you a little bit aggressive on standing its ground yeah yeah and curious about you possibly rabid we were thinking something wrong with it for sure and i got to where it's old i think so it's definitely old it looks like real fast even besides its injury it looks like shit yeah usually when you see minks they have like they almost like flow across the landscape you know there's like a snake like movement to them and this sucker has more of like a hobbling like he's got like a hitch in his giddy up yeah like a old like some imagine some he's got stories really old lady with a really old poodle if you watch that poodle walk around scruffy yeah in southeast alaska so the mink i got to where i i started toying with

the idea of killing it with a rock only because i had in my head that there's something wrong with it it's sick and it's like suffering and it's potentially like a hazard to be around when you're sleeping and things around. He just is weird. Yanni told me that would be playing God. Then I said, you know what? I'm going to shoot it with a shotgun.

Then I didn't. Do that. He kind of vanished. Then I thought, then me and Brody were brody like oh he crawled off and died yeah then we get talking to some boys down the beach and they're telling us that that mink has just been hanging around for years with a festering wound on the base of its tail running around on the dock doesn't give a shit yeah they named it what was its name? I can't remember Faster? And you said that was a female mink

Because it was a lighter color Yeah It's not fail safe But like Like when I used to trap mink A male mink You know Would be

Worth twice as much as a female Much longer than a female. So like a male mink might be 24 inches nose to base of tail. A mink could be 14 or whatever. Females, they're generally lighter color.

They generally seem to have like a they're like, I could be mistaken about this one, but I think I remember the tail to body ratio was less tail for body length than a male. Then we later saw a couple of males fighting. Yeah, just big. Screeching. Yeah, big.

Yeah, they have a crazy screeching. Yeah, that sound was, I would have never thought that that was two minks. You knew right away. Fighting minks. Yeah, well, I'd just seen them and heard them before. And do you remember, were you there at Doug Duren's out, and there was a mink raiding a squirrel nest? And I could hear him way up in a tree, and I couldn't figure out what was going on.

And I realized that there was a mink up in a tree fighting with a squirrel because he's trying to raid the squirrel nest to get the babies out. But the squirrel was fighting him, and that mink was up there doing that crazy fighting sound too. My money would be on the mink. They're a weasel family, right? Oh, yeah, you don't mess with them. Yeah. Yeah, no one wants to mess with a mink was up there doing that crazy fighting sound too my money would be on the mink they're weasel family right oh yeah you don't mess with them yeah yeah no one wants to mess with the mink man um so while you're here dirt uh what what was your impression of mooch and cohoes man oh man you found your calling yeah yeah i'll dream of the mooch madness about 17 for years to come i mean mean, that was fun.

Explain it. Explain why you were having such a hard time with it. Well, initially. And then you got so good at it. Yeah. The initial hit just causes like, I feel like the reaction is to set it like you're fly fishing or real fishing. Just the excitement. And then you get lifted.

Come back up. As Steve says. To set it like you're fly fishing or, you know, real fishing. Just the excitement. And then you get lifted. Come back up. As Steve says. To set it like you're doing what? Yeah, just like to really, I mean, it's such an aggressive hit when you're like slowly jigging 50 to 30 feet. Yeah, let me break it down for a minute just to catch people up. So, you guys can butt in if i miss out any things that you think are helpful to people's understanding so in the area southeast alaska where where we we have a fishing shack um well if you're going there in the winter there's not

gonna be a lot of cohoes around there's some resident kings that you might catch there but won't be many cohoes around the cohos are coming in to the inner waters congregating up and they're getting ready to go up rivers and spawn and they start showing up but you're like out in the you know you're out in the legit ocean um but it's fish that are preparing to do their spawn run and then i believe other co-hosts are mixed in that are not going to do a run that year but the big schools come in and in this area they tend to congregate around rocky points like big cliffy points either because i'm sure someone knows the answer to this either because they're pushing bait they're pushing herring and schooling herring. And it winds up being that they're schooling herring up against the cliff walls. Or the herring like those places.

Like the herring are in those points and the co-hosts just come and find them there. I'm not sure which of those is true. But when you pass over. So you're fishing where you can take a slingshot and hit the cliff with a rock but it's deep too right but it's still 100 200 300 feet deep uh and you'll pass over with a fish finder you don't need to use a fish finder necessarily but it's really helpful you'll pass over the fish find you'll find the big bait balls you'll either see big bait balls like just look like giant wads of something and they're thick enough that they're dense so

the sonar will show like red red and yellow balls of something not on you know hovering in the mid water column and you'll mark slashes like individual slashed fish and the cohos tend to even if you're in 300 feet of water they're up they tend to be around 45 50 feet so you got 300 feet water column and you'll see 45 feet down you'll see slashes or balls big balls of bait a big ball of bait on your sonar might look like it starts at 30 feet down and extends down to 70 feet. So, like, you know, sizable chunks. When you see that, you just say, like, you'll shout out a depth. And then a mooch and rig is like big, long noodle rods, 9 feet, 9 1⁄2 foot rods with a level wind reel.

And I like to use a line counter, a reel with a line counter on it. And you got your main line running out, and you got like a little flasher. It looks like a crushed beer can. And then 18 inches of line or whatever. Then you put a four ounce banana weight. Then you got a, you know, three feet of leader coming off that and a little two hook harness rig that you hook a piece of cut herring on and when you see that bait ball you just shout out 40 feet everybody drops down to 40 feet and if all goes well that's what i'm gonna say

that was a co-host i really like that part it's like we're kind of, you know, motoring around, and you're eyeing the sonar, and then when you'd say, like, oh, fish at 30 feet, it was just like, oh, sweet. Game on. It's fun. Yeah, real fun. And dirt would get a hit, and you would just try to bitch slap it. Yeah.

And like you said, I think it was that, and then also, like, when you bitch slap yeah and like you said i think what i it was that and then also like when you bitch slap it like when you said it like that you're also gonna let the slack out and they just well no because there's two things you're doing i was doing something wrong you're limp dicking yeah where you here's this is the most common problem i've found with people who come out and haven't grown up or who aren't accustomed to salt water deep salt water fishing. Yes, 50 feet. Significant. Is they

and even jigging deep water like jigging halibut, 300 feet of water. People have a tendency to do a very like rambunctious hook set without reeling do a very like rambunctious hook set without reeling. So they're doing a big

hook set. So imagine that you're imagine the hands of a clock and the water is like the three and nine position. Okay. So you got a horizontal plane and your rod's out horizontal above the horizontal plane of the water their hook set takes them all the way up to 12 o'clock then for whatever reason they lower the rod very quickly back down to the horizontal plane not feeling anything yeah and not reeling yeah so they're like setting the hook

they're saying to the fish gotcha then they're saying just kidding because they lower the rod back down in a and on a nine foot rod you're all sudden like providing the fish with tons of slack and we think about the mechanics of a hook the hook just falls back out of its mouth yeah yeah people just like Think about the mechanics of a hook. The hook just falls back out of its mouth. People just like, yeah, limp-nicking. It's just, I don't get it. But real, when you're sat in real. Yeah.

I get once after three, I think three misses. I didn't miss another fish. Oh, yeah. And then you got deadly. Yeah. Because you realize that you can't just go i'm gonna lift the rod can't beat up the air they're gonna drop it back down in the water and let you go it was a reaction just because of that hit but yeah if you can keep your calm just real bring it a nice well how big were those i think too though on that since we're talking

about this hook set now because there is no virtually no slack if you're fishing it right and when the fish takes it. You don't need a hook set. Yeah, if you over hook set, you know, like with a big giant motion, you could be pulling it right out of his mouth or right through his mouth, literally ripping off chunks of his mouth. Yeah, popping the hook out of his lip. Yeah, you know um yeah i've been thinking a lot about that and i wonder if it has something to do with like the amount of slack that you're fishing with because like fly fishing right you always you rarely ever tightline no while you're fly fishing unless you're doing some sort of like check nymphing

thing right roadie where you'd have actual like yeah you have an actual feel to the to the fly normally there's slack so when the fish takes it you have to make an exaggerated motion to take all that slack out as fast as you can but that's not actually setting the hook you're just removing the slack so that then the rod can barely bend and and set the hook and you're set reeling down on the fish yeah because i think they're eating that herring and turning with it and if you reel you're gonna hook them yes but if you come up and then drop your rod tip nothing's gonna happen but yeah a lot of times they're swimming they're eating it and swimming towards you at the same time that's what i was

gonna say yeah he's coming up and grabbing it and i think that when people are like well i'm getting it it's like you don't get a hit you don't like a coho doesn't come up and nibble on a herring they're swallowing it hopefully taking it yeah he's not going up like oh i'm gonna he's not like being like a catfish who's just down there like leisurely messing around with your bait to see if it's something he wants to consume. That thing is coming up and grabbing it. When you get like a hit, what you think is a hit is the fish taking it. But he's a lot of times rocketing up. Because sometimes you'll hook a coho, you'll think you had a hit.

And the next thing you know, some bitch is up in the air out of the water because he comes up and hits it, comes up and jumps. And all of a sudden, you feel like you had a hit, but then there's a fish flying through the air. Yeah, I hooked one that I hooked it on my side of the boat, and it ended up jumping behind us on the other side of the boat. Yeah. In which case, he or she is creating slack. That's why the astute angler doesn't say, ooh, I'm getting a hit and sit there, and he doesn't overdo it and do some massive, rambunctious hook set.

He feels the take and reels down the fish. Now, setting a hook is the end result. Setting a hook means you're punching that hook my understanding of it is the same way when you got that hook in your hand right it never set

meaning it never got the barb in there right so if i had at that moment when you were tangled up in your own hook on a fish in a net had i I grabbed that line and did a hook set, right, you'd still have that hook in your hand. Or you'd be going to a place, a professional facility to get it removed. So a hook set is a thing that happens from something you did. When you reel down, I feel like you are putting that hook home yeah barbs keeping everything yeah you're not you're not setting it with the lifting you are setting the hook you're just not setting the hook by doing some crazy thing yeah you're reeling down on that fish yeah but i think nine out of ten just you know average level fishermen or just people in america if you said set the hook which what does that mean or whatever

they would give you some you know exaggerated motion of lifting the rod tip you know yeah that's what i want to see my clients do like right They need to look like the Statue of Liberty. That's right. We always teach them like that. With no reeling. No. I mean, it's a fly reel. Like, you could reel for 10 minutes. We don't reel at all.

It's all stripping, right? Because there's so, it's such a narrow arbor on that thing. Like, it takes you 10 seconds to reel in five feet of line. Yeah. So, like, limp deck dick when you're guiding fishermen well i don't want to see him come up and then back down again you don't say no because that the same thing you were talking about like it's up and stay up you know keep it taught yeah i was always told to put the butt towards the fish fly fishing once you got one on does

that make sense is that something that's a good i never heard it but it makes sense yeah just to keep keep from limp dicking 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 our northern brothers get irritated well if you're sick of you know sucking high and titty there on x is now in canada the great features that you love and on x 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 you were always talking about uh we're always talking about on x here on the meat eater podcast now you um you guys in the great white north can 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 OnXMaps.com slash meet OnXMaps.com slash meet welcome to the OnX club y'all

so you want them getting the hang of it oh man dude it's so it's the most fun thing on the planet yeah i would rather uh another way to catch silver is wait till they go up in the river i mean there's a hundred ways to catch them but a couple ways that we catch them is wait till they go up in the river miles and then just huck spinners at them yeah or throw flies at them well these were even like mooching so much fun and a couple of those times they would like i don't know if they'd pop off the set the the hooks or whatever but they'd be chasing the herring up to the boat as you reeled up yeah yeah i never expected to be visual yeah like we were seeing those things yeah nice bag a little bit to your loud six a day

how big what would you say the average size of those were i mean there's like giants out there We were seeing those things next to the boat. Nice bag of them until you're allowed six a day. How big, what would you say the average size of those were? I mean, there was like giants out there and all that, but what we were catching. I would say, and we don't throw every fish on, we don't throw really main fish on a scale at all, but just eyeballing them and having weighed a lot of fish. I don't think we caught a 12-pound silver. And in our area, in our fishing, a 12 pound silver and in those in our area in our fish and like a 12 pound silver be like a nice fish we caught a lot of like six to ten pound

yeah yeah yeah beautiful strong crazy oh crazy and they go crazy yeah yeah and taste good we did uh raw we ate one raw after freezing it to get rid of parasites yeah yeah that's it we used to eat like when we used to catch a king we just eat the thing raw not even freezing it but there is some and i think it was like people being hysterical saying that it's a bad idea to do it but it's uh advised that you freeze it and then promptly thaw it out and then cut it for sashimi. See, I had always heard do that with

freshwater fish, but not that you didn't need to freeze saltwater fish. Yeah, with salmon, I think it's like best practices. I think it's, again, my understanding, some someone write in and contradict um best practices to take that salmon and i think my understanding too is what they do in sushi restaurants is they're freezing it and then serving it would salmon be good as ceviche i've

had like oh yeah ocean bass and stuff yeah it's really good yeah really good yannis's sushi was good yeah he did a good job slicing it just right yeah but it did have like texture it was mushy yeah like mushy no no the opposite yeah instead of being that like creaminess that you expect from like a good sashimi fish it had almost a little bit more al dente than i was expecting i wonder if that's not the most popular like the most popular sushi grade salmon sakai maybe kings oh really yeah and now you can't catch them i i wonder if it was temporarily right now in this area yes like where the that because was a fillet, part of the fillet near the tail. I wonder if it would have been...

Yeah, off the shoulder. Well, I advised him against that. Like the loin. I'm going to go on record as saying, why are you doing the tail? Well, test run. It's because it was a test run. Now we know. We're all going to go home and pick out the biggest, fattest, thickest slab and try it again.

Another kind of fishing we were doing was we were doing deep water jigging. And Dirt pulled up a world record silver gray rockfish. 500 feet. Well, that counter you said is off, but probably 300 feet, right? Yeah, over 300 feet. Big silver gray. Those, so coals, you're allowed six a a day you're allowed a rockfish a day as a non-resident right is that the same for residents same for residents yeah so when we bought our

place many many years ago you were a lot i think at that time i could be wrong but i think at that time, I could be wrong, but I think at that time you were allowed, a non-resident was allowed one or two yellow eyes a day. Then it went into an annual limit. Last year, you were allowed two yellow eyes a day. I'm sorry, two yellow eyes per year. This year, one yellow eye per year. And on the west side of the island no yellow eye retention this year for non-residents or no for anyone wow and they closed the winter king salmon and winter king got down shut down but they closed the winter king salmon not to do with fish up here but they're

because they're having such poor returns in some rivers south of here and you can't and like counts are so down in some of the rivers south of here more in the like we're in southeast alaska but like northwest washington yeah uh some of the returns are so low that they did an emergency shutdown of kings here in hopes that there's like in hopes that that some of those fish are up here did they shut anything down around you in seattle at all you know i don't know because i don't know as far as like wild kings i don't know what's going on down there right now i'm just surprised like non-commercial sport fishing would have an impact on something like that one could argue that it doesn't yeah i mean i could see like you know guided services or commercial yeah that'll get closed too yeah but they you

know what a couple weeks ago well a few no i guess a month or so ago now there was a king a commercial king season going on out here yeah so you got a commercial king season going on out here. Yeah. So you got a commercial king season going on. And then later they like, you know, I mean, there's so many conflicting interests. And the way, like in Alaska, they tier out importance level of fisheries. Okay. And it's all very reasonable but importance level be like subsistence fisheries get are like top tier importance okay so people that rely on the fishery for like their own consumptive use that that's like a primary food source, and there's like cultural heritage there.

Okay, like that user group is going to get top preference. Yeah. And commercial interests are going to get preference over recreational. Yeah, because of the livelihood. Yeah, and then you get into this numbers game of what's more valuable to the state what's more valuable to the state would be like is the commercial harvest and the jobs generated from fish processing and and all the economic activity that goes along with commercial fishery is that more important or a more vital revenue stream for the state than all the economic activity generated around recreational

fishing but it's kind of funny it's like from the from the perspective of a personal use fisherman it's really fun to be out like we'll be out fishing and you're under a bag limit like let's say you're allowed six silvers a day or a king a day in a slot limit. And you're fishing within stone's throw of a purse saner. It's just like it winds up feeling kind of like off kilter. But those guys have a quota that they're under. There's that. Or it'd be that you're out fishing halibut, rod and reel, and you're allowed two halibut,

okay, a day. It's a very generous bag. That's a lot of halibut, right? Yeah. You're allowed two halibut a day. But next to you is a halibut long liner who's running miles of hooks. It just winds up, you know what I mean? It's like, there's like a, and it all makes sense you know it's like there's like a and it all

makes sense but it's like it's like out in the salt water when you're fishing amid commercial extraction it does wind up seeing like like kind of our drop in the bucket it seems like kind of arbitrary this this this may be a reach you guys may give me help for this but problem if you're gonna because like a lot of things you say, you don't even know, right? The fact that you're anticipating blowback, it makes me nervous. Because this could be good.

As a, you know, living in Montana, fishing up here on the Pacific and it's like this massive body of water and it's like when we're mooching and it's like this massive body of water. And it's like when it, when the, when we're mooching and it's going off, it feels like there's like a limitless supply of these fish. And it kind of, I was just like thinking it could equate to what the early settlers thought of

as the Buffalo being a vast, very good point. Yes. So yeah, that's how it kind of works in my mind inability to comprehend the finiteness of a resource just because you're so overwhelmed with how much there is in your little world so my buddy speaking of the yellow eye thing the yellow eye restrictions my buddy who is a biologist was saying to me the other day, and this is like a good dude, very concerned about resources, we can save the fishery, but that would mean you can never fish again the rest of your life.

He would be like, okay, if that's the way it has to be, fine. It means that much to me to have it out there. Knowing it's there means more to me than contributing to his demise yeah okay so that kind of fella he was saying to me he's like i just don't buy it i don't buy the yellow eye thing because when i drop down i catch one yeah but i'm like yeah but it's like so anecdotal dude you might be you know how do you it's like he also said they don't really know a lot about them, like as far as numbers and stuff. No. But they know those sons of bitches.

When you catch a big one, those sons of bitches are 80, 90 years old. Yep. Wow. Yeah. The guy at the lodge caught a 30 pounder that they aged at one. Yeah. How old was that fish, Yanni? I forget now.

It was 98 or 108. It was around 100 years old. They did a test on its ear bone. Dude, any yellow eye you catch is old enough to vote. Right. And most of them are going to be old enough to draw Social Security. Is there much of a commercial fishery for those? Bycatch.

But then even it's limited. So I've got friends that used to do commercial long line for halibut. And you're trying to get out and set up on big, flat areas. But now and then you'd screw up and you'd set too close to a rock bluff or cliff face. And it'd just be like a bunch of yellow eyes come up. And you just got to float all those fish. The commercial guys, because you're limited to your percentage of your bycatch. For instance, in U.S. waters, you used to be able to fin for sharks.

So you could be a swordfish longliner and be running big pelagic longlines and catch sharks and then just take the thing of instead of like filling your hold up with shark flesh that isn't valuable you could just fin the sharks and keep the fins for the market the asian markets just keep fins to be like i'm not gonna like use valuable hold space and valuable ice to chill sharp meat that isn't worth as much as swordfish meat you know so what they could do is just cut fins it'd be like legally just taking a backstrap off of the deer yeah like i only got a little small freezer i'm just gonna fill the backstrap so i'm gonna go shoot 20 deer and have just back strapping there but then what they wound up doing in u.s

waters they came in and said like of your haul of shark the fins can only be a certain percentage of your total haul of shark that you're bringing in they've made it that you basically can't i can't remember what it was it's some number like it wasn't like let's say it was 20 they made it not cost uncost effective to do that yeah in order to try to slow down the harvest on sharks so with the bycatch thing with all commercial fishing it's like there'll be not all you can never say all like it's so like the regulatory structures are just like mind-bogglingly complex and there's no generalizations but it'll be percentages of take or whatever allowed and bycatch if you screw up or just whatever like my nature conspires against you and you pull up your thing and you got like no halibut but shit loads yellow eyes you can't just be like, sweet.

Yeah, it's a bummer. But you'll still walk into Anthony's, which is a popular seafood chain in the Pacific Northwest. You'll still walk into Anthony's and see rockfish on the menu. Yeah. You're looking at bycatch fisheries. At least some of it's getting used. Yeah, but the minute...

Here's why. So people are like, that's ridiculous. It shouldn't be that way. What's the alternative? They'd be targeted. You're like, okay. All bycatch is okay. Some dude's like, oh, you mean yellow eyes bringing

whatever pound? I'm going to accidentally set up against this cliff and make a bunch of money. Well, the same argument is made against keeping roadkill. I've heard people make that same argument. I think that's a silly argument, but go ahead and explain it. Where it's like, well, now it's legal

as of a couple years. You smoke a deer on accident, you can call it in. In your state, it's now legal. Yeah, and for a while, it's now legal. Yeah. And for a while, it wasn't legal because people worried that guys would get big cow pusher bumpers and just go out and target road. Which seems just kind of like. Oh, no.

Yeah. But it's a similar argument. It's like you're going to risk killing yourself. Yeah. But even then. So in that state, you got, like when I was growing up with roadkill, like in Michigan, you could retain roadkill, but you had to secure a permit. And they were very liberal with the permits. I even remember picking up deer with my dad when I was a kid and my dad would call. He just dialed 911 or call the sheriff's office, whatever.

And they would even be like, I'll bring you out a permit tomorrow. Yeah. Or got it we got your information don't sweat it take the deer but a thinking in like a state like in some of the western states where you have seven eight nine species of big game some of them being very valuable right like a moose yeah like big horn like a big horn ram yeah yeah if you have a 180 inch big horn ram head you know it's worth thousands of dollars so even with the roadkill thing the roadkill thing only applies to certain creatures yeah so so that people won't target yeah like you still can't pick

up a roadkill bighorn yeah and i think in a lot of states even with a whitetail or a mule deer buck you can't retain the horns if you're taking i think that it's that way in colorado you can take a roadkill buck but you can't take the antlers can't retain the antlers gotcha and i've tried twice i think what why there's a hole in the in that theory that people are just going to walk around you know smoking running over deer is that twice twice with my buddy Jim Miller, he got two. I think one was a Cadillac. I can't remember what the other one was. But rolled in there.

I think even like DOT maybe showed up with like a tractor or something to help load it into the back of his car. Like I met him after work, and we started skinning that thing. You know, it had been gutted, and it had him after work and we started skinning that thing you know he'd been gutted and been hanging and we started skinning it and like we ended up there was no meat that was good for human consumption it was all just purple and beat up bruised yeah and it we turned it all into dog food like it's not an efficient way to get meat when you figure auto damage now i one time killed one with the side view mirror

oh nice clean oh yeah headshot headshot the side view mirror it was one of those side view mirrors on a truck that folds in anyway some old metal ones they had like the tubes the tube structure leading on to it that thing come in and hit the window so hard scared the shit out of me but yeah just like done yeah No meat damage. So you were saying with the back to the fisheries stuff, if it was a bycatch, you would try to get it. There was some way that you can try to get back down to the depth because they'll die.

Yellow eyes, yeah. So back to yellow eyes. And this is kind of interesting to tell you the intricacies of fisheries management stuff so like take the case of the yellow eye now rockfish a lot of your and i don't know about more pelagic life but non-pelagic rockfish so rockfish is just like live in a little spot down at the bottom of the ocean in the rocks or in the kelp and they don't drift around and move around. Do you want to explain pelagic versus non-pelagic?

Pelagic is a word for open ocean. And they move a lot. Yeah, so you have reef, for instance, with sharks. You've got reef sharks that are residents around. Then you've got a shark like a mako, which is regarded as a pelagic shark. So he drifts around on the open seas up in the water column not affiliated with the bottom of the ocean like it's not like a benthic shark who lays down on the bottom he just out cruised around other pelagic fish would be your tunas like tunas yeah

billfish tunas pelagic fish yeah cruise around on the open ocean um so there are some species of rockfish that are regarded as pelagic rockfish so they're not they don't have like a lot of fidelity to their little home spot on the bottom of the ocean yellow eyes are non-pelagic just like he's got like a spot where he's got like generally doesn't move far has like a place where he lives down the ocean he doesn't move around in the water column a lot and for whatever i guess lack of adaptation or whatever like he doesn't have the ability to adjust his swim bladder quickly to account for lateral movements in the water column or no like an account for like a horizontal movement in the water column pressure changes the same way that humans can't the same way that humans suck at it like yeah he can't be down 300 feet down and then do a rapid ascent to the surface

and make the necessary prep the necessary adjustments and pressure. Yeah, I read somewhere when we were getting ready, or I don't know, maybe, oh, it was in that article. It was in like an Anchorage newspaper and talking about this whole yellow-eyed rockfish management thing. And the guy equated it to basically you coming up in the water column, you would basically vomit your lungs. It's nice. Yeah, very nice. But a halibut

can. You can crank a halibut. See, but halibut move around all the time. They're up that, you know, people don't think about it, but halibut, yeah, they're down, but they're up too. We caught a halibut that had a diving duck in its gut. So they move around and come up and go down.

They can vent, right? But when you crank a yellow eye, and many other species as well, we're just talking about yellow eyes here. When you crank a yellow eye up from 300 feet of water, 400 feet of water, the gases in his blood and the gases in his body expand rapidly. So when you pull him up, stomach his swim bladder which is the thing they use for buoyancy his swim bladder the gases in there expand and his swim bladder will have expanded so much that it shoves his stomach out of his mouth so what you're looking at when he comes up is you're not looking

at his swimboat you're looking at his stomach yeah looks like a hot dog sticking out and his eyes are and the gas is behind his eyes so his eyes are bugged out and when you're fighting a yellow eye he's fighting fighting fighting but then you get him 100 feet off the bottom you realize he's not fighting anymore and when when they come up, they just float. Like, you don't need to gaff them. You gaff them because they're very heavily armed and you can, you know, get bad infections from all the fins and spikes on them and stuff. But you don't need to gaff them to get in the boat. One time my brother was jigging and someone had on a fish in deep water and the fish came off. Halfway up, they lose the fish.

Yeah. So like, oh, you know, fish got off, come unbuttoned. And a while later, he realizes up comes, up floats the yellow eye. Dang. Yeah. Just kept, you know. It got off, but it was too late and it floated to the surface so if you buy catch that what guys used yes let me explain let me let me because there's like a lot of steps to this a thing that people used to do is take a needle

and you could take a needle and vent the swim bladder. And people used to use that as a way to release rockfish, is you'd vent the swim bladder and turn the fish loose. But because there's confusion, because the stomach is sticking out of its mouth, people were puncturing the fish's stomachs, thinking they were venting the swim bladder. And I think that's almost like like virtually guaranteed death yeah to the fish then someone comes up with the idea of a deep water release mechanism which imagine that you

take a imagine you take a lead-headed jig let's just say just for to visualize it you take a lead-headed jig file away or pinch off the barb and tie a line to the bend in the hook okay so tie a line a tie your line mid-gape right in the bend of the hook and you just prick the hook into the fish's mouth and you got a lead head jig tied to your rod but instead of tying it to the eye of the jig you're tying to the bend in the hook prick the fish in his mouth and drop the jig in the water and let that lead-headed jig carry that fish all the way as soon as you catch it send it right back down on a quick release mechanism let that lead-headed jig carry all the way down to the bottom of the ocean

and then jerk the rod do a dirt myth hook that. Pull the hook back out of the fish. That is like a 90-some percent recovery rate for that fish. That's crazy. And how do they even know? Because once they're down there... They put a marker on it, put a transmitter on it and see if he keeps moving around. So he'll readjust to that pressure.

You can send him back down. The same way when a diver has the bends, they put them in a compression chamber. Yeah. Just visually looking at a yellow eye you pull up. It's hard to visualize. It's hard to think that, yeah, he'd go back to his little home place and be fine. This is where it gets interesting with, like I said, drawn-up fishing regulation. So you've got this thing where you have high mortality of a fish,

and catch and release isn't really an option and this is where you get into the honor system because when you're fit when you're intentionally fishing rockfish you are not allowed to size grade your rockfish if you're intentionally fishing rockfish and you're thinking you're going to catch a 15-pound yelloweye. And you drop that jig down and pull up a 9-inch quillback rockfish. You've hit your daily bag limit and you have to stop fishing rockfish. Yeah. You cannot be like, shit. It's not the big bull.

Not what I was after. Yeah. It's like that fish goes in your box and you're done intentionally fishing rockfish so it makes you if you're trying to catch a yellow eye it makes you fish way deep where you know there's no risk that you're going to have some little dink or quill latch onto your jig and then you shut down yeah because you're only allowed one rock fish a day so then people were like well who would know because like if you go catch like if you're out fishing you intentionally catch yellow eye and you throw them in your boat and then later

you're doing whatever fishing halibut perfectly legally targeting halibut and you pull up a yellow eye yeah then you need to send them back down on a deep release mechanism when they have those like charter vessels have to have a deep release mechanism they haven't made it yet that recreational anglers need to have a deep release mechanism on board yeah it's probably coming but you can make one from scratch in seconds yeah Yeah. All the time we've spent out there, though, we rarely would have needed one because it seems like once we limit, man, we just get off of that kind of fishing and go on and do something else.

Yeah, it can happen. I mean, you know, you catch, I've seen a lot of rocks caught, but I never would go out and, like, jig rocks and then go set up for halibut. I might go out and set up for halibut and then if we catch a limit of halibut or it's not happening or you get blown off the water then be like well before we go in let's go jig up yeah a quill bag that's cool you got those variations jig up a silver gray

or whatever you know yeah and catch one on the way in but yeah i'm pretty careful to not be in a situation where i'm out there having to like trying to like resuscitate and release rockfish yeah but your fisheries biologist buddy dan thinks that the one a day thing is over the top too restrictive yeah that's what he well yeah he thinks that because he's like there just seems to be in his, a lot of yellow eyes. And it just depends. It depends on the day. Because it's like some days you go and it's just game on. Yeah, we couldn't find them.

Sometimes you go look for them, you can't find them. But we couldn't find any fish that day. It was the solar eclipse, super tide. No, I got that big quillback. Oh, quillback, yeah. The eclipse day. Yeah, well, quillbacks are abundant. Yeah. We, quillback, yeah. The eclipse day. Yeah, well, quillbacks are abundant. Yeah.

We all did. We all got. I shouldn't say abundant, but they're not hurting like yellow eyes. Yeah. The reason yellow eyes are hurting is they're

so old and low fecundity. Yeah. They're such a slow metabolism fish, you can't bleed them. When you cut their gills, their heart isn't pounding enough to push

their own damn blood out. You cut a yellow-eyed's gills and nothing comes out of that thing. Just chilling. Yeah. But you do want to bleed salmon. Yes. Commercial guys bleed them.

Yeah. We were bleeding them. Yeah. And when you don't bleed them, you can tell when you go to flam all that blood stacked up in the tail yeah i believe i like to bleed them and you think ripping their gills is is plenty you don't need to like cut the throat there

yeah i mean i think it just tearing the gills tearing the gill but it's like i don't put my thumb in there and rip because it's like abrasive yeah i caught him yeah but there's like a handful of fish that there's a handful of fish i think it's like generally accepted it's a good idea to bleed them and there's some that just i don't think it's really necessary right i like i never grew up like we don't bleed walleyes yeah right like the white flesh fish it doesn't seem like you need to we bleed halibut yeah yeah part of the thinking and bleed but yeah there's like i don't know maybe like a lot of it just maybe a lot of it's nonsensical it's just like practices that you've developed that aren't like based on fact but like

you know i never like bleed yellow perch but i don't clean yellow perch and realize that the flesh is real bloody right what were you guys talking about Electrocuting Fresh catch EKG man What what are you laughing about The dirt thinks it's electrocuting him Yeah He didn't actually think that it's electrocuting him But he heard EKG man

And now that it's coming back around He's like so you guys were talking about electrocuting fish Weren't you I think I know what's tripping dirt up. I'm just floating in and out. No, what's tripping dirt up is this. So explain EKG,

Mayani. Have you ever witnessed it? I haven't, but I've looked at a couple online blogs and process photos, as we like to call them, but series of photos that show how it's done. But for the most part, I think they still do bleed the fish.

When I've witnessed it by people who are believers, they bled the fish. Before or after. As soon as they catch it. Yeah. And then EKG made it. Electrocuting them. Then they cut the tail. I don't think they cut it all the way, but I guess.

No, leave it. It's connected by a flap of skin. Yeah. But I don't know they cut it all the way but i guess i don't know it's connected by a flap of skin yeah but i don't know really what that would maybe gives you something to hold on to creates an insertion point like why not just cut it off yeah it gives you a handle yeah it gives you a handle but then they basically take a uh stiff wire that uh you could looks like stainless safety wire yeah but it but it's stiff. It's got some backbone to it because you're basically going to ram it and run it up the fish's spinal column.

Is it single-strand wire or braided? Single-strand wire. For instance, I could picture on a salmon, you would EKG-may it with a coat hanger. A wire coat hanger. It would be a good diameter for a salmon. But I don't know if they EKG- it with a coat hanger, a wire coat hanger. Right, coat hanger, a straightened out coat hanger. That's a good example. Would be a good diameter for a salmon.

But I don't know if the EKG may salmon. I saw them, like Helen Cho and her boyfriend were EKG man. I don't know if you can use that as a verb. They were EKG man, black sea bass, I think fluke, which is a flatfish. Yeah. But because you basically cut the tail off, so now you're like looking up through the fish, you know, like from his tail, like up towards his head. And so that cut now gives you a portal into his spine. And you just run that wire up his spine all the way to his brain.

Basically through the spinal cord. Dude, it just run that wire up his spine all the way to his brain. Basically through the spinal cord. Dude, it just destroys that fish. Looks like they're getting electrocuted. They just melt. There's no rigor. You know, you, like, throw a fish in. Like, this is my saltwater. One of my saltwater mentors, Ron Layton, like, when you had a salmon,

you caught a salmon, gutted it, gilled it, right, and then put him on ice. He'd curl and rig rigor he was like don't take that fish and flatten that thing back out because you're tearing muscle wait till it relaxes then flay the fish don't like when it curls up in rigor don't go and bend it back because you're just ripping up the muscle yeah yeah there's still a lot to be learned in general about meat care. That's why when Ron Layton goes to Pike's Place Market and sees him throwing fish around, it just makes him uncomfortable. Yeah.

He's like, that's not good handling. He just feels like, why would you do that to the fish's flesh? Mishandling. Firing it around, catching it. Oh, there's an entertainment factor. Yeah, but he just thinks it's abusive of of the of the abusive of the fish disrespectful to the fish so now now i think i thought we talked about this before but i'm gonna tell it again yeah i was in south america with on a river with amerindians and they caught a turtle big turtle they're not supposed to mess with and uh was this bolivia or

guyana oh years ago okay the first trip and they ekg made that turtle with it wasn't willow but imagine the willow switch debarked and sharpened and the ekg made the turtle right up his backbone and doing it was amazing because we when we would catch turtles like a snapper we would chop its head and then you'd have to hang it up for a few hours before you could clean it because it'd still be it just suck its arms in and if you pull the arm out and pull it back you could get like cut and scratched from a dead turtle yeah or a headless turtle but they ekg made

that turtle and that turtle was ready to eat yeah no rigor the reason you're tripping it up with electrocution is they get a similar effect in livestock slaughter facilities by using electricity yeah so if you've ever gone in a watched some slaughter cattle in a slaughter facility, they hit it with a captive bolt gun or hit it with a.22 mag, right? Kill it. It drops to the floor. They put a chain on its rear ankle, jack it up into the air, cut its juggler, and then zap it with electricity. To the same effect. Once you zap with electricity and once you have the same effect once you zap

with electricity it's safe to handle it isn't kicking its carcass isn't twitching and it's just that carcass just melts and then everybody can come in and like piranhas with knives and dissemble that thing in the next three or four minutes you ready for a segue steve you got a good one i think so dude hit me people may start ekgman deer by trying to shoot them right up the spine from the backside yes speaking of which oh you want me to talk about shooting guns so i didn't want to get to this i'm gonna yeah that's a very good segue i like that they're not gonna start doing that though no but we did talk to a guy recently who goes for a similar EKG effect by hitting his animals at the base of the skull. Yeah, I don't like that at all.

We've all made our point about not liking head shoot. The cons outweigh the pros on head shoot or the the the the problems the negatives out the the cons outweighing the pros on head shoot but the other day yanni is talking to we we're going up uh we have some me and remy warren who's one of my hunting heroes we drew uh a fog knack island elk tags and we're going up uh to hunt a fog knack for roosevelt elk and um we got to talk about uh rifles caliber selection and remy had said something like being incredulous of the 30 0 6 for a fog neck elk because these elk these bulls are for they're huge they're 1400 pound like a moose almost big freaking bulls 1400 pound bulls and he's like oh man a 300 win mag is the way to go minimum i wouldn't take no 30 out six for this it's too slow and remy i'm sorry i

wish you were here but i'm just i'm i think i i got it right right yeah and yanni was not enough gun yeah and yanni was pointing out but the the old is what explain your thinking on this well again depends on uh you know what grain bullet weight and uh you know how many grains of powder you have behind that bullet but uh for this example you could basically have the exact not basically you would have the you could have the exact same bullet let's just say like you're throwing 165 or 165 grain bull or 180 or 200 or 220 all of those can be shot out of both 30-06 300 wind mag 300 short mag uh you know any of the other 300s 300 weatherby this is yanni vans wall see this is like yanni the gun writer

not the lab he needed. It was Yanni Vanthewall. You know, let's just say it was the 165s because that's what you're shooting out of your 300 Win Mag. I'm going to guess that it's, you know, 3,100 to 3,200 feet per second out of the muzzle. And the.30-06 is pushing that same bullet at 2,900 to 3,000 feet per second you know on average again depending on if you loaded it hot or depending on uh you know the you could

buy factory ammo that could that could be pushing the same bullet faster or a little bit slower. But somewhere in the realm of 50 to 100 feet faster or slower. And so the difference between the Otz 6 and the 300 Win Mag is probably just a couple hundred feet a second. Which someone could probably sit there and lay down some real numbers and start talking about kinetic energy and impact energy all that sort of stuff and it might end up being a great big difference but you're saying it's probably not significant

I'm a believer that it's more important to have a rifle that you can handle and shoot accurately and not be scared of because it kicks too much put that bullet in the right spot. Then to have a bullet moving. I want to get to the main point.

Why do you think people make such big differences out of like, oh, 30 off six, a 300 win? It can't all be the same thing. Well, it's not. No. That bullet is moving faster. That is the only difference. The bullet is moving faster. That is the only difference.

The bullet is moving faster. There is no difference in the bullet itself. The bullet is simply moving faster. So, okay, so if I'm throwing 165 grain out of my 300-win mag, it's going at 3,050 feet per second. That's what you just found on the internet? No, I pulled up my ballistics calculator. Oh, okay. 30, 50.

Yeah, and I've chronographed my Ot 6 that I hand load for, and I'm shooting 168 grain Barnes's, and it's shooting those things at 2,900. Okay. Not a lot of difference. At 300 yards, an elk isn. Not a lot of difference. At 300 yards, an elk isn't going to know the difference. 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. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know,

sucking 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 MeatEater 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 onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com

slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Yeah. So, that's just like a prelude. So, I got like a number of hunts i'm anticipating this fall and i have like a whole fleet of firearms and i just like now and then uh get sick of having a whole fleet of firearms so i was like you know what i'm gonna go down and i'm gonna just like i'm no matter what I'm doing this year, deer, elk, whatever, everything from sickle blacktails, which are, like, 100 pounds, up to 1,400-pound moose,

I'm just using my 300 win. Not messing around with all kinds of different guns and whatnot. I'm going to like, I'm going to load up with 165 grain federal trophy bonded bullets. And I'm gonna like, just, just that's it done dinking around all fall. So go marching up the hill. And, um, you know, Brody, we just like brody had done a thing

written an article not long ago talking about different people's choice like if they only had to hunt with one gun and what are most people it was split down the middle but i mean yannis and i are the 30-06 side of things and you and cal were the 300 side of things and i think you know you're not making a mistake choosing the 300 it's just in some cases it might be a little much yeah you know but that's the thing so my whole like one gun deal right now we go marching up and we uh uh post up on a glass and tit and we find no bugs. That night, we got mauled

by flies. Bad maul to where my hands are still not comfortable. Got mauled by flies and glassed up a few does, a handful of does. One of which may have been a little spiker. And then Dirk got his big spot

kept the ball rolling slept in our tents woke up all foggy and you said that night the bucks aren't out at night and yanni didn't believe me sure enough the next morning i have found in hunting the alpine and like hunting the alpine for sick of blacktails, the evening is not, it should not be considered an indicator of whether you're in a good zone or not. I don't know why. I see a lot more deer. In fact, we saw five or six that night. And I was saying, you know what? I know we're looking at a bunch of does.

I think there's a lot more deer around. I find they're just pop in the morning and it was a different story it was like double yeah and he's like some little negative nancy thing he said and i remember i got up and it wasn't quite dark yet and i gathered up my loot and i was like see boys in the morning and I was like, see you boys in the morning. And everybody's like, oh, my God, you're quitting. You're going to bed. So I crawl in my tent and sleep, and then wake up. We wake up at daybreak.

It's all foggy and rainy. Had a cup of coffee. Go over to the glass and tit and just start just pounding deer. Buck after buck. Buck after buck. Buck after buck. Hard to find a doe the next morning. Just freaking deer everywhere. So me and Brody split off.

I'm a one rifle man. That brings up another funny thing. We actually talked about that that morning because I remember there was a guy we had on the show one time who had said like, he's got like a shotgun. got, like, a shotgun. He's like, beware the man with one rifle.

I'm like, dude, the guys I'm scared of are the guys that got a shitload of guns. That can shoot them all. I know. It's like, the guys I know that shoot the best. When I say scared of, I mean, like, the guys I know that are the best shots tend to have like a whole bunch of guns yeah like you know i like to shoot i regard myself as a fairly good shot and i got quite a collection so um yeah i think it's just like a thing people like to think but uh so yeah neither is true whether you have one gun or a hundred guns, neither makes you a good marksman or a good shot or a good hunter. It all depends on how much you're shooting and practicing with the one gun

or the hundred guns. There's plenty of dudes with a hundred guns that those things just sit and save. For sure. But it's like one of those simple man mantras. Yes. Beware the man with one gun. Right? It's like one of those simple man mantras. Yes. You wear the man with one gun. It's like, huh. So, you know, me and Brody split off.

And we get up. And we're 328 yards from a buck. We glassed him at like 600 and then, you know, moved in. Got over there. And I hit the deer in the rib cage. 600 and then moved in. Got over there. And I hit the deer in the rib cage. A couple ribs up from the back. Laying down, prone.

I'm laying down, prone. He's quartering away very slightly. There was a little bit of obstruction over his shoulder from some brush. So I shied away from that a little teensy bit. No, it's more like right i remember my gun jumped up my big heavy hitter right thing like talk about a hook set

barrel on that thing 300 300 win back. Bam! Crossed the line. I remember the gun had, like, come back down, and I was trying to see through the scope what had happened when I finally heard the... Right? So, I knew he hit him. Yeah. In the ribs, out the ribs.

Go up there, and he'd still run off a little ways. Not much blood. Yeah, he went... No blood. Run off 20 yards. Yeah. I don't know. And no, like, Real small entry hole.

Through the rib. Small unshouldered ribs. Small exit hole size of a 25 cent piece. Behind the shoulder. Opposite shoulder. Everything looks cool. We drag the deer up to try to get out of the wind a little bit

and as we're dragging it i'm starting to smell that there's like a gut shot type situation going on even though we're up in the ribs dragging around and i think we're gonna like pull out the cutlery and start working magic on the deer and get to working on it and it's just like way like a lot of damage man and i think i was just gonna say upon uh is autopsy the right word we yeah we did like a little vivisection, a little autopsy. Yeah, like a little. You know, we know, we can say exactly the path of the bullet, you know,

like in the placement. And it was ahead of the diaphragm, like you said, two or three ribs, and angled as such that it still came out behind the opposing shoulder. It did not hit intestine or stomach. No, but it also wasn't angled so much either that you would have gone and hit the opposing shoulder, right? Like it exited behind the shoulder. So it gives you just a sense of where it was.

So the path was farther back in the whole vital area, but still ahead of the diaphragm. Both lungs had a hole through it. It was excellent shot placement is my point. Thank you, Johnny. I don't feel like you were back. No. But that thing hit.

That thing hit so hard and fast and big that it burst, yeah, burst the stomach. Maybe rib bone went back in there or. Busted that. Yeah. Cause when that thing went in, even though you're on the skin, you have one small 30 cow hole. It busted three ribs. But it could have just been that.

You tell me honest is the whole hydrostatic shock thing. Like, is that a real thing? Oh yeah. It's real so that shock wave may have burst the gut too yeah that's like when people yeah not only did it burst the stomach but i mean you have a diaphragm that completely right you know separates the two right yeah so burst that but you said it didn't even it like wander like ran off well just kind of plunged down yeah it wasn't like a yeah like wandered, like ran off. Well, it just kind of plunged down.

Yeah. It wasn't like a. Yeah. Like if you're, if you're, if you're hunting and you hit a, and you hit a animal, it's not always true. This is not always true at all. But in general terms, if you hit something in it, like really quickly starts favoring like a downhill getaway, it's's you probably got a good hit yeah

not always not at all always but if it's comes kind of toward you in a downhill direction especially it's like you probably got a good hit yeah and he was when he ran he was on wobbly legs like i felt good about it and then there's another indicator about that happened here that tells you about your shot is there's two other bucks with him and so Buck gets hit and runs because he got hit, right? Just runs a little ways and tips over. You can't see because you don't know what happened. He just disappears from your view.

But when those other bucks hang out, looking down, trying to figure out what happened, he didn't leave. So these other two bucks were very slow to get out so it's like had that one buck really been missed and ran off he's not gonna stop running he's gonna keep going probably and everybody's gonna travel with him yeah but when they're like hanging out trying to

figure out what happened he's down yeah no he never felt a thing yeah i mean i think he was alive like a second at most yeah but when we open it up so even though the shots through the ribs and in front of the diaphragm everything up in there is just like stomach contents and when i'm butchering we use those uh those it's called a bench made steep country and it's got like a big bowed not a big it's a short blade but like that big bowed belly on it big drop point yeah big drop point blade and you like take that thing and usually like if you get like if you hit something through the ribs oftentimes especially on the exit side you'll have like a lot of blood clotted stuff and you

just take that thing and just clean down the ribs like imagine you're just like scraping the ribs down but you're just like flaying it all away you just flayed it all away and you just pitch it but doing that it's just like a mess so now there was stomach contents on both sides of the animal between the ribs and the hide and there was like that's how much energy is going through that there was grass like up in the shoulders like just going yeah you found some in the neck zone like undigested stuff he had been eating that morning yeah up they had come out passed up between the skin and the muscle and jammed up in the neck area yeah i'm not a one gun man anymore well yeah here i mean i'm gonna play devil's advocate a little bit because some guys are

gonna say like so are you saying that your animal's too dead yeah the gun did its job it just did it a little too well listen you're after two things i'm after a sweet spot if you imagine like two intersecting lines okay one line is humane death and one line is meat damage now i could have gotten a really humane death with a hand grenade or like an RPG. Or shooting him in the shoulder. Or a 78 Chevy. Yeah. But, sure, humane death. But the meat damage line is too high. Yeah. So you're striving for, like, for instance, with archery, right? With archery, it's a different trade-off.

Very minimal, minimal meat damage. The quickness of the death is not as abrupt. So with archery, you have a different sort of trade-off, right? You're like, meat damage is just minimal. Even if you punch through the shoulder. Like, had I hit that deer in the shoulder, there wouldn't have been either shoulder. It wouldn't have moved,

and you'd have had no shoulder meat whatsoever. This way we had to trim out some bad shoulder meat on the exit side. So, like, with archery, like, meat damage is next to nothing. Virtually nothing. But quickness of death is slower. It's just like, and then people are gonna be like, it's like, okay, you know, screw you. It's just shorter or it's, it doesn't happen as quickly.

I'm sorry. I'm not, it's like, I love it. Right. Bow hunting is great. Um, I think people should do more of it and I have I remember hitting a bull elk with a bow and watching it

take two steps and fall over dead it does happen I'm saying like generally those lines get moved low meat damage lower you know humane kill factor so yeah you could it was too dead you know, humane kill factor. So yeah, you could,

it was too dead. I think I got something you should try. I think before you decide to, to not be a one gun, one gun, man, here's the thing. It's like there's part of being a one gun,

man has been a one bullet, man. Yeah. Okay. Please. Well, big reason people shoot like a lighter bullet like a 165 out of a 300 wind mag is because it's flatter trajectory right yeah but i mean this is a rabbit hole you can really get squirrely with but that lighter bullet gets blown around by wind more so shooting in

windy conditions you're shooting like a 200 grain thatiner. That's what Callahan likes. Yeah. He likes to throw those big 200s. Yeah, higher ballistic coefficient so it doesn't get blown off a little bit more. And once you really get out to range, just the air friction itself slows down the 165 faster than the 200. So at some point out there, like 600-plus yards, the 200-grainer actually might surpass the 165 but that's like ranges that we don't really shoot game at at least you and i don't but something to think about is if you went

up to 200 you would be shooting a bigger bullet at a slower speed i just feel like if you went and hit a 100 pound antelope coos deer black tail deer yearling white tail i just feel like if you went and hit a 100 pound antelope coos deer black tail deer yearling white tail i just feel like hitting it with that gun throwing 200 grains i don't know i think you might see less i think you would see less less damage yeah because i think it's the speed maybe and maybe the fracturing of the the front end of that bullet which is supposed to happen you know with that bullet that you're shooting, that's maybe causing more of that damage that you don't like. And if you had a bigger bullet that maybe stayed together,

moving a little bit slower, you wouldn't have as much of that shock. Yeah, like, I mean, I shoot animals with a 350-grain muzzleloader bullet, and, you know, it's not blowing them into bits yeah yeah i mean think about shooting deer back home with 12 gauge slugs right i never killed a deer to slug oh that's right you were i live north of the shotgun zone so where steve and i grew up somewhere i don't know do you know what demarcate i could draw it on a map but yeah but anyways in the southern part of michigan i think it's still that way now you can only use uh shotguns for southern third of the state yeah and um yeah they just poke a nice big hole yeah you got a deer with a buck with a shotgun last in montana's right. In Montana last year. Yeah. And I had no meat. I shot him close range, you know, so it's still probably hauling buggy.

But I think it's only coming out of the muzzle at like 1,800 to 2,000 feet a second. So 1,000 feet a second slower. If that same slug was doing 3,000, yeah, it would probably be a different end result. A lot more meat damage. But I had none. When these guys talk about hydrostatic shock we're talking about is the it hits so fast that you have like the projectile passing through it but then there's also the issue of like displaced material like displaced liquids that are then pushed out of the way at such a fast speed that they become projectile like or it causes like this wave of shock and that's why when you hit something it just goes

down like oftentimes when you hit something it's just like down on the ground the shock of it right because at slower velocities you could hit something where it doesn't even register the hit and also in a couple seconds later it tips over from blood loss but the actual shock of the hit doesn't do anything um yeah man i think i'm i don't know i i hear what you're saying but i think like i think that i i made like a brief foray into being a one gun man and i'm foraying back out i'm gonna get me like i'm going back i have a little lightweight dealie and my little lightweight dealie is gonna be deer and antelope and whatnot and then i'm gonna have my big ball buster for elk and moose elk and moose yeah so is uh it's like the meat damage the meat damage like makes me sick.

Yeah. Another thing you could try, we got to wrap it up here, but you could try those trophy coppers. I've had really good luck with that copper bullet because it holds together and I've actually shot them on the point of the shoulder bull elk what was i shooting when i shot that bull elk i can't remember now i think it was my 300 short mag i was shooting 180 grainer and it was like 200 yard shot not too far away point of the shoulder and just dropped him just lights out over and done never kicked and uh it had gone through both scapulas you know it was

high and you know so there was but the point is maybe a two inch diameter made two to three inch diameter meat damage around the you know the entry and the exit as it went through those scapulas because that bullet's not exploding when it's hitting yeah i i had good luck with them last year those trophy coppers worked well for me even shooting uh lung shots because a lot of guys will say oh you're saying you like those trophy coppers yeah and i was leery of them for lung shots because they're just you know you hear the whole like making a little hole through the lungs takes them a long time to bleed out but that i did the double lung shot on a mule deer and an elk last year and they went those animals went 30 40 yards and died yeah i've just had a lot of really good

luck over the years like using what i use but yeah yeah any concluding thoughts addy man um i wanted to like jump in i think one time we were mooching next time we're mooch when you jump in with the scuba tank go down there and just see how wild it really is i think you could have stuck a gopro down there that one day because it was calm no yeah yeah i'm thinking about going i'm not sure yeah. I'm thinking about going. I'm not sure yet, but I'm thinking about this winter down in Seattle doing my diver certification, man. But this also just seems like a lot of, I might, but it also seems like a.

Gear heavy. Just a whole other damn, you know, like a whole other thing. That'd be pretty sweet, though. Because when you're up in southeast Alaska, it's like, there's just so much stuff to do. And you wind up's like you gotta like focus you know just see like a whole other realm just that much more shit laying around not a whole nother pile of that stuff another shack for your scuba trying to get like tanks i don't know i'm kind of dying to do it though man and i would dive down there too too. I would dive down there.

That's it? You want to film a... No, just to see what's going on. I think everybody has an idea of what is this interaction and what the take looks like between the Silvers and the Herring.

What's going on down there? Someone's probably already done it someone probably knows exactly what it looks like oh yeah cool yeah why aren't there nature movies there's a million nature movies of pelagic warm water pelagics pounding bait balls there has to be nature movies maybe someone if know about this, can send us a note at TheMeatEater.com. But there has to be videos of salmon working bait balls. Oh, yeah. You know those underwater films?

The cameras that the ice fishermen send down? Yeah. I wonder if you could hang one of those off a boat. Oh. And see what's going on down there. Yeah, but not like some souped-up underwater photographers. No. I want to see a souped-up underwater photographer film of salmon working bait i'm sure they got to see like what the

interactions like do they just come through do they hurt yeah are they corralling them or you know they're gonna conclude i got two wow they're quick though one just speak on that people made me think of it as the variety of activities you mentioned. The bear interactions we had this trip were phenomenal. 30 yards away. Getting hoofed at, barked at. Yeah, having to stare down with a better bow. I mean, that was something that won't leave me. The second one is I'm camping in my truck and I need a place to live.

So if anybody in Bozeman knows of a rental or a caretaker ranch out of town, I need a home. Explain this now. That's right. So Dirt. Me and my gal, Andrea. I want to help you out on this. Dirt lives out of his truck. Yeah. um it was out of his truck when Dirt opens the door of his truck

you know that little area in your truck door where you keep maps or a coffee cup there's that little lower compartment that's Dirt's medicine cabinet so when he opens up his truck door it's like shampoo and deodorant and stuff all lined up in that little toothpaste, toothbrush all lined up

in that little map how long was your stint like as a real resident of an actual domicile the longest is probably about a year and a half because you lived with your girl until when june in a in a place with a roof yeah and then we're both and she's she's a great we'll be good tenants or caretakers. So you're looking for a caretaking gig, and you don't want to pay any rent. Yeah. I mean, ideally.

You'll care. Now, listen, I'll come in and say this. Or we would rent, but we just need a place in Bozeman if anyone's got something. Yeah, and I will come in, and I don't do this very often. I will vouch up and down for dirt as being, if I was going to have my place caretaked, I would have it be caretaked by dirt. Thank you, Steve.

Because I'm telling you what, we were trying to change the gear oil in one of the outboards and couldn't get that dirt. Yeah. Handy. Handy. Handy. I'm wondering if you really want to be saddled, though, with that responsibility.

Free rent's nice, but some caretaker positions are full-time jobs. He welds. Okay, but Dirt has a job. Yeah. But Dirt just travels a little bit. But he's got his girl around to help out. Yeah. And rental, too.

We're having a tough time finding a place out of town in the bozeman area so i figured i might as well ideally you got like ideally there's some joker out some wonderful person out there who's got a place that they're like kind of in a little bit but not really in there that much they would love to have someone there that was trustworthy keep it up i know dirt's parents well like i can vouch for this guy up and down. If Dirt screwed you, his old man would come out and make it right. His old man would come make it right in a hurry. Not that Dirt would ever screw you.

Gary, how's that our place? Did a great job. While we were on vacation. I came home. He did let the deer get the garden, but that not that was not his fault that was a fence problem yeah he just happened to be there when it happened yeah so sons of bitches so if you got like this place right you're only there now and then and you just want everything to be tight and when you show up you want dirt to be gone it can be he'll he won't even be you won't even yeah you want to be the smell and dirt

and his toothbrush will not his toothbrush will be in his truck door not in your house and just show up and everything's tight and right yeah and you're ready to enjoy yourself yeah um so that was two things you like running into bears and having them wolf at you and clack your teeth at you and shit and then you like uh you're looking for a place to live yeah the winter is upon us the fall is so brody how come you never plug our fishing clients because i got all the clients i want really yeah man i've been doing it for 17 years i don't need to don't even want one more yeah if you want to look at it look me up go for it how do they find you if they want to book you for colorado fly fishing fly fishing outfitters avon colorado orvis but i only got like and they'll find brody henderson yeah but i only got like six or eight weeks a year anymore you know i used to do 200 trips a year that's just

not fun anymore i'm getting old yeah i like to fish when it's like 80 degrees and sunny and there's a bunch of bugs hatching outside of that i'm not real interested in it really yeah and your kids right missing out on yeah like i'd rather take my kids fishing at this point you don't want to be gone all the time right yeah yeah for sure yeah well there's an enthusiasm talk about a guy hungry for business brody henderson but i do have a conclusion that might be the best kind of guy. Yeah, because I'm happy when I'm out there. I'm not going to be in burnout.

That might be the best kind of guy. He's not going to be like, oh, it's perfect right now. He might be like, if you go with him, it's going to be right. If you can squeeze in a half-day trip between June 15th and July 31st, I'm all about it. You're going to catch fish. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

My conclusion is to shout out to Matt Elliott, because we had a thing. I'm all about it you're gonna catch fish yeah yeah alright my including thought is to shout out to Matt Elliott because we had a thing I used to on the on my pocket knife I used to always like

those pocket knives that had part serration oh yeah and part normal tip yeah Matt Elliott at Benchmade

was kind of like he wasn't like down on it he's like oh you know everybody has what they work for him but he suggested just switching over and he took the i have this uh you know uh it's called a griptilian she's like what they call like the edc like the everyday carry knife and i always had that serrated on there and he took it and made it put it just straight i'm loving that just straight man you're not missing this no i used to like i i have honestly spent my whole entire life walking

around with a pocket knife that had serration on it thinking i was a bad mofo ready to cut some ropes ready to like cut a rope that like was dragging me off into a pit right i had to like cut it quick or else I'd die or something. Yeah. Yeah, I think when you asked Matt about it, he was like, yeah, some guys like them. Yeah. The serrations. Oh, nice, man.

Beacon of knives, though, I got one more concluder real quick. I don't want to give the impression that we left a bunch of meat on the hill. Like, we took our time and cleaned it up and salvaged 90% of the meat. We brought home the heart, liver. Yeah. Just took, you got to take your time. I then went and leftaged 90% of the meat. So you brought home the heart, liver? Yeah. Just took, you got to take your time. I then went and left the heart in my vacuum sealer. Oh, really?

Closing up the cabin. And I was like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to not leave my chamber sealer. Like most vacuum sealers are like, you know, like those little, they're not a chamber sealer. Yeah. You know, everyone has like, you know. You put it on not a chamber sealer yeah you know everyone has like you know you put it on the outside you put the bag on the outside i have like one of those weston chamber sealers where it's a much better system the bags are better and cheaper to buy

bags for a chamber sealer but chamber is a lot more expensive either way i didn't like my chamber sealer sealed up i thought it might mildew in there so So I cracked it open to stick a little piece of chalk or something. Yeah, just to keep it cracked. I realized that damn deer heart was in there. Sealed? Like I sealed the last bag. We were like wrapping all of our meat. We were like sealing fish and freezer paper and red meat.

But I was like, for whatever reason, back bag, the heart, didn't find it. So there's going to be a fermented heart for the next person that goes there? No, I had to pitch it. Oh, it's that overnight. I just threw it out in the water for the crabs because they've been sitting there for. Oh, unsealed. Sitting there for however long in the wood stove right next to it. Total stupid move, man.

But still got my liver. No, man. We did like a lot of meat salvage just like it was a lot of work and made me realize beware the man with one gun because he's gonna leave a lot of meat damage all right thanks for listening 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 on axe hunt is now in canada it is now at your fingertips you canadians the great features that you love and on x 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 meet.