The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 111: Inside the Dark House

Episode Date: April 9, 2018

Interior Alaska- Steven Rinella talks with Bryce Myers, Brandt Meixell, Joe Zych, Dirt Myth, and Janis Putelis.Subjects Discussed: chopping big-assed holes in the ice; correlations between TV sizes and amounts of TV watched; Minnesota: the most ice-fishingest state in the world; ice fishing's PR problem; eelpouts, lawyers, and burbot; circumpolar species; prepping bait; here comes one now!; the relative qualities of fish flesh; 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.

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Is it fair to say that, are we in South Central? Are we like too far north to be out of South Central Alaska? I feel like we're closer to interior. Yeah, I'd say this is interior. I can say we're in interior Alaska and I'm not being melodramatic. On a lake perched over a spear hole

there's about three feet of ice on the lake. We have a hole chopped through the ice. It's about three and a half feet by two and a half feet, would you say? Yeah, that's about right. Looking at a bottom, we're in about eight feet of water. The hole we have in the ice is about the size of a big screen tv not like a guy that's like way into tv watching but a big screen tv for a person who watches a fair bit of tv but not too much what's sort of become the norm i think for the american household

right 40 inches yeah but now then you walk into a house and you'd be like these mugs watch a lot of tv all right based're usually sports fanatics. Yeah, based on how big that TV is, this guy is watching too much of it. This would be like, we got a hole about the size of, yeah, you appreciate TV, you respect it for its value, but you haven't overvalued it. And we're on a slope looking down, eight feet of water. It's kind of a sandy slope. The slope peters off

and some weeds are picking up. And we are spearing for whitefish. There's two species hanging around. We have seen... The first one you saw when he dropped that little underwater camera you feel the humpback that was a humpback yeah

we've seen so far two humpback whitefish and i've seen quite a number of round whitefish they're about they look a lot like a mountain whitefish if you're familiar with those and they're about, they look a lot like a mountain whitefish, if you're familiar with those. And they're about like a smallish mountain whitefish, but not so small that you'd throw it back. But they're a better eating whitefish than a mountain whitefish. And the humpbacks would be like a big lake whitefish. Is that fair, Brant? Yeah. So far, we have put two of these whitefish on the ice and we've also picked up lake trout and a big burbot 14 pound burbot you weighed them out 14 a 14 pound burbot

and that's the take so far today right yeah two whitefish a big smoking burbot and then a uh and a laker probably the best burbot of the trip oh yeah definitely the best burbot of the trip um so that's the middle of the day yeah and it's not even yeah and so yeah it's the middle of the day it's what one o'clock now two o'clock yeah it's still seven hours till prime time. Seven hours till prime time. Now, I want everyone to introduce themselves and tell your name and how many years you've been ice fishing. Joe? It's Joe Zich.

How do you spell that? Z-Y-C-H. Really? Yeah. Yeah, I hadn't caught your last name yet. Joe Zich. Yeah. Most people call him joe zurch from work i don't know where that because they just can't live with the zich they gotta be like

it's gotta be zurch yeah joe zich what uh where's your grandparents your great-grandparents hail from poland oh i got you i can see that and i've been ice fishing for 28 years probably how old are you 29 okay okay bryce uh name is bryce myers and uh i've only been ice fishing for about seven or eight years ever since i met joe uh he was the one that took me out for the first time took you under his wing pretty much so i'll get to why joel's ice fish for 28 years but why uh what what prevented you from ice fishing the rest of your life i'm originally from boise idaho and not a whole lot of ice down there to to fish off of so you're like a little south of ice fishing yeah definitely i think they do some ice fishing up north but i wouldn't drive

that far to go ice fishing when i was living down there so it's not like when you go into a tackle shop in boise just not um you don't you don't see ice fishing gear uh not that i remember i don't think so at least not around the boise area when i was down there. But you were an angler. Yes. You grew up fishing. Yes. Did you grow up hunting? Not as much. Mostly small game. Birds, stuff like that.

Not a lot of big game. And then you became a hard water angler after moving to Alaska. Yeah. Pretty much. Joe said, you want to go fish one day said sure bought a cheap little rod and after that day i went out bought myself an auger at an ice house and was hooked and now here you are with a big pair of ice fishing bibs on working the tube jig down a hole trying to lure in whitefish yeah okay yanni uh yannis patelis and i've been ice fishing for i could probably still just until instead of saying in years i can just probably give you the amount of days that i've ice fish i don't understand why did

you not ice fish in michigan you guys are the only people I know that hunted and didn't fish. Dude, I don't know. You'd have to ask my dad that question. I'm not going to blame my dad, but I'm going to say that it has to do with something, the fact that my dad just wasn't a big fisherman, never has been, isn't now. It almost skipped a generation. But we've talked about this before, right? Anyone who traps hunts and fishes. Anyone who hunts fishes anyone who fishes who knows what else they do right yeah but like it's weird to meet someone who grew up in a hunting family who didn't fish especially

in the state of michigan but the lavians probably eat a ton of fish. Yeah, they do. No, I knew a lot. I mean, we would go out. There was a Kalamazoo Latvian hunting and fishing club. I think my dad belonged to it. And so, yeah, we'd go out and visit there.

They'd have an annual ice fishing derby tournament. We'd go out and check them, you know, meet them, but we never did the fishing. Okay. We'd go out there to say hi. say hi so yeah less than 10 days on the ice less than 10 days as a hard water angler is that total or is that saying 10 days ago was your first time out total oh yeah i messed around a little bit last year in mont. What are your general impressions? Oh, I dig it. It's been harder than I thought it was going to be. Harder physically? Mostly because I'm bringing kids along.

And so I went out there one day to Canyon Ferry. It's blowing 30. And by the time I had the holes drilled, my kids were like, all right. That's an unbelievably windy place, man. Yeah. Since then, I've had people tell me, like, yeah me like yeah if you're gonna go out there you have to have a shack unless you catch the right day you know yeah i've seen it nice out there but generally it's like windy enough where you're losing five gallon buckets right like you leave a five gallon

bucket unattended and all of a sudden it's just gone. No, the ice is scraped almost clean of snow. You don't get snow on top. People come out there. It's so windy that people come out on an ice sail where they make a little boat that has basically on skates. You ever see this? Yeah. That's a windy-ass ice fishing lake right there.

Brant? Brant Mikesell. Ice fishing my whole life. From the get-go. From the get-go from the get-go yeah um and then i've been ice yeah i've been i'm 44 years old i've been i like to say i've been ice fishing for 44 years my mom and dad i'll point out for their honeymoon rented a live-in ice shanty that is awesome honey that was the honeymoon they ice fished for their honeymoon so um i was even even the egg and even the egg and the mixins the mixins that went into producing me had a deep familiarity with hard water angling before they even came together and combined to make my component parts deep tradition in ice angling now uh you guys are from i would say probably what i think to be like the ice fishing estate

minnesota yeah i would tend to agree i was flying in recently i flew uh i was flying into lacrosse wisconsin and on the flight over over minnesota we passed over some big lakes and it was right at dark right at dusk and you can see the lake just lit up with lanterns just little ice shanty villages all over ice communities do you think it's mostly like a place like minnesota where people really hit ice fishing heavy is it like uh is it because people are miserable and bored in the winter or do you think it's something else like do you meet people who only ice fish yes actually that they're not generalist anglers i mean i i don't think it'd be very common for

someone who ice fishes a lot to not open water fish but i there certainly are people that like are dedicated ice fishermen that don't do much open water fishing yeah and it's like uh it's more associated with drinking it's frequently associated with drinking but it's also you know there's some different styles of people there's people that love ice fishing that don't really care if they catch anything or if the fishing's good they more care about the drinking because they want to just go drink on the ice yeah because it's fun yeah but then there's people that like want to catch fish and try hard but they often are drinking too not always the reason i bring it up is i feel like there's always been a there's a like in the non-ice fishing world which is a big world okay of people that don't

ice fish there's a perception of like like ice fishing has a a perception problem grumpy old man yeah people aren't yeah it could be that you think that did it that's what i thought of before i even ice fished it's a horrible representation of what it actually is. Like lazy anglers who aren't successful. I mean, you go over those. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Coming in. Okay, we got a round whitefish coming in.

Bad angle right now. I think you're just going to have to. You want me to wing at angle? Are you going to let him walk? I don't know if he's going to turn into the bait. I got a stroke at him. Here, take it. Can you get it before? Well, it's not a great stroke don't know if he's gonna turn into the bait i got a stroke at him here take it can you get it before all right he might come back yeah doggone it come on come on bryce can you see him still jiggle him jiggle him jiggle him

no i just watch his tail go away he was going back behind us yeah yep he was kind of like he wasn't like booking i wouldn't be surprised if he comes back through. Seems like he was looking at the jig, but they just like to circle it. Sometimes. Oh, man. I was just thinking we were due. It's been a little bit. Hold on a minute.

No. Almost excitement. warm it no almost excitement would you you would have taken that poke steve well i'm at it i'm in a different spot than you i would have taken the poke knowing what i now know me too but no i think if i was in your shoes i'd have waited thinking he might hook or whatever but now that reviewing in my mind i would have taken a hail mary just one more pass like duck hunting yeah let him get closer exactly oh see so anyways bryce the first thing you thought was that movie grumpy old man yeah that's that's exactly what i had in mind for not only minnesotans but ice fishermen and so uh so it's been so long real quick though. Refresh my memory. How do they depict the actual angling and the, and the like, what's a couple of old men sitting around drinking beer and like not catching share.

But I feel like most of the movie doesn't actually, no, it's about one of them's like kind of a little bit potsy. And then, uh, there's like a lady and they both like her she goes to the one you figure she's gonna go for the other one gets a little pissed start pranking each other putting fish in each other's trucks that's right that's right it's not to sound a lot like growing up um so when you got invited out ice fishing, why didn't you, you were like, oh, so this is what I'm getting into? I'm going out and it's going to be two old men caught in a love triangle? Not exactly.

I mean, I guess I just hadn't really considered going out ice fishing. I never had this stuff i wasn't gonna just wing it and spend you know 300 bucks on an auger try to chip through the ice with a spud bar or something but when you guys first went out what was your what were you going for oh it was just the the stock fish around anchorage. The first lake we went to was Beer Can Lake and just went out and just see what we can catch. And it wound up being, like, not exciting. No, it was very exciting. Oh, is that right?

Yeah, we didn't have any of the Vexlars or any of the fish finders. Yeah, a Vexlar is like a sonar-esque apparatus that kind of tells you what's going down but down below your hole but yeah so we didn't have any of those and fishing in the blind and even then still just we caught countless fish and uh they're almost all dollies weren't they i think Yeah, dollies are the stock rainbows. And then you were hooked. Oh, yeah. Yeah, right after that, like I said, just went out and started buying ice fishing stuff.

And now I've got my own arsenal. Because that's what I think. I feel like I was saying, in the non-ice fishing world, there's this idea that it's uh like super boring and i think but they're because they're looking at people that there's like these different kind of anglers you have your drunkards there's three kinds of ice you had your drunkards you had your hardcore fishermen that were out to catch fish and then you had your drunkards who were hardcore fishermen and out to catch fish and then you had your drunkards who were hardcore fishermen and out to catch fish and i like associated with i knew about many of the

the drunkards i would see a lot of the people who were out there but uh no real interest in catching fish but it's like the social aspect of it you know and like to go drink on the ice but then my in my father's social circle there happened to be a lot of the drunkards who were hardcore about catching fish and they would be like there's like the kind of guy who comes out on the ice he sets up his shanty without doing any work he just kind of randomly is out there drills a hole through the ice lowers his thing down and that is that is where he's going to be that's the weekend and it's like he's just opening it up to fate it'll turn out it won't turn out then there's the kind of guy who goes out and drills a dozen holes before he

does anything anything and this man will be the man that catches fish because they're taken to it that same level of devotion and passion that what you'd think like the best open water angler would take to it yeah and a dozen holes is understatement i mean yeah how many hours do you think we drilled on this lake so far over 100 easy you think so yeah it takes a lot longer ice fishing when you're trying to find depth changes because basically if you want to see the depth you gotta drill a hole at every spot yeah you know my brother used to talk about the way you like the way an ice fisherman perceives the body of water is so much different the way an open water angler perceives it because he says that he perceives the body of water just basically as like cylinders like when you're out on the lake in the open water you kind of think of the whole lake but

he's like i just think of it as that i basically drill my hole and i imagine that cylinder extends down to the bottom and i just think about like that spot and then i move over and i make like another like theoretical cylinder that i can think about but you can't be that you're just checking out the whole place because you're just like picking you know you can't troll you can't cast you're not like working a drop off you just have to be where you're like committing to like a specific spot and picking your spot is really important but you have a lot less data to go off of to pick your spot because you're not passing over with a fish find or get like a really good sense of where everything is but brant your thing is like drill millions of holes yep ice troll ice troll oftentimes send a camera down there to have a look just check out specific habitat up front

trying to find edges micro habitat just find the spot on the spot. And then on top of that, you need to go in there and take a poke. And here we have like the visual element where we have a big ass spirit hole and we're in shallow water. So you see all the things that go on that you otherwise wouldn't be aware of for instance last night we had we were jigging for burbot through a hole in the ice where we could actually look down and see because we put a light so we could look underwater and had seven burbot come up to investigate the jig this is a big predatory fish that will suck back six, seven-inch fish no problem. Seven of them, throughout the course of the night, came up and sniffed the jig or passed through under the jig.

If you were fishing without the looking hole, you would get the sense that there was no activity and nothing at all going on. If you have a Vexlar. If you have a Vexlar. Unless you have a Vexlar. Explain the Vexlar. So Vexlar basically is depth finder, fish finder. If you don't have a camera, which we normally don't have a camera, so we use that to check all the depths,

but basically it's a circle and then it will sound the bottom and have a real dark red line where the bottom is and then as you jig your jig's normally like green you can see your jig going up and down yeah so when you jig you can watch your the light on it go up and down and then as a fish comes in for like eel pile they'll come up from the bottom generally so you'll see a red line come up from the bottom red line and then follow the jig it's like a video game match up the lines and you win yeah yeah but the thing about it is like it's like they're very responsive so it's kind of real time like there's a delay with sonar yeah like a regular boat sonar yeah that you have like

a display screen and it's kind of like tracking your history. It's just like a real-time portrayal of what's going on, to the point where if you lift your rod to work your jig, you're watching an exact replication of where your jig's at in the time. There's no delay whatsoever. Exactly. But I can't believe going my whole life and not ever using those things. I can't believe it either.

Yeah. I don't know how you like ice fishing. You don have a vexilar i don't know i guess i just like it like a deeper old timey way oh it's just you're like when you're just fishing blind you never know if there's a fish under you like with the vexilar at least you know if there's fish down there or not at all times you know that's like a thing that comes up with people griping about technologies like that. Well, this is a very old school technology, too. Like my grandpa had one. Is that right?

It wasn't colored. Yeah, my dad had one that was like an LCD screen. It didn't work real well in the cold at all. It was just gray, black and white scale. But you're familiar with the people that will say, oh, it takes all the challenge out of it, right? And I think stuff like that can increase effectiveness. But a thing that I always point out to people

when having this conversation about whether it's sonar or whatever else is you learn a lot more. It enhances your understanding of the environment and what's around you and how it all relates absolutely so you like you come like it's not like you have it's not like oh now that i have this device like a like a gps i know or not sorry now that i have a sonar device when i'm fishing i can just turn my brain off and now i don't need to learn anything about fish it's like having a sonar has taught me shit loads about fish because you understand like where they are when they're there not hitting when they're there and are hitting and you come away with it if you stripped it away from me now if

whatever it became illegal to have it i would be like thank god for the time that i had with it because i'd learned so much usable stuff about how fish operate yeah how to jig how fast do you when they come in and they don't bite do you go up make them chase up you go down to the bottom they'll go down what size jig's working it gives you a lot more information if you don't have a flasher you're just hoping something bites your jig and some days that works great but when you're going into new lakes and find a new territory and i want to get something dialed in it's a it's a good tool but there's like flasher we should explain as a synonym for the vexlar well

vexlar is a brand name yeah yeah vexlar's brand name yeah so when you like when i was younger though if you like if you were going to strike out to go ice fishing heading out the door it would be typically a very like rudimentary setup so that was your childhood yeah so well no depends on it depends on to what level we were going out so like for instance because if it was if we were going out to ice fish the lake you grew up on, you could go as simple as this. You'd have a bucket. And in that bucket, you would have one or two rods. In your pocket, you'd have a chew tin full of maggots.

You'd have a little film canister full of jigs. And then if the ice was, like, six inches or less, you'd carry with little film canister full of jigs. And then if the ice was like six inches or less, you'd carry with you a spud to chop a hole. And depending on the air temp, you might not even have a scooper to strain out the ice chunks. And you'd be like out ice fishing like that. Like basically nothing. 20 bucks worth of stuff.

Or you'd go out expedition grade fishing where all of a sudden you're introducing, like we have thousands of dollars worth of stuff with us right now. Easily. Oh, yeah. Just the flashers alone. Yeah. So, I mean, it can like, it like takes ice angling, takes many different, takes many different kind of forms you know and i think this kind of winds up being that like the level of passion you bring to it or how much you're dying to catch a fish but out here you guys are like i think you guys do in alaska is different than most people too is you kind of do

like a sort of like expedition-ish outing like explain where we are now you don't have to tell like where we are but sort of like talk about what it goes in to get to a place like this and be prepped up for a place like this yeah so we had uh several hours on the road and then about 25 mile snowmobile run um into the lake rigged up for everything for from start small and to fish up so spearing whitefish all that gear jigging lake trout and burbot and tip up fishing for burbot yep now the ice fish kind of like a main i'm gonna talk about a little bit about the different apparatuses that people use to catch fish through the ice like as a kid we would mostly jig for perch and bluegills or panfish crappies perch bluegills but then you'd have like

for big fish you have this thing called a tip-up and a tip-up is what do you guys you guys have you guys call them you guys use the word dead stick for tip-up? No. No. When you guys say dead stick, what's that mean? That's a rod that's not being jigged. Just with a piece of bait. That's your term for a dead stick?

That's the term for a dead stick. What's that? That's the term for a dead stick. A rod not being jigged. Yeah. Just hanging in the water. Usually next to like, you'll be jigging a tube jig in one hole and then you'd have this other rod that just has a piece of bait on it not moving at all and that's your dead stick yeah that's a term i hadn't heard we would just call that like uh a rod over there

with some bait on it or something like that but like so a tip up is this is what tip up is and there's many different companies that make tip-ups. But a tip-up would be, I don't even know where to begin describing a tip-up. A spool of line. A spool of line. That has a spool of line in which a spring-loaded flag holds the line in place until a fish bites. Then the fish can free spool and the flag goes up so you know you have a bite. And you can watch it from a distance.

And you take, depending on your area's regulations, like in some lakes you can put a live fish on the hook. Not in Alaska? No. Nowhere in Alaska? No. You can't use live bait in freshwater at all. Anywhere in the whole damn state?

Yeah. Which is weird because usually rules here are a bit more lax. But like in the Midwest, most places you can use live bait. The argument against like what they don't want, when people prohibit live bait, what they're generally trying to prohibit is they're trying to prohibit you purposefully or inadvertently introducing species of fish into bodies of water where they don't belong yep so that you would like take some suckers or whatever shiner sucker some kind of fish and you'd catch them out of one lake or buy them somewhere drive to an area where that fish

is not a native fish and you fish and you get done and you dump your bait down the hole and you just did what they call bucket biology and introduced a new species of fish into an ecosystem where it didn't previously exist and a lot of fish get moved around that way and also that you would introduce diseases into waters that you don't normally fish but like growing up michigan like no one's going to set a tip up no one in their right mind is going to set a tip up in michigan that doesn't have a live fish on the end so you rig a live fish you hook them generally like right kind of under the dorsal fin and you send them down under the water and you set your tip up up and so you get that thing set to the right depth where you want it and we used to you know

we'd fish pike six feet off the bottom however you're going to set it up and then you position the flag so that when a fish hits the thing and starts pulling line the flag pops up and you might be able to set anywhere from two to six tip-ups out and you put them all up everyone sits around shuffles around on the ice talks a lot of people then begin getting drunk and then eventually a flag comes up and someone yells flag flag and you run over there and lift the thing up and then hand line the fish up and that is like because the unknown factor that is one of the more exciting things on this planet absolutely and it's hard to appreciate how fun it is to see a flag pop until you've done it and once you've done it you love it it's just it's like there's been times when there's just like a flag sitting in one of our sleds.

We're not using it, right? But that flag, for whatever reason, is popping up in the air. You just see a flag in the air and that instinct in your body is triggered. Yeah, that you've developed over a lifetime of waiting for flags to pop. Yep. As youngsters, we would sometimes, like most of the rules on tip-offs are usually this varies but generally it needs to be that you're like tending it okay it needs to be your like in your immediate control how do they word it usually closely attended closely attended not

just attended yeah closely attended meaning you can't go set them somewhere and come back the next day to see what you caught generally i'm sure there's exceptions to this, but generally you got to keep an eye on it. So when the ice, when we were kids, we did this now and then, when the ice was good for ice skating, we would be able to set our tip-ups way far apart because you could see them from a long ways away. Then you just would skate around checking them. And it was like kind of like like hockey with fish just moving around chasing tip-ups but typically you just like set them out you scatter them kind of out through the ice around your shanty and observe them and that's tip-up fishing and what we've been doing at night for

burbot like burbot's a weird fish because i want to cover here we've been taught when it's a whole bunch but different names like did i already talk about different names for burbot? No. Okay. The official name is what, Brant? The scientific name? Scientific name. Lota Lota.

Lota Lota? Yep. How's it spelled? L-O-T-A. Really? Lota Lota. What you know that fish as might depend a little bit on where you're from. When I first heard of the fish, I heard of it as a ling. But I became suspicious of that name only later when I learned about the saltwater ling cod.

But people call them a ling, even though it's a freshwater cod. People will call them an eel pout, which you've heard that in Minnesota? That's the main term. someone told me it's the main term i think if you live south of highway two yeah once you get uh like the first time i ever heard anyone refer to them as lawyers was lake of the woods area so up like getting into closer to canada i think that term might have more of canadian origin yeah i heard okay that's interesting because my friend doug duran who lives in southwest wisconsin he had spent time living in dora peninsula they definitely call them lawyers there he says they call them yeah he he knew that

the guys there referred him as lawyers the first time I ever heard the fish referred to as a lawyer was not far off Door Peninsula but was fishing out of Garden Peninsula in Michigan's UP which kind of thumbs down southward and the guys out on that peninsula call them lawyers and as he explained to me he's like do you

want to know why they call it a lawyer and he opened it up and showed me that it's heart sits right next to its vent. Or one might say, like, because they'd say, like, the heart's right close to the asshole. That's how you know it's a lawyer. So that was what they called lawyers. When I first heard of the fish, even though I grew up in a state that has some in the big northern waters, we didn't catch them where we ice fished.

We never talked about them. I got to Montanaana and they call them ling in montana then they learned it was burbot and i learned that some of you boys call them eel pouts and then there's another word if you look in fish books i haven't heard anybody ever call them is clench yeah and on the east coast they call them cusk. Oh, maybe that's it. Didn't we see clench, though? I haven't heard of that. I've never heard of that. A cusp?

That's the East Coast? Cusk, C-U-S-K, like New Hampshire. That's what they call them out there. Yeah. Either way, if you're from the South and you don't know about this, it's because it's a northern tier fish. It's a fish that's distributed across the North. And around the globe and around oh yeah

like yeah talk about that brand like what a circumpolar species yeah they're circumpolar so they're uh on multiple continents across the northern part of the globe other examples of circumpolar critters would be polar bears polar bears well brown bears grizzly bears are circumpolar were circumpolar the blue muscle is circumpolar i believe that the northern pike but there's like some variations but the northern pike is a fish you'll find like so a circumpolar thing would be like imagine a certain latitude band um if you just take that latitude band and wrap it around the whole earth you'll find that species are very closely related critters all within that same latitude band wrapped around the whole earth so it's circumpolar fish and you're saying too that they've been

extirpated in places from europe i think there's been areas where they've been overfished in europe which is funny because in min, where you boys are from, you were saying that a guy might want to pull a burbot on the ice and leave it laying. Yeah. I saw that. We'd have permanent ice shacks on the lax. And when I was younger, I remember seeing just piles of these things. And no one liked them because they'd leave their um their rattle

reels down at night and then eel pilot would come bite the line and then tangle all the lines up when they're trying to fish for walleyes oh so that's what that's that's why i didn't like them yeah that's what i think they're ugly and i don't think they're at least especially when i was a kid there was not a reputation for them being good to eat and i never even tried eating one until i moved to alaska there's no walleyes here you got to ice fish for something figured out that not only are burbot fun to catch and much similar to walleye fishing but they're absolutely delicious yeah and not just that but i remember like guys that uh commercial fishermen have an ability in

some places where they're like our commercial whitefish seasons that they'll even be able to market the burbot oh really yeah hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew! Our northern brothers. You're 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. So, the tricky part about burbot, the first time I started catching burbot through the ice. In fact, I never caught a burbot not through the ice. But the first place we started doing it, we would go out, there's a lake we'd go fish. We'd go fish for perch during the daytime. And then it'd get to be dusk. And you would have like a narrow window of opportunity around dusk time to set up tip-ups and catch the burbot. Because their bite, like perch, you cannot catch a perch at dark.

Like there's some fish that don't want to eat when it's dark out. Pike. And some fish that don't want to eat when it's light out. Yeah, pike, the pike bite ends. The perch bite ends. You can get want to eat when it's light out. Yeah, the pike bite ends. The perch bite ends. You can get bass to eat at night. Burbot like to eat at dusk, even though we just caught a tanker at noon today. But you know what I'm saying?

Like a general thing, man, a general thing. So what we've been doing is going out and at night out here on this lake in interior Alaska, setting up tip-ups, which we explained earlier, for burbot. And real quick, can you guys explain the regs around, how many lines you're allowed to use when and all that kind of stuff? Yeah, it varies by water body. In most of the state, whatever the daily limit is, you're allowed to put down that many hooks.

On any water bodies where it's more, so on pretty much any water body, you can fish two lines for any species of fish through the ice. On places where you're allowed more than, to keep more than two burbot in a day, you can have as many hooks down as is the limit but um as soon as you do that you're only fishing for burbot so then there's additional regulations about hook size and uh the bait resting on the bottom and different um criteria to try to i think limit bycatch of other species yeah this is the thing that i feel like we talk about this year a day it's the thing that's not well understood by people who don't hunt and fish the the like how like tightly regulated and detail oriented the regulations are around all kinds of like harvest of

wild resources so i'm trying to think of a way to approach like the thing you're talking about with hook size so like as brant was saying a minute ago you approach the thing you're talking about with hook size. So as Brent was saying a minute ago, when you're ice fishing, just generally ice fishing, where you're trying to hope to catch a variety of species, you can fish two rods. The minute you commit that you're only fishing burbot,

it's like, okay, now that you've committed that you're only fishing burbot, you can jump up and put five, six. Depends on the lake, yeah. On a you can jump up and put five, six. Depends on the lake. Yeah. On a lot of lakes, it's five a day. In some areas, in some, like in rivers, it's 15 a day. Okay. So let's just say we were in a lake that's five a day. That's an easy number to work with. So all of a sudden you're like, no, no, no, man, I'm only after Burbot.

So they're like, okay. The regulations basically say to you, okay, since you're only catching Burbot, we're going to make sure that you're only after burbot. So they're like, okay. The regulations basically say to you, okay, since you're only catching burbot, we're going to make sure that you're only catching burbot. At that point, they dictate to you that you have to have a hook with a three-quarter inch gape. Greater than. Greater than three-quarter inch gape. And your bait has to be laying on the bottom of the lake. Resting on the bottom.

Yep. So what they're trying to do there is be like, okay okay if you're making a play where you're really just doing this we're gonna allow you to have more lines but we're gonna do added regulations on top of that to prevent like you said a minute ago from catching by catch so when we've been setting up at night we're going out and putting down like enough tip-ups where it's hard to keep track how many tip ups you have down like where you're kind of wandering around the dark a little bit trying to find them all because the snow's so damn deep when you dig it out and drill a hole through the ice your your tip up a sort of subsurface and it can vanish on you. Explain what you do, how you get bait and how you prep your bait for burbot.

We mainly do a personal use hooligan fishery. I'm going to open the vent. You're getting warm. Should we turn that heater off? It's off already. Is it that warm with no heater on? I thought someone turned it back on.

I'm sweating. Hold on. Let me open this other one too. Did you pause it? No. What were we talking about? Oh, how we get our bait. Yeah, candlefish and bait. Yeah, we go out dip netting.

We're not live right now. No, we are. I didn't pause it. All right, so're not. We're not live right now. No, we are. I didn't pause it. All right, so go ahead. We dip net our hooligan in the spring and package them. You got to back up and talk about the Afromix. People are going to have no idea what you're talking about. They're a smelt.

A fair number of people are probably familiar with rainbow smelt in the Great Lakes region. They're also a smelt, but they're larger and oilier. One of their common names is candlefish because you can get so much oil out of them because if you dry them out you can light them like a candle which i still haven't tried like i'm not exactly sure which end you're supposed to light but um i didn't know that i thought that was because you could render out oil that was flammable so you know it's mainly that but you can from what i understand you can dry them out and they'll burn like for an extended period of time off that oil and like the the they have two spellings i'm Spellings. I'm gathering one must be the kind of official spelling, which is E-U-C-H-A-L-O-N. Yeah.

Hooligan. Oh, that's, I don't think it's actually pronounced hooligan. I think it's pronounced eulicon. Eulicon? Yeah. But then there's a popularized spelling, which is hooligan like those hooligans who keep vandalizing my car, H-O-O-L-I-G-A-N, or candlefish. And it's an anadromous fish.

Yep. Lives out in the ocean, runs up the rivers to spawn, and there's so many that I've never done this. I've done it for Rainbow Smell years ago a fair bit. But they're running up so much that you're just dipping blind. You're dipping a net blind into the water. Yeah, and they spawn in the lower reaches of silty rivers typically like glacial silt right so they're rivers that you don't really have any visibility in anyways um there's some exceptions to that but

so it's mainly you're blind dipping but when it's good uh you're getting good numbers in each in each swipe with the net and it's just just a small, like a bait net. I don't know what, 12 or 14-inch diameter. Yeah, that's probably about 12, I think. And you scoop down and go with the basket, with the mouth of the net aiming downriver and swipe down to catch them coming up yep hey did you ever when you're growing up did you guys drop net for smelt no i i did very

little that um i didn't really grow up in the great lakes area so oh really oh yeah i guess not yeah you were way far away from the great lakes so uh yeah like fishing rainbow smelt we would dip net like what brant's talking about but usually sight fishing now and then you'd have to blind up usually you have land and you put a you'd sink a pole you'd wade out into a stream close to the mouth or float into the end of the lake and drive a pole into the mud and hang a lantern from the pole and you'd wait there in waders and you'd see the shadows coming by and you dip them like that or you go out to pier walls and drop a 36 inch by 30 inch into square net on the bottom of the lake

near the mouth and when schools would pass over you'd lift that drop net up oh cool and catch them and you could if you had it dialed and had your kind of gear right adjusted to the sensitivity of the fish, a lot of times you have to run pretty thin monofilament and have your mesh be the right color where it matched on the bottom or else they wouldn't go over it. But once you got it dialed, you could catch extraordinary numbers of smelt like that. I was talking about one night we caught, people catch many more than this, but I remember a night in particular we caught eight five-gallon buckets

of rainbow smelt in a night. That's a lot of smelt. And they're very good to eat. Oh, my God, they're good. Yeah. But the candlefish or hooligans, they don't have quite the reputation of rainbow smelt. No, there are people that really like to eat them, but they're oilier and they're larger, so the bones are a little bit more prominent when you're biting into them.

And they don't crisp up nice like a rainbow smelt. Because they're soggy with oil. Yeah. When Danny cooks them, my brother cooks them, he cleans them like a smelt, which you eat them whole. Just take the guts out. He fries them like a smelt, but then he puts them on a cooling rack in his oven that sits over a baking sheet. And then he puts that on 300 degrees and puts them in there for 20, 30 minutes to drip all the oil out. And when you pull that thing out, that baking sheet is full of oil.

Yep. And then he eats the candlefish. And my wife. That's a lot of work. Yeah. My wife will eat anything, man. My wife was like not big into candlefish. she'll eat you know i mean she's pretty good about stuff yeah i know the first one i tried to eat i cut a stick and tried to cook it over a fire

and after gotten it and everything the uh as it was cooking it all the oil just basically squeezed it right off the stick and fell into the fire. That greasy. Yeah. As the meat firmed up, it just squeezed it right off. So to get back around to the bait, you're primarily, when you go out for hooligans, you're primarily going out for bait, which you use for halibut and everything. Yep. Yeah, and I mean, herring is a great bait, but there's not as many opportunities to catch it yourself. So you're looking at a lot of money.

Dude, it is so expensive. Yeah, buying herring is expensive, man. Yep. So this is a great bait fish that for residents, there's no limit on that fishery are non-residents allowed to dip hooligans no not at all nope it's a it's a personal use fishery so it's limited to residents okay so then walk through how you turn it into burbot bait uh this is pretty elaborate process i like to brine i like to brine my bait joe and bryce uh like to use more fresh just frozen natural natural hooligan because you um like is it aesthetically or performance

i don't like getting blue dye all over my hands fishing all day i notice brant's hands are blue or green whatever the hot color is for the day or red some days yeah so you guys are going you're like taking your candlefish freezing them in gallon size ziplocks i like falling out for bait yeah i like to vacuum seal a bunch just in a single layer until i get sick of doing it because i think it keeps them fresher and they thaw out quicker yep um but at some point you just got to be done with processing them and yeah when you got 15 gallons of that stuff 15 gallons of hooligan or however much you want i know i normally just go with a cooler not like half the size of a regular beer cooler and i'll fill fill that up full, and then that's normally good for the year.

And that's how much you need. And that takes how long? To net that? 15 minutes sometimes. Okay, so it could be like hot and heavy. Oh, yeah. Talk about brine and bait for a minute. So I like to brine bait for a few reasons.

One is it helps to firm it up. So hooligan can be soft. So the basic component in a brine is salt. That helps to draw moisture out of the meat and firm it up. And then I also like to add various scents and dyes. Mainly because I just don't have that much i don't get to fish all that often and uh there's times when your bait can matter well relatively like relative to how much you wish you fish right so i want to make it count when i go out yeah no i got you

um but you're not a half asser nope and if Nope. And if there's any little thing that might help you catch a couple more on a given day, I like to try it. So you're using salt to firm the thing up, and then you can buy commercially produced bait enhancements? Yeah, you can buy commercially produced brines that already have a dye in them, or you can make different recipes uh adding different things into your brine to do the firmness and then so you can make your own brine with your own materials which is usually like salt and powdered milk um and water and then you can add herring oil or dye turn it whatever color you want um or buy the stuff that's already made up commercially now have you been brining halibut bait too i have i started doing that salt brine it but i never do any other stuff to it so what i like to do is brine it in a liquid brine and then drain it off the liquid and then uh put just straight salt on it and that'll help keep it firm and keep it

from freezing which when you're out ice fishing it's annoying when your bait's freezing yes um you use a rock salt or just regular like table salt i actually use table salt we you know at at your cabin see we usually use rock salt but i think that the finer salt helps to coat it better yeah um more area. So these hooligans then are blue, can be blue, can be red, can be normal. I see a whitefish, yeah, but he's already gone. He's already gone? Well, I mean, he kind of came into the zone just enough so I could see him. Where did he come from, the deep?

Yeah. Just did a 180 back in there. Why are they changing their attitude so much lately? We're in a real suck stretch here, man. We're due. Yeah, but they're just not coming in and lingering. Little pass-throughs. Well, at least we know they're around still.

You know what I was talking about TV earlier? It'd be like if you were watching TV, and just now and then the program flickered on. Right? And then it flickered off again. That's what this is like. And it flickers on, and there's like an action scene happening,

and then it flickers off. You're like, oh, man, what happened? Heartbreaking. scene happening and then it flickers off you're like oh man what happened heartbreaking so uh catching burbot now do you how convinced are you that burbot like to be down deep i'm real convinced of that but that you think that the evening the low light triggers a burbot that he's going to come up and hunt the shallows? Yep, come up. Spend the daylight not moving around, not being very active in deep water, and then coming up in the shallow flats to chase bait fish and feed. You know, they're a bottom.

They relate to the bottom. They kind of have that rough fish look to them, maybe like a catfish. So you could see how there'd be a perception that they're like this lazy, scavenging bottom feeder fish. Which is possibly another reason, you know, slimy bottom feeder, why they get that nickname lawyer. But they're actually, they feed mainly on live fish. It's like the kind of lawyer who has a billboard in Las Vegas. In a fight, call me. But they're very aggressive.

Except for last night, I guess, under our hole, they weren't very aggressive. We found seven that were not at all aggressive. They were curious curious but not aggressive so it seems it seems like a kind of unassailable truth that burbot like to live down deep

during the daylight hours and then as the sun goes down they come up shallow to hunt do you feel that's pretty true yeah I think that's pretty standard in lakes in particular in lakes in particular so what we do is to fish them you're going out and at dusk setting up your tip-ups in the deepest we've been running has been 15 feet 20 feet 15 20 feet of water up to as shallow as

where that fish has to be bumping his head on the ice as he swims around you wouldn't really think there's enough room for it to fit under there yeah it's like like i mean literally a gap of 12 or 16 inches between the bottom of the ice and the mud and you have a bait laying there and there's fish that are swimming around in that narrow that narrow gap of free water hunting

or spurting eggs because it's like the spawn time of year and you set them all up and then you either get like wham bam or just the stillness. Yeah, we've seen both. So the first night we set up, by the end of the night we had...

Ten. Ten bourbon? Yep. Big fish. From what to what inches? Well, the top end would be 14 pounds is the biggest so far the small end would be what like three or four pounds yeah maybe about that oh there you go whitefish yeah oh oh skirt in the edge what is he doing up there come on lure them down i think we gotta move no no move to where no i think we gotta move the

jig away from this beer hole so when they skirt the edge they come under us i completely disagree because we've had somebody come up we've had somebody come up to smell the thing not for the last couple hours yeah i don't know think about about it like this, Brant. Let's say, okay, I want to paint. I want to just bring you into the debate here. We have an attractant. Basically, we just have like a rig that you would use to catch a whitefish. A little jig.

What's that? A little jig. Yeah, we have a little jig with a little flasher above it. And the little jig is tipped with a wax worm. And we're jigging it in the center of the big spearing hole. And we've had quite a number of whitefish literally come up to the thing, oddly not bite it, but just come up to it and put their nose against it. Some come under it. Some come along to the side. but it seems to be the last couple

have kind of skirted around the edge brandt thinks that we would go drill a hole there's one right there yep that's him coming back you gotta angle and shoot it i might side shoot him because he's not playing get playing ball with us oh this is gonna be a tough shot yeah holy cow well he's still he's gonna come back he's just holding tight he's standing there or not standing you know what i mean like if a fish could stand he'd be standing can you see him still do you still see him yeah i see him. Is he looking this way? He's like right underneath you, Brant. He's just messing around right up in the zone. Is he coming in?

Not quite. Do you still see him? Yeah. Really? Yeah, he's right there. Try going down to the bottom with the jig. Oh, I was going to say lift the jig all the way to the surface. One or the other.

Yeah, try that. Just for a minute. minute he's gonna come right up to the hole i don't see him anymore gosh i've never seen that in all my years of ice fishing what's the fish doing now all right he he went away he'll be back i'm gonna laugh if he comes and eats that waxy that's floating down there. No, I hope he does. That's a nice natural presentation. Yeah, that's beautiful. That's what I was going for.

So, Brandon is suggesting, since they seem to be skirting the edge, he's suggesting going and drilling a hole over yonder, thinking that as they skirt the edge, it'll bring them right below the spear hole. I feel it would just make it to be that when fish are investigating it, there's so much more out of sight. Where is he now?

Same zone? Oh, I see him. Here, you know what? Oh, he's coming in. I might go for him. Oh, you want to try him I might go for him. Oh. You want to try him, Brant? Oh. Did he spook?

He might. I don't think he would have spooked. Here, hold that again. Because he was at least up against the bottom there, which makes him like a little bit more pinnable. I'm not saying like put it far away and maybe even if we just put it like three feet away, we'd still be able to see it.

But it would give, it would let them, you know, they're kind of staying like five feet away from it. Except for the ones that come up and smell it. Or the ones that come up underneath it. Right, but that hasn't been happening lately. What was I talking about?

How my idea is horrible. Yeah, but even before that. Burbot coming up. Shallow to feed. Oh, so yeah. So you can like lay by like a considerable bunch of poundage on burbot meat. And I think about a burbot it looks

like we don't really get into what they look like i think it looks like a frog and a snake made love where you have a a very bull it's fishy for sure it's like indisputably fishy but has a has bullfrog qualities to the head and the body is that of a like an eel like snake like body covered in definitely snakehead ish snakehead ish don't you think yeah when you feel them they're not snakehead but i think if you just looked at two pictures of the two fish yep oh you mean like not a snake's head but a snakehead fish yeah yeah for sure they have some similar similarities with like a bow fin too yep and they got that fin like the dorsal fin runs down the whole length of the thing and then he's got like a bottom what

fin you think it is on the bottom the caudal fin caudal fin is basically along his entire bottom he also looks like a bow fin. You know that fish? Yeah, dogfish. Dogfish or bow fin. A lot in common appearance with a bow fin, but flesh-wise, dramatically better. And they're covered in frog skin. Yeah, slimy.

Slimy skin, like more of a froggish skin than you'd find on say a catfish when you go to clean a burbot you can just make a cut through the skin and peel the skin off with a pair of pliers and then you got all the tail meat so from the vent back you can just kind of flay it off like a flay from the vent forward you're peeling off big back straps kind of and the ribs are weird because the ribs don't curve down but just kind of go straight out so you're actually flaying off like a like a sizable chunk of meat and the way that you always hear it described is it's described as poor man's lobster oh whitefish right underneath you right underneath you no jig down the hole i cannot see

it here you'll find them oh all right got him yep i'm gonna should i take this this is a risky shot you think he's gonna turn around all right way oh damn that's a tough shot yeah that was a tough shot kind of getting out of the oh you gotta be kidding me who tied that knot someone's going swimming you know earlier i was naming off all the names that there are for burbot which is endlessly fascinating to me. But when we were naming names off, did I name, did some people call it poor man's lobster?

No. I didn't talk about that. The reason folks call it poor man's lobster is because sort of the preferred way to eat burbot is to prepare it like lobster. Where you take the meat and

boil it like you're doing a lobster boil, dip it in melted butter, um, and just eat it boiled. But a thing that I can't figure out is that you've had like, you've been to salmon boils and other kinds of fish boils yeah like do you think that the burbot like if i let's say i took a chunk of walleye and a chunk of burbot and boiled them both do you feel that you would eat the burbot and be like man that is better suited to this preparation than walleye i've often wondered that because there's not really many fish species that you cook like that just drop it in boiling water for a minute in pieces um it does have a lot a distinct lobster like texture and flavor you feel like it full-on does

oh it does yeah it tastes so i mean it's like i don't know that he goes we eat them that way but i don't know why we eat them that way he's i just eat them that way because they're called poor man's lobster oh i think i mean they taste like a saltwater fish more than a freshwater fish yeah so you feel that that's i'm definitely like i definitely like that's how i think about cooking them for sure man do you guys fry them too though i've never fried i don't think i've never fried one in my life yeah i've fried them um usually i just don't have that much so it's a bit of a novelty and so it's just cool to cut them up into little they're like when you when you cross cut those back straps it's like little scallops and then drop those in the salty boiling water quick and dip them in butter and i mean it's it's cool and it's like rarely have people that you're serving it to ever even ever had it or

heard of a burbot before so yeah our friend randy was saying that burbats were so despised where he grew up in minnesota among walleye fishermen that if you caught a burbot, people would go drill a new hole as though the hole had been tainted by the presence of that fish. And walleye are good, but I feel like people

almost think walleye are better than they actually are. There's a lot of fish that are as good as walleye. Yeah, you're not going to get in a fish house full of Minnesotans, no one's going to agree with you on that one. They feel like walleye is just

absolutely good. I think what people like when they like walleye is walleye don't have any muddy taste. You don't need to do any extra kind of trimming and it's just clean, white, benign. It's the halibut of the fresh water. Yeah.

Meaning it's a blank slate. There's no... Fish. Oh, nice one. Oh, that's a good one. See ya. Okay, okay, okay. I got you, I got you, I got you.

Oh, that's not good. No, but it didn't spook him somehow. Podcast cord went into the spear. Man, he's kind of out of my zone now. He's going down. He's got the spear three to four feet in. Got him through it. I think I hit him.

I think he got him. Did you really? Yeah, it was a cock-eyed shot. Yep. Oh, he's on there. All right he got him. Did you really? Yeah, it was a cockeyed shot. Yep. Oh, he's on there. All right, pull him up. Nice. Nice work.

That was an impressive shot. Holy mackerel. That's how we do it. Careful, careful, careful. 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 Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service.

That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet.

Welcome to the OnX x club y'all there we go got him that was impressive impressive underneath underneath us yeah that was like uh see my sports analogies i'm they're so dated i feel like that was like larry bird right that was like a trick shot there we go that's impressive here you go throw them outside starting to get decent number those nice nice nice so what happened there was the embricer bryce the embricer you feel like you sucked him in i feel like you're in do you feel like you're in the driver's seat

right now uh sometimes but then again i can't tell if I'm bringing them in or spooking them away. So you're not getting the sense that they're coming eyeballing that thing? Some of them do, but some of them just don't really seem to care about what I'm doing here. But why are they showing up then? Here's what I'd like to know more than anything. Let's say all of us each had a hole like this would we all be seeing about the same yeah it's just like a total random distribution of fish that happened to be passing through or are we creating a little micro environment

you know with the jig and the light the light difference i guess it probably doesn't look too no it has looked different from their perspective you know what just happened is whitefish came in was a little bit non-committal um a lot of guys were thinking uh you know steve he's a great man i don't think he can pull this off uh i think he's finally met his match and and in the end i came through that fish was far enough underneath us that i could not see it steve was leaning over the hole looking under us and throwing backwards and i couldn't even see the fish nor that the spear stuck it is how far under us it was yep it was like a shot from 10 feet behind the three-point line. Yes, exactly.

Exactly. 11 feet. Where were we? So, that little bit of action there. We were talking about eating. Relative. Oh, yeah. Walleyes.

Oh, I was saying, I was saying that a walleye, and this is not to bash on walleyes. I love, I like everything about walleyes oh i was saying i was saying that a walleye and this is not the bash on walleyes i love i like i like everything about walleye like catching them looking at them love eating them but i was saying it's kind of like a halibut type fish where it's sort of a blank slate it's like white flesh flakes nice clean tasting you can kind of do anything with it no one's going to eat it and be offended by it you know but i feel like well to me i don't know you guys should describe it you guys probably eaten more than i have i have never had walleye before in my life well i've never even caught walleye that's right there's only two minnesotans because not of walleye in alaska no no or i don't know if they're in idaho there's damn sure a lot definitely not where i was fishing

in the red in the reservoir systems being a minnesotan and eating a lot of walleye i thought i think that's what it tasted like because to me the little that i've eaten it when i taste it i don't taste to me and you know if you're if you're a lover of halibut, don't get mad at me, but to me, it's a little on the bland side. It's such a blank slate. Where walleye, there is some flavor there. There's a sweetness maybe to it. I agree. Sweetness.

You feel that walleye has more flavor than halibut? Definitely. And I think it has a better consistency. So you'd rather have a pound of walleye than a pound of halibut? Any day. I would too. I mean, I don't know that i wouldn't but i think if you went and polled most americans

they're just not going to agree with that but brand give your take on what walleye tastes like um i think yana summed it up pretty good they're i think they're they're mild so they don't have a fishy taste they don't have a strong flavor at all. They can take on whatever seasonings you want to flavor them with, but they have a bit of a sweetness and they're firm. And as opposed to halibut, if you cook it a touch too long, it can get a little dry or even kind of threaded like chicken can. Whereas walleye oh fish straight

down straight down get him at the jig at the jig come on eagle nice round one come on eagle got oh nice over his nose nice right in the head. Yeah, lift up gentle. Oh. You got him. Yep, and then swing him this way. Nice shot. With your reactions. Oh, no. That was excitement. I wouldn't say, oh, oh, oh, about a miss.

Oh, look at that. I think I got him on the tip of his nose. Right in the nose. Nice shot. Top lip. You stoned him. Look it. He's out.

He's not even flapping his tail. Yeah, bring him up. Yep, There you go Oh man That's a beautiful shot Through the brain Giannis The plug

Putellis Nice shot Nice shot Man Okay First one We'll talk that to luck Giannis is batting A,000 lifetime spearfishing.

Next time we see Giannis, he's going to have a hat that says the Dark House on it. Nice shot. Okay. Back to walleyes. Walleyes. Because we're going to get to whitefish edibility soon, very soon. Joe, do you have any thoughts on the flavor of walleye? No.

I mean, like Steve was saying, most people would probably prefer halibut over walleye, but I'm with Brant. I like the walleye more, and i don't know if that's because it's not as readily available to us up here or if it's because i just like the texture better you mean because in alaska you can't turn around without bumping into a halibut yeah for a bag of halibut flies yeah so along that lines and how it matters what's most abundant so when i was back in minnesota ice fishing with buddies this winter i brought you know halibut to share with everyone and salmon and none of my minnesota buddies who catch walleyes all the time they all thought i

was crazy saying that i like walleye better than halibut they say oh halibut's better 10 times out of 10 because they don't have it it's different but they have a freezer full of walleye yeah when i say that the fish is approachable or like people like it and it's a blank slate what i mean is this is like okay take a fish like mackerel, okay? For a lot of people, it's too oily, too dark, too strong flavored. But there are people who are going to know how to cook it and wind up loving it so much that it makes up for the detractors. And I think with halibut or walleye, there's people who are kind of like, I don't generally like fish.

Like I'm not a fish person, but I like walleye. I'm not a fish person, but I like walleye. I'm not a fish person, but I like halibut because it's just a kind of a and I'm not talking down on it or being mean about it, but I'm saying it's kind of a safe, mild, it doesn't inspire a lot of

it doesn't inspire a ton of love and it doesn't inspire a ton of hate. Except for it inspires a lot of love. True, and I think burbot falls right into that same category. Meaning what? A mild white meat that isn't strong but has a good natural flavor. Yeah, and a good texture. And a good texture flavor yeah and a good texture and a good texture with white fish

see oh hold on can i add something to this whole uh uh poor man's lobster oh yeah poor man's lobster when i was working at old tuscanini in beaver creek colorado that's where he got the name long tong yanni we because he uh because he manned the long tongs at the tuscan eagle with the old grill station working the grill and he had a set of long tongs and uh long tong yachting um no they call it we bring it we bring it we we'd bring in a fish uh called a monkfish and that was also that's got a good liver uh referred to to as uh poor man's lobster it was yep yeah no yeah monkfish liver monkfish flesh monkfish i never heard that and again i have i mean i don't fit you know it's like i don't fish for him so we don't talk about him as much but

that's just yeah i had never heard that before hey brant can you touch on um can you touch on burbot liver kind of like start out by how they have a gigantic liver and proceed from there yeah so everyone's familiar with cod liver oil right um and so as we've talked about burbot are the only species of freshwater cod so they have the same trait of a very large and oily or fatty liver um that it can be cooked in a few ways it's i think it's a it's a delicacy in some places i think um in france i think burbot liver is popular freshwater burbot liver or of course freshwater but yeah freshwater fish liver um and so i've just recently started doing this as i learned about it but um did you do this because you heard about burbot liver eating or just because you're like well hey it's got a big liver like a cod i'm gonna try to cook it

i actually because i heard about it as burbot okay it's got a big liver like a cod. I'm going to try to cook it. I actually, because I heard about it as burbot, and it was introduced as, well, it's a cod, so it's similar. Yep, I got you. But the way that I've done it the last couple years is just sliced thin and then drop it in an ungreased frying pan. Like a dry pan. A dry pan, and there's so much oil in that liver it'll just create its own grease it'll render out and then you're basically just frying it in its own oil and it'll just it'll crisp up real nice um on both sides so you're just you're just kind of zapping it once you get oil in there and you don't want to overheat that oil because i made that mistake and it smells fairly bad but when you just just brown it it kind of crisps up and it's it's not gamey at

all like it's a real nice flavor and that just add a little bit of salt it's good it's good do you ever drink the oil afterward or is that too strong i have not that that oil has definitely some flavor to it that reminds me two um fish oil stories years ago i was down in you know the the the species of asiatic carp that have gotten into the mississippi drainage yeah there's like several so there's big head silver silver that's kind of the primary ones the flying carp being the silvers and there's another one big head carp and these are carp that they were using to clean aquaculture facilities so these are like herbivorous carp um filter feed like yeah filter feeding carp that they would put in these

aquaculture facilities where they're raising catfish or tilapia and they'd use the carp to maintain the tanks and during flooding uh you know the the aquaculture facilities would be like overrun with water the carp escape and get out into the main stem river channel and now they're all over in the and in some of these stretches of river the primary biomass of fish in these rivers is these carp so there's been a lot of brouhaha about what to do with them and there are some commercial fishermen that are operating um up and down the ohio and mississippi rivers i think some other branches of it as well netting these carp up and they're sending them overseas to israel for gefilte fish and various

other processed fish preparations and people for a while were thinking oh if we could just catch them all um we'll take care of the problem and so they would set requirements where they want to be able to catch all the carp out but not destroy the game fish so they would set requirements where they want to be able to catch all the carp out but not destroy the game fish so they would come out and say like okay you can use a whatever inch mesh net you can use a four inch mesh net to catch carp thinking that your game fish can be small enough to fit through the mesh and they could go in and put a real dent on the large introduced carp but what they would find then is you would still have the same poundage of carp in the watershed it would just be the poundage would be comprised of much smaller fish rather than much

larger fish it's just this ongoing problem if you want to go read about it you can go read about all the different thoughts in it one of the most pressing issues around these introduced carp species is that they will get up into the great lakes watershed now you know of course the ohio missouri mississippi tennessee right these all flow these all wind up flowing into the Mississippi Fish fish fish Oh spooked What spooked him? The jig

You drop it on the ground Yeah I was starting to pick it up again And then you guys started yelling fish So I tried to set it on the bottom Do you mind tending that line a little bit for me? Maybe just hang it there And just stop jigging it i don't know man i kind of like that i don't know i feel like you well like when when the fish comes

in oh when he comes in instead of just dropping it to the ground like a quick movement instead of scaring the bejeebas out of them so i'm off on a little bit of a side note here about it's gonna continue for a minute because a big fear about these Asiatic carp that have invaded the Mississippi drainage areas. Straight down. Is that another one? That's a different one. That's a bad angle.

I might wait. Oh, no, he's not even a contender anymore. I have a shot at him. Do you? Yep. Take it. Will you man that at him. Do you? Yep. Take it. Will you man that line? Yeah, you're good.

That's a big angle. Oh, he's right below us now. Oh. Definitely dodged that one. He dodged it, didn't he? Yeah, that one was skedaddling as that thing was coming down. He moved. It sure seemed like it.

Holy mackerel. I thought I had him. Who's up? Giannis is up. No, I'm up. Oh, that's right. I stole that from you. So a fear with these Asiatic carp species that have gone and invaded this river system

is that they would get into the great lakes and what i was saying is like so the tennessee ohio missouri like everything flows into mississippi um the river that ben met the writer ben metcalf calls the american heartworm and flows out into the gulf of mexico you know in new orleans around new orleans so the great lakes that whole system flows out through the st lawrence seaway into the atlantic but years ago they made a shipping canal to connect the great lakes watershed to the mississippi watershed so you can now do what you would not have been able to do you know 100 years ago or do you know when they dug that canal i don't 200 years ago i don't want to mess that up 200 years ago you'd not have been

able to go up to mississippi and then finagle your way into the great lakes those different watersheds but they made an artificial connecting point and they're afraid that these carp that are now in this river and the mississippi drainage will make the jump by going through this shipping canal and invading the great lakes and what they've done to prevent this from happening is this river and the mississippi drainage will make the jump by going through this shipping canal and invading the great lakes and what they've done to prevent this from happening is the army corps of engineers runs an electro barrier so there's a bunch of water there that they have like an electrified water that's meant to prevent fish from wanting to cross that barrier and that's meant to prevent fish from wanting to cross that barrier. And that's what's... What's that?

I said no shit. Yeah, that's what they have to keep... That's what they installed to keep these carp from coming in and invading the Great Lakes. So there's been a real thing like, what are we going to do with all these damn carp? So people have been kicking around different ideas of how to make it a marketable.

And this guy had built this facility where he was going to start everybody was all you know everybody's always talking about eating omega-3 fatty acids people like cod liver oil it's a like you can extract fat from these carp so i went to visit this little mobile processing facility that he was beginning to test out and he wanted to get i think it was like fda approval to be able to make this carp oil and put it in pill form. And I go down there to see his facility and he's showing me a, he's got like a bottle of oil that he's extracted from these carp and you smell it. It smells just like cod liver

pills, cod liver oil. Um, and I have a little sip of it and and it was pretty peppery and very cod liver oily. And they go and investigate this little centrifuge-type machine he's using to make this stuff. You couldn't have fit another maggot in that thing, man. And I remember being just kind of turned off because I felt a little bit like I'd been duped into eating maggot oil. I mean, it was just like he hadn't been cleaning the thing. It was the nastiest thing.

I don't know if that guy ever got it off the ground. But that was like a weird case scenario with that stuff. But the other thing that was not weird, Yanni, do you remember up on Nunavak Island when we were fishing tomcod through the ice? Yes. Do you remember eating those livers? Yep. Dipped in seal oil? That was not bad.

No. We ate those raw. Yeah. So the Eskimo of Nunavik like tomcod liver, which is probably another one that's very similar, but a very small fish. So we've covered burbot up and down on eating. I want to now touch on eating whitefish and this is like a one where they're not all universally appreciated because people have i feel like people have the same from a table fare stance people kind of have a similar perspective with mountain whitefish

which is the whitefish living like anyone who's fished the West knows them as being a fish of the trout streams. But whereas rainbow trout, if you're fishing in the Rockies and you catch a rainbow trout, that's a non-native fish that's been introduced into that system by, you know, out of barrels, unless you're on the the pacific slope if you're on the pacific slope you can have native rainbows but anything that flows east absolutely you're fishing a non-native fish species when you're fishing brown trout you're fishing a non-native that's a european trout so when people think they're in some pristine Western thing catching brown trout and rainbow trout, you're catching fish that got dumped into the place out of a barrel.

It's basically like, it's kind of like a make, it's a little bit of a make-believe fish. But living there alongside them is mountain whitefish, which look strikingly similar to the round fish that we're eating here and are catching here. And mountain whitefish are like a lot of people don't like them like all the trout fishing you've done janice what has been sort of your general take on what people think of mountain whitefish oh they treat them like them those minnesotans treat the uh eel pout i mean they i've seen guys just give them the death squeeze and act like they release them they give them the death squeeze and act like they release them.

Give them the death squeeze, throw them on the bank so birds eat them. I mean, just no respect at all. I never heard of anybody eating them until I talked to you. When they do that, are they thinking that it's going to make more room for more non-native fish by getting rid of that fish? Yes. Like they don't want the natives competing with the non-native oh yeah they don't yeah well they don't yeah the sport fish the ones that jump right yeah the suckers get the same treatment yeah we started eating them because we would take them and brine them and smoke them and make like whitefish dip out of them

uh chef eduardo garcia smokes them and puts them in empanadas. Yep. Little dink or two. He came in hot. Yeah, he came in hot and crazy. I'm not even going to get ready for him. He looked like he was running from a big burbot. Did he come and go?

He just came in like he was. He never even slowed down. That was just a pass through, man. Yanni, can you turn the line for me? Yeah, I got it. Well, it's under your boot right now. You're good. So that's kind of like the mountain whitefish, which I think is a pretty good fish.

But it's weird because there's so much variability in whitefish. So like in the Great Lakes, you have the lake whitefish, which has a commercial market. That is like a phenomenal fish. Very white texture, but it's bony, and you got to debone it. Here, I think that a lot of people... Hold on, you can cut a full-on fillet off of it. You can cut a full-on fillet, yeah. You can go in and take a lake whitefish, which are highly respected. So in the Great Lakes, lake whitefish are as easily as esteemed as walleye,

perhaps more so. And there's a limited, the Chippewa holds some commercial license where they use trap nets to catch lake whitefish. And then they market the caviar as well and they catch some big ass burbot as bycatch in those trap nets but other people target them they have a really good reputation you can flay them but you have one line of pin bones that you got to remove on a whitefish but yeah they're excellent fried as sandwiches they export them eat them in europe good fish up here this like they use a lot of them to feed dogs and stuff.

That's not true? Oh, I don't honestly know. I think that historically, whitefish were an important source of food, primarily in the winter because it was a fish that was catchable in the winter and i believe it was used as dog food but with nets or traps yeah um i'm not sure how much white fish is used as dog food now just because people don't run sled dogs and stuff as much anymore um i mean there's areas where people do i know that there's you know certainly some fish is used to feed dogs um and i think there's people that use white fish for it

yeah what's the general like in alaska what's the general reception of the speed of white fish's table fare in alaska i think it's uh a little bit unknown. I mean, I think for one thing, I think whitefish is kind of overshadowed by all the other great tasting fish we have. And as far as like the sport side of things, there's just not that many people that get after it for whitefish. There's some personal use or subsistence fisheries like in the chattanooga you can spear them as they're spawning in the fall okay and people go do that people do that um and there are there's some subsistence uh netting in some parts of the state for white fish oh huge burbot huge burbot holy cow jigg that oh my was he paying attention he didn't he wasn't he was moving that was a big fish holy cow i didn't even see it yeah he went right under you bryce

was this big as that that 14 pounder pretty close it was in that it was in that size class definitely no way That was cool. Oh, man. I wish I would have seen it. They're out cruising our edge that we're set up on. What's that? I have that bourbon. You got them on dirt?

Yeah. He's just killing it with that stuff. Open that window up for you. Oh, you got them filmed. No, I got them out of water. He's got them on. He's got him on. He's got him on the hook. Oh, nice job, Dirt.

How big is it? Were we right or were we exaggerating? You were exaggerating, but it's a dandy. Holy mackerel. You jigged him off, Dirt. So you don't need a flasher. Seriously, all that talk about Vexies. I don't know. Good job, Dirt.

That's a giant. We're in here working. Garrett's out there just fishing. So you had a camera aiming down, making pretty pictures, as is your job. And you were fishing, which is not your job. And all of a sudden, whammo, there he was. That's incredible. Good work.

Do you guys feel that when he went by that he was headed to hit that? Like he had a mission? He was on a line to that jig you stole that fish from us that's a nice fish man that's probably like a what like a like a 12 pound burbot eight so you went out looked at him so he's not even close to the 14er very nice nice work nice work laying by some meals all right shut the windows back to spearing get the dark house back into action oh no what are you talking about man keep jigging keep stacking them up oh we'll be able to snag it up so there's a book i'm reading right now called the land of feast and famine and it's about uh fur trappers who were working around great slave lake in the i think in the 30s the 20s late 20s and uh man for their like because these are guys that

had are traveling by canoe and they have to carry their sled dogs with them in the canoe because they're traveling into the trapping grounds and then when everything freezes up they make sleds and the dogs pull the sleds so these spend most their time in the summertime fishing whitefish with nets to keep you know the dogs fed every night and then when it starts to freeze up in the winter when they know they can keep fish frozen then they just net whitefish in order to feed the dogs throughout the winter in order to feed themselves throughout the winter and also to use some for trap and bait and these guys will go in this book they talk about periods where they're going literally months eating nothing but white fish cooked on a spit over a fire and the intense cravings

that you would get living that lifestyle but he would say that the thing you could get over like steffensen talks about this too is like you can get over salt like the our taste for salt is an acquired taste and you say when you go months and months with no salt you lose that feeling of wishing you had salt on your meat and when steffensen would travel into the village like eskimo villages they would just make sure to put because they were always worried about everyone eating their food and they would put extra salt on their food because they know that the people who didn't use salt would never be able to eat even moderately salted food.

And it was a way to make your food unpalatable to people was to put a little bit of salt on it. Like it's that level of acquired. But this guy that was living for months on just whitefish, their cravings would be for red meat. And like that would be the thing that they wish they had and would wait and wait for was to get caribou because it would offset like how off you felt just eating nothing but whitefish

but the way i'll be cooking these whitefish we're catching right now is just brine them whole and smoke them yep it's because it's the perfect fish for it it's oily it's like a little bit bony, but when you smoke it, it loosens the flesh up so you can peel the flesh off. It leaves a skeleton that looks like something you could put in a museum display, like something Sylvester the Cat would be walking around. The meat peels away, and you have the perfect little skeleton. All I do is I slit them up from the belly to the chin,

take out the guts, cut the gills out but leave the head on, truss them by putting a little string around the back of their neck, under their gill cover, out their mouth and tie a loop in it and just hang them in the smoke or smoke like that. I fucking love those things. How long do you brine them for eight hours in like sometimes overnight like salt and water 50 salt sugar brine salt sugar yeah salt sugar and i'll sometimes put honey in there you see people putting all like oh sprig of thyme i just

think that like that stuff is like it does not right it doesn't pass into the meat i don't think i think that people put a lot of stuff in fish brines that there's no way you can taste later i put rum in fish brines like when i do dry brines i'll put rum in there i've seen where you can slice up fennel and put alcohol on it and wind up getting like a fennel taste to it but i think a lot of people put a lot of aromatics and stuff into into brines to brine fish and there's no way that that flavor is carrying over in the necessary quantity where you can taste it above the taste of just like smoke brine and smoke fish yeah i think garlic i think you can get i can see you get garlic on it yeah because garlic has a strong taste yeah but putting like a sprig

of green herbs i just i just feel like when you see that kind of stuff, it's like, come on. It looks pretty, but it doesn't really matter. But yeah, that's how I would definitely go about cooking these roundies. And then lake trout, the other fish we have on the ice right now, is often criticized for being a tad oily.

And it's one of those fish that some people are dismissive of, but then people that love it really love it. Matt, my brother this year, smoked up some lake trout and brought it out, and my God, is the stuff good smoked. I think it's a great fish smoked. Joe, talk real quick about what your reluctance is about killing big lakers. So I don't like to kill big lakers because they're a pretty long-lived fish, and it takes them a while to get to the size to actually be able to, like, spawn.

So if you catch, say, a mid-30-inch laker, it's probably 15 years 18 years old something like that and i just i feel bad killing big fish like that the old ones yeah you ever fish yellow eye rockfish that's different i don't know why it's different it's 80 i don't know why it's different because it's a hundred years old because i don't know why i like eating those i don't know what why there's a difference between maybe that's it maybe it's the flavor maybe if the lake trout tasted as good as a yellow eye rock you'd be whacking them oh i don't know if we'd have a lake trout left at that point yeah if a laker was because the yellow eye rockfish is a phenomenal fish if a lake was that good is it just because you kind of like i don't really like them and they're old and those two things combined makes

me not want to kill them i think so and i've tried them before um like you said they're good smoke so if we do get a small one and have to keep it i wouldn't mind trying smoking it but the times i've had it before i tried to have cooked it i've just done it wrong or the other person who's cooking it didn't prepare it right maybe and it's left you feeling like why even yeah why even give them the death stroke i pickled them and thought they were okay but i think pickled pike's better. You like pickling northern's better? Yeah.

Yeah, man, I just have never mind, like, I just don't mind, like, bait, I don't mind baked lake trout. I like smoked lake trout. But I feel like I have, like, a little bit higher tolerances for... For gaminess? Or just, yeah, like, I just,

I kind of like, you know, think of all I'm going to say, man, I think that some stuff, there's, like, I don't think it's everything's job to taste perfect. Right? There's just something that is like interesting to mess with it, to experiment with it. And if something isn't absolutely perfect, I don't feel like that it was like an inconvenience. You know what I mean? I don't mind cooking something and then being like yeah

you know next time i'm gonna try this i feel like that in and of itself is like a little bit educational warrants some messing around there's some things i mess with like common carp i've messed them a few times and in the end i just have come to i've done it enough and had enough disappointment or now i just don't feel like messing with common carp, right? And you'll still find guys that are like, think that common, oh, you got to do this and fish cakes. You're right. You can basically turn it into a completely other substance with the addition of everything in your kitchen.

But I don't look at them and feel, you know, I mean, I just don't look at them and see food, but I still look at Laker and I'm like, yeah, man. That's like a food fish. All right, Brant, you got any concluding final thoughts as we sit here and watch the live screen TV? Oh, it's our last night. I'm excited.

I hope it turns on again. Yeah. We had our first night was on fire and last night was just dead i wouldn't call it on fire our first night well i don't know relatively we sat we sat over a hole and didn't yeah got one bite okay well the tip ups tip ups were going off and when i'm saying on fire on fire i'm informing that by what happened the next night.

Yeah. Right. So with two nights to compare to, I think we had one night that was on fire and one night that was on ice. Although we still saw a lot of fish. So if something, some unexplainable thing or something that some smart person might know about pressure or moon phase or light you know whatever turned them off last night hopefully that switch goes the other way tonight and i think it would be pretty fun every fisherman has their own thing but i do feel as do a lot of anglers that i think that barometric pressure has major implications for fish yeah that's my gut instinct

is a high pressure system will shut the bite off on burbot on burbot you know i think on lake as well you think high pressure shuts lakers down yeah high pressure fires northerns up in my opinion all right bryce you got any concluding thoughts brant's concluding thought was he hopes we have a good night of fishing well i i obviously agree with that as well you're hoping for a good night of fishing yeah something a little better than yesterday um hopefully we can jig a couple more up tonight like the first night too and we probably got another hour of spearing before it gets too dark we can just throw that light down you know well they just quit coming after a while last night we had last night we shined the light down there never saw another whitefish once it got dark.

I don't know what they do. They go somewhere and lay low. Joe? I want people to appreciate the eel pout and not treat them like the Minnesota ice fishing walleye guys. Just kind of, if you do get a chance to go out for them, try cooking it up because I think they're really good. Would you go so far as to think that you're going to start the North American Eel Pout Alliance or the North American Eel Pout Foundation? I don't know about that far. But you do want people to know that it deserves your respect.

Yeah, and it's not just a trash fish that swims on the bottom of lakes picking up garbage. Yeah, any wild thing, any wild thing that you would be so lucky as to have that wild thing grace you with its presence,

right, warrants a level of admiration and respect, whether or not you think it's a good thing to eat or not. With some invasive species, like excluding that. But generally, yeah. To sort of wantonly, to kind of like wantonly destroy a native species of fish out of some misguided notion

that you're going to be like improving other fisheries by disturbing a system that has been intact for tens of thousands of years that you killing this fish for no reason is somehow going to like uh alter things for the better is a little absurd not you but i'm just talking about a mug that would that would leave an eel pow on the ice yeah out of disdain for it uh yanni i don't have any concluders man my concluder is just hoping more whitefish turn up for it gets dark yeah that'd be nice be nice to get a couple more shots each but um yeah i'd like to i can dovetail off that a little bit. And just, I was thinking, as we're getting ready for the concluding thoughts here, that I was thinking, man, just another species to add to the list of wild game

where people are like, oh, that thing sucks, sucks, sucks, sucks, sucks, sucks. And then finally I'm like, oh, tried it. Guess what? Doesn't suck. Actually pretty good. And I was going to say like make a short list and then i'm counting off in my head i'm like well i've heard that about elk i've probably heard that about deer and moose and camel and antelope and bears mountain lions and by golly if like some

so who are these people that however long ago like started this thing where they were hunters and fishermen they were sportsmen and all of a sudden they're like you know not really that into eating them i'm just gonna start saying they suck yeah it was the it was some sort of like dramatic shift that came out of having too many chickens growing for them yep it was like a thing that it came out of uh it came out of being spoiled by abundance of other stuff that people could start to have like disdain for or negative feelings about the resources yeah so my concluding thought is next time you hear someone tell you that something's

so and so is no good to eat, try it. Find a good recipe. Yeah, if I didn't eat everything that someone told me is no good to eat, yeah, you'd scratch off 90% of the wild harvest out there. All right, that's all. Thank you for joining. 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.

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