The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 202: From the Two Kingdoms of Nature

Episode Date: January 6, 2020

Steven Rinella talks with JT Van Zandt, Jesse Griffiths, Seth Morris, and Janis Putelis. Topics discussed: Lola and Stone Age chewing gum; how Texas is the highest of the high and lowest of the low; hunting nilgai; poop piles; how Steve shot the top of a nilgai's heart out and then saw it run off like it was carrying the mail; electro-tenderizing meat using a car battery; fish-spotting abilities; flounder gigging; appreciating silence; when dolphins join your hunt; 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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without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Presented by OnX Hunt, creators of the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters.

Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with Onyx. Okay, it's got to start out with a correction, but it's a weird correction because the mistake hasn't been made yet. It's a preemptive correction. Kind of. You understand the onyx?

I guess, but it's all messed up because we're dealing with all this happening in the future, which none of it has happened yet. Oh, man. It's like that Michael J. Fox movie, Back to the Future. My dad always said, never apologize in advance. Oh.

Well, is he alive? No. Oh, well, glad we're here. Glad he's not. Here's what happened. I was talking on a show that we haven't released yet about a gentleman it was a like a a meth ring a drug ring um and a couple of these gentlemen within this meth amphetamine ring turned on one of their associates and tied him to a tree and spread bacon all around him

so that bears would come and eat him. And then the guy got his hands and rope lubed up with bacon and was able to pull free. You guys know about this story? I haven't heard it. Your reason why is because it was many years ago. The mistake happened where I was talking to a journalist and i don't know how it can't how it happened but i felt that the journalist i was talking about was telling me that he wrote the

story and he said that he likes to repost it he likes the story so much that he reposted every year on facebook but it turns out it wasn't the feller I was talking to. He was talking about another writer by the name of John Craig who covered this trio of gentlemen involved in this ring. And what happened was they turn on their associate and drive them off out in the woods. And go and they got a i don't get this pistol they got a 22 pistol they had to fix because the cylinder was loose on it and so they put a drill bit in there to hold the cylinder in place and they they go out and go to shoot their associate

with the 22 and the 22 misfires it is like out of a movie. They go to shoot him out in the woods in the 22 misfires. And then one of the guys starts arguing that it must be divine intervention, and so they shouldn't shoot him. So then he takes the pistol and points it off in the woods and pulls the trigger, and the pistol goes off. And then they have a conversation and decide not to shoot their associate and uh instead they tie him between two trees and then hang bacon around on the limbs because they stopped at a

convenience store which we used to call party stores uh tie him up between two trees and hang bacon around like Christmas ornaments. And give him a good pistol whipping with the.22 and leave him there. But eventually he frees himself. I kind of like how even these folks leave a little bit of space for God in their lives. Where was this taking place at? Can we guess? It's not that we're high on math, boys.

I'm telling you. This is God talking to us. God's looking down upon them. Let everybody have a guess which state. Oh, take a stab. Come on, Jesse. You're going to offend some people with this. I think Lickskill at Wyoming, wasn't it?

No. I think Lick Skillet, Wyoming, wasn't it? No. I'm going Mississippi. Just say Michigan. No, no, no. It's got to have bears. It's got to have bears. Florida. What type of bears? Did you just give away the answer?

I'm going New Mexico. No. These fellas, it was reported in the Spokane paper, but I believe these fellas are doing these things to each other in Idaho. Oh. They grew up in the woods. Peterson, 39, said he grew up in the woods near Orient, Washington. Sometimes he lived in a teepee. So he was never afraid bacon would cause animals to eat him. That's a line in the woods peterson 39 said he grew up in the woods near orient washington sometimes he lived in a teepee so he was never afraid bacon would cause animals to eat him that's a line of the

story phew i knew i had it made when they brought the bacon out but the the headline it's a great headline duo tried killing man with. Hold on a minute. Duo. That's a hard. Duo. I was going to. Duo Tried Killing Man with Bacon Suspects Accused of Using Pork to Lure Animals After Gun Failed. Man, I'd find a new headline writer in a hurry.

I think Johnny Knoxville wore a bacon suit on jackass one time there's another headline bizarre case bizarre bacon case ends in a nine and a half year man this guy's a horrible headline writer i hope it's not john craig doing these bizarre bacon case ends in nine and a half year rap. No punctuation. Victim was tied to trees, surrounded by bacon as lure for predators. But the real problem isn't that I've screwed up. The real problem is that we're talking about something that happened in 1997. Why is that a problem?

Just as a long time ago to be covering news from 1997. Well, at this point, it's... Now it's just an old thing. Urban legend. Yeah. Happened a few days after the anniversary of the Battle of Little Bighorn. Let's move on to something new. Something fresher.

Yanni, pick it up with the woman that I'm in love with. Lola. Oh, that's what they called her? Well, it's interesting. She's, the site, the archaeological site is in, Lola, shoot, it's going to take me a second to find it. Is this story pre-1997? This is brand, well, it's two.

It's either, depending on how you look at it, it's either brand Spickety New or it's thousands of years old. The site is on a Danish island of... But you haven't said what the site is. I know. Well, it's okay. I can think I can set the space first and then talk about what's going on.

I said it's an archaeological site. Building it up. And we're going to find out how Lola got her name because the site is on the Danish island of, I think you would pronounce it Lolland because it's L-O-L-L-A-N-D, not Lolland. Yeah. Okay. Keep going. I'm waiting for it.

This is not how I would lay it out, but go ahead. So at this site, they've excavated a piece of chewing gum many years ago. It's a piece of, it's not really chewing gum as we know it. It's a birch pitch that folks used to use to make tools when they needed some sticky substance in there to hold something together. And they also found that folks used to chew on it. They think that people were chewing on it to just soften it up prior to use now he's doing a good job well um so what's interesting that i really like and this is why everybody should just leave arrowheads and in the woods when they find them really he's doing a real good job they uh they pulled this out 30 years ago and it's just been

sitting in a museum and the author assumes that a lot of people, like museum, not the curators themselves, but the people that handle the budget would say, why in the hell are you spending money to store this piece of pitch? It's just a black piece of junk, right? Well, 30 years later, the dude extracts a whole human, how do you say? Genome. Genome out of it, and we put together this picture of a girl that was at this kill site. Look at Paul Harvey here, man.

He's doing a great job. She was. I like to start low and then get better as I go. It just gets better and better. I'm on the edge of my seat and I already know what happened. And yeah, so it turns out she was at a tool making, hunting type site. And what's cool is that they can,

with this DNA coming out of her mouth, they can also see what she was recently eating. 5,700 years ago. That's right. And she had recently eaten hazelnuts and a mallard duck when I told Jesse about this who's with us here today Jesse yeah when I told him about this I told him dark skin blue eyes had just eaten mallards and hazelnuts and he said i like her my kind of gal yeah you might have to make a new dish for the restaurant you know the lola appetizer or something and work some i bet it works mallards and hazelnuts and hazelnuts sure be delicious gotta work pitch in there somehow not Not far from where my ancestors come from.

This is like due north of Germany, kind of at the southwestern tip of the Baltic Sea. Yeah, it looks like a little, there's a picture of the actual thing. It's like a two centimeter long gob. Picture that it was Big League Chew, if Big League Chew was black. I think, no, Big League Che chew is too big it's definitely like

a chew big league chew is however you want it that's true but okay well look there it is there's a scale it's it's it's roughly two centimeters maybe two and a half centimeters wide so you're right it is actually more like a like someone taking a big wad of big league shoes it's like if you gave my kids that's an inch yeah black black gob of just looks like a black gob of chewing gum but they're able to pull all that information lactose intolerant which what's interesting about the lactose intolerance portion of this is they're interested in it helps you put together animal husbandry because once people um started domesticating started using domestic cows and getting milk then you see lactose those cultures that adopted milk you see lactose tolerance in those cultures so hunter and there's a painting of her a beautiful painting I'd hanging on my damn

wall dark hair yeah blue eyes got a lot of animal hides on she's got a little fish trap basket she's got her fish spear she's got a couple Drake mallards what you haven't even showed me the profile pic there is right there you need to get that picture and have it say on the bottom wanted oh nice yeah exotic some mallards you know how's she down in those birds i wonder yeah i'd love to know man she just snuck up to him and got probably got him with that spear ran him through okay another news story uh we've covered this a fair bit and if you were looking down like if you were looking down from outer space and you were watching what's happening on isle royal and lake superior you would have a sad laugh so as we reported you know i'm just

gonna assume that everyone listens to every episode and so they've been following the saga of isle royal but the wolf they brought new wolves out to supplement the last two wolves that are on Isle Royale, which... Isle Royale used to be Caribou and Lynx, even in the somewhat modern era. I think it was in the early 1900s.

It was like a Lynx-Caribou island. Then through unknown things happened. The thing froze. Things walk out, leave. It became a moose-wolf island. There was wolves there for a relatively short period of time. The wolves started not doing well from inbreeding because it's on an island and they can only get out there rarely when the thing freezes. So then the moose started building up real good.

I propose they just have a hunting season and people go out and get some moose. But they thought, oh, let's bring more wolves out. So they only have two of the original wolves left that crossed out on the ice. And they go catch a bunch of new wolves and put them on the island. And guess what happens right away? Killed them.

They killed the old. They killed the new wolves. Killed the original two. That's in the news. Anything else, Yanni? Seth, got any thoughts on any of that? No. No thoughts.

That's it. That's it. Okay, thanks, Seth. Killing wolves. Great. Oh. I think that's it. Any more news?

I want to talk about the Gator band in California but I'm not quite there yet you good Johnny oh good man let's talk about Texas okay let's do our introductions go ahead JT hey JT van Zant fishing guide here in Rockport Texas that's about it yeah how many days but you don't live here i live here um that's relative yeah i i kind of uh i kind of migrate a little bit uh texas born and raised seventh generation found fly fishing back in the early 90s this is one of the first spots i came to to chase redfish with my new fly rod was just kind of blown away by the habitat and the freedom to explore these marshes.

And I've got a wife and kids I'm not totally sure I want to raise here. So I spend a couple hundred days in a row sometimes down here and my family comes to visit me. So you're down here working your ass off and moving back and forth. Yeah, my wife held down a job for about 18 years with Apple and recently convinced her to quit to be with our boys full time. So she's homeschooling, taking on a whole new life. Oh, that's fun. Yeah.

So we've got a lot of freedom. You know, there's some things in the works down here that I'm just letting play out before really build a house. I had set up pretty permanent in a canal house on copenow bay and then hurricane harvey kind of wiped that out so now you guys have seen my little rental which is pretty sweet kind of small to raise a family of four in but super convenient all bills paid right on the water um so i want to try to hold on to that place and kind of figure out the next move yeah we caught some crabs basically in your yard yeah my front yard it's pretty neat sunrise every morning a bunch of redhead ducks um

yeah so you know and shit i'm getting older so i gotta make up my mind how old do you know 50 and uh i like meeting dudes that are like a little older me because it helps me picture yeah it helps me picture because you're pretty spry still standing up on that doormat in the air pulling around all day right yeah um i think if i if i was more sedentary i'd be in bad shape at this point that keeps you young and healthy yeah and the tequila knocks me back down a little bit yeah so every day you get a little better and then you take the top off yeah uh and then jesse grs. Hey. You've been on the show before. Yeah, a couple times. Yeah.

Man a few words. Remind everybody. Yeah. Jesse Griffiths. I'm the chef owner of Daidue Butcher Shop and Supper Club in Austin. We also have a little taqueria. And we run a hunting and fishing school called the New School of traditional cookery they go around state actually everywhere and uh kind of show people how to uh cook butcher and enjoy their game more thoroughly

and you were on an episode i think it was called you want to talk about shooting hogs or something like that yeah yeah people can learn about more about your thing there yeah um this kind of came what we're doing right now down here kind of came out of that experience right because we decided we were down here and went to your restaurant and we covered that meal pretty extensively right i think i was you know talking up talking up no guy yeah talking up flounder and so we came down that's what we just did is went um nil guy hunting yeah it was a good time lay that out for people like what the basic groove of nil guy is oh they're brought over here uh i believe the the 1920s um and to the to the coastal big coastal ranches in texas notably the king

and they've become very uh native down there they i, I'm sorry. That's improper. Just call them native. But I think they've nativized a bit. Yeah, I was scolded. Assimilated. I was scolded by a friend of mine who's a biologist, Mike Rule, who I had put a thing on Instagram where I had a picture of a nil guy. And I had mentioned your, I used your phrase where they've been accepted as honorary natives among locals.

Right. And he took offense. Well, let's call it a cultural native, nativized. I mean, I mean, I think to,

to the point that there's a, there's a Spanish word for an Indian antelope now, and that's the Valentin and that's what they're called down there now. I think that speaks a lot to their acceptance into the vernacular down there. I think

there's a bunch of things that, whether he likes the word or not, I think there's a bunch of things, there's a bunch of introduced species in this country that were were introduced they're not deleterious they're not trouble-causing you mean like Europeans yeah well I wasn't going there good point right yeah we're definitely like a deleterious we're a deleterious species sure uh not trouble causing and great local acceptance meaning no one's looking to get rid of them when i say that

meaning like wild turkeys in california idaho washington montana wy. Pheasants are the best example. Pheasants in all over. Yeah. Sika deer around Chesapeake Bay. Nil guy down here. It's not native. Right. But people can't point to like a damage.

They can't point to some huge problem they're causing. And people dig them. Yeah. And want to eat them. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a lot of value to them. They're almost a currency down there.

They're eaten extensively, even if people don't have the access to hunt them, which is a bit controlled. And it's its own issue because of the big ranches that they habitate. But everyone down there eats nilgai and it's a preferred protein for everybody that's lives in like south of Kingsville all the way to the border it's because there's such a giving animal they're huge I mean there's 600 pounds and

so it's something that is fairly available as a game meet when you look at them it's like you're looking it doesn't even make sense for a minute the shape of them yeah or the color yeah blue buck they're like people call them what blue bulls blue bulls yeah they're very they have a low ass they have a real like angular upward pitch toward the shoulders the head seems too small yeah the neck seems too long they run kind of like a giraffe yeah no that's a good way to put their gate yeah big sons of big um you know when i put a picture of a nil guy up on instagram at steve ronell uh there was a there was anell uh there was there was a little bit of uh there was a little bit of uh most people are like oh that's cool love to do it someday but there's a

little grumbling a little grumbling about oh must be nice right must be nice oh well i can tell you it doesn't take helicopters and uh having a big fat you know your own tv show kind of budget uh to go hunt a ngai because we actually hunted with a dude that helped us out that runs Nilgai hunts down there, same ranch that we were on and he has other ranches that you can get in on. And his Nilgai hunt is less than $3,000. Oh, is that right? Yeah. You can't get a hunt anywhere out west for that kind of money. That's what they charge for one? Yeah. Yeah, I think he said it was like $27.50 or50 or 2850 something right

around there you know so who knows what you could get a cow and ill guys four hounds of meat a cow I mean and that's one thing that I think about a lot is no I wonder how that affects the the population because almost no one is shooting the cows which is exactly what I would want to go after I mean they're not as big but i mean i mean judging from the meat quality of a giant bull uh a cow that's 60 that size and you know having the the qualities of that typically pertain to the female species i think there'd be incredible meat and you probably find a better more budget budget hunt that way. And there is one, um, drawn hunt that the parks and wildlife offers on the Laguna Atascosa. That's right. Down there.

But I've heard it's, uh, it's, it can be a bit crowded, um, because I think it's such a desirable thing. I mean, that's a freezer filler right there. So everybody's putting in for that hunt, but I mean, it is limited, but I mean, that's I mean, you're going to go back to 150 years of the historic land distribution down there. And that it's divided amongst a handful of huge ranches, some of the biggest in the world. And that's where those Nilgai stay because they have relative safety there. And that there's controlled hunts for them. and then that's where those populations have set up and it's just it is what it is and so it is it's not a limited resource because people built fences around them it's just it's a limited resource because they've settled in this very unique part of the

world that's uh historically controlled by just a handful of families. Highly inaccessible, yeah. I just typed up a thing. I just did a general little Google search. So how would this be? It costs more to hunt a high-fence nil guy than it does to hunt a free-range nil guy. Yeah, because it's guaranteed. Yeah, more guaranteed.

So you can go shoot a penned up you can go shoot a penned up one for 3 500 bucks you can shoot a real one while wandering around for 27 50 nil guy cows price on request yeah see so it's presumably less expensive absolutely and then you're gonna get and then got to figure you're coming home with, let's say you did the bull hunt 2750. You're coming home with 200 pounds of meat. Yeah. No, Yanni?

Oh. They got a good, they got a high yield. Yes. It's a high yield animal. Yanni had been sparring on that meat weight the whole time. He just made like the, it's called the Latvian. No, it's not like the Latvian smirk is different. He and Johnny have been sparring on that meat weight the whole time. He just made what's called the Latvian... No, it's not like the Latvian smirk is different.

It's like the Latvian disapproved. Yeah, if you were to vocalize the face he made. It's the Latvian... No, that's like a cow call. A lot. How many are there in the wild, Jesse?

I don't know. I think that the surveys on the ranch that we were at are around 2,000 just on that property, which is a relatively small property. We did a fair amount of research. It's looking like Texas Harbor is around between 30,000 and 40,000. That's a lot. I mean, how long from less than 20 animals that right were brought from a zoo in san diego onto the king ranch i believe well but they that did happen

but there's also been more that were brought from india i gotcha what's interesting too is that they don't they can't really spread north they're at like at least on our um continent they're at their most northern range in texas so much so that on the ranch that we least on our continent, they're at their most Northern range in Texas. So much so that on the ranch that we were on, they said when they had a really bad cold winter a while ago all the Nilgai actually migrated to the Southern end of the ranch where unfortunately for them,

there was, there's a high fence on the neighboring ranch. And so they got stuck there and we just drove down that fence line. And you could like, if you just looked into the bushes 10 20 yards it was like nil guy skull after nil guy skull and without even looking we found what three four right a very literal running away from a north wind they ran south they ran south to escape it how how wildly like terrifying that cold must have been to them, an animal that just doesn't recognize cold.

And their base instinct was just to run away from it. Yeah. They had some on the Powderhorn, but they didn't do well up there. Right. Perished. It's too far north. Yeah. You know what's funny, man?

I'm in a live chat right now with someone at a place that, this is classic. I want to get into this a little bit like how i know it's coming texas is the lowest of the low and now also the highest of the high in terms of just like goodness here i'm i'm i'm trying to live chat i'm live chatting with samantha uh at a place that has a hunting blind. You can hog hunt from our hunting blind that holds 10 people. This blind has a TV

that receives live game camera footage, a poker table, air conditioning, and a fully stocked bar. Sounds like a house. This is in Texas, I assume. It has to be. Sorry to say.

The only mistake in that is the word hunt. If you call it what it is, then it's a pretty luxurious situation. I'm still waiting for my reply. So lay out how one can hunt. Can I tell you this, though? You know the poop piles? No guy. Okay, go ahead.

Like the poop in piles. You showed me this. Yeah, the circular latrines yeah they make a pile llamas do that they marked their territory by making poop piles and they're all over all over let's do a really good job of describing the poop pile okay you describe it i'm live chatting with the i'm live chatting with the poker table oh yeah ask her how'd she describe a no guy latrine she doesn't have no she doesn't have nilgai. No, because over the years. She doesn't have nilgai cow hunt.

Is she trying to sell a party in this blind? They got all kinds. It's like one of those places where they have everything in the world. Chained up. Over my ears. You can hunt a mark or you can hunt a. Is this high fenced? Oh, yeah.

Oh. No, I can hunt anything I want. It's probably like. Sounds like a luxurious. Four acre pasture. I can hunt a... Is this high fenced? Oh, yeah. Oh. No, I can hunt anything I want. It's probably like a... Sounds like a luxurious... Four acre pasture. I can hunt a bongo. It's a live action video game. I can hunt a wildebeest.

I can hunt an Arabian oryx. Is there a tiger on the list? Let me check. I can hunt an impala. What about a giraffe? Save all... They probably order one for you. I can hunt...

Probably. I can hunt Texas doll sheep. I can hunt a Thompson's gazelle. Water buffalo. Wildebeest. A zebra. Should I ask her? I don't want to mess with the lady.

This is phenomenal. No lions? I'll only put in a quest should i ask you got any lions i get some pricing all right okay let's get back to reality yeah so no i was because guiding got quite a few people from texas they would come up to colorado a lot and uh we you know somehow always gets not always but over the course of the years numerous times i heard about these animals nil guy and everybody if they tell you about nil guy they're going to tell you about their poop pile they no they don't well that's that was my experience they tell you

about they'll take you can't bring them down no you know what i actually hadn't heard that until we got ready for this trip oh so people tell but anyways you know the way it was described to me i was imagining something that you you so the way it was described to me i was imagining something that you so it would be big enough to play king of the hill on like steve would run up there and i'd run up after him and push him off the edge of the no guy latrine pile and there we are it's not quite that impressive okay i was imagining a llama ship pile. Yeah. Well, with all due respect, piles have been reported to be as high as 10 feet. Oh. But I don't know.

India has 100,000 of these things. Sure. Maybe. And they've been pooping it for a while. The average pile that we saw was, I'd say, three to five feet in diameter and only a few inches above the surrounding. They never got taller. It seemed like they just got wider.

Like the bigger ones were wide. Fewer greater circumference. Yeah. That's not tall. I had a hunt plan of spreading out laxatives and then sitting one of them poop piles. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. But there's so many poop piles that it doesn't,

it's not like, you know, it's not like a water hole in a desert you know it's like what every depending on on the area but every like 100 yards yeah there's a there's a good pile some spots like every 50 yards depending on it's a good way of putting it but uh the place we're on can we talk about the place we're on sure go ahead tell everybody about the place uh the ataria so it's on the kind of just south of the king ranch it doesn't extend all the way to the gulf but it just occupies a you know good section of that rolling super sandy uh kind of dune influenced brush country how'd you become friends with those guys? That's a long story. One of the friends of our host

sold artichokes at the farmer's market years ago. Back then, artichokes were a big deal for us. Not anymore? How unique they were. There's a couple more options for artichokes now, but at the time he had... For background, Jesse will only sell stuff in his

restaurant from Texas. If they don't when you see something you don't have it exciting like an artichoke which has a very short season we would we would jump all over that and even his olives and shit right yeah yeah wine olives yeah name it uh so we we would buy a ton of artichokes and preserve them or you know it is we could to really kind of celebrate the artichokes. So this guy is like, why are you buying so many artichokes? And it turns out he was from Brownsville. And then we started talking hunting, stuff like that. And then his friend, he's like, oh, by the way, I got some land.

And I'm like, okay. And then I go there. And they're like, oh, this is a very special place. Yeah, like they don't really hunt it. No, they don't. I mean, the deer were friendly. They don place. Yeah, they don't really hunt it. No, they don't. I mean, the deer were friendly. They don't bait it? They don't bait it?

No, there's no feeders. There's no blinds. The only high fence is the one that exists on the south side of the property, which is the neighbors. And so these are all very free-ranging animals. Yeah, but it's weird to be in Texas and there's no blinds and nos and no feeders yeah it's pretty refreshing i really enjoy it still animals everywhere everywhere yeah there's there's not a lot of hunting pressure i mean so turkeys javelina uh lots of pigs and then the deer which were just uh they don't get any pressure and it's fascinating to see what

happens with a deer population that doesn't really get any hunting pressure how how just familiar they become with with humans and it was also the rut I mean they were in the middle of it so the males were acting dumb yeah I was telling someone yesterday it's like we didn't really we didn't really go out like hunt a nil guy. It was kind of like a harvest, a harvest hunt. Yeah, well. Meaning there were just so many of them. There were.

You had to pick them. I mean, you put off. Yeah, I don't use that in a negative way. You know what I mean? It was a good stock, I thought. I mean. But it wasn't like after an hour, I wasn't like, man, I wonder if we'll get one. Yeah, I wonder if we'll see a nil guy. No, I know. guy I know it's like oh I could see now they're thick they're like a little wary like you know they're a little wary yeah but you kind of get the

sense yeah I don't wanna see it wasn't like it was like hunting but no they were actually the guy were the most the spookiest animals out of everything that we ran across yeah on that range yeah for sure they must get persecuted a little bit more yeah well the pigs um had they been down wind of us way more sensitive and you know the we saw you know a pig that one pig that ran across the road i mean he wasn't having it they know i mean pigs are naturally like that but uh yeah the no guy they they know that there's pressure on them for sure so could a dude if you wanted to go to that ranch in in like book a hunt for no guy yeah there's outfitters that are allowed on to that ranch but it's pretty it's pretty limited I got you but it

could it is possible yes yes absolutely there's they there's hunting out there we went out in the morning and then what's the what's the word i came i wish i could sendero like a road right yeah yeah but like a two-track yeah a sendero that's spanish for two track yeah it's a lot cooler than a road a send. Yeah. So the shit out here is low, very thick, very flat. Everything's, how high is everything? Yeah, mesquite height, 10, 12 feet. Yeah. But you can't see shit once you're in it.

But there's big openings around here and there. And there's senderos, like roads that cut through it and the roads through this place are when they used to do uh seismic surveys for oil exploration you see that shit in the arctic too where they'll like grid out on these grid patterns these road systems and they'd lay them out so they could go and do uh searching for fossil fuels. And these are now, some of these have been maintained as senderos. And you ride out, and now and then every time you get to one, they're straight, straight roads. And you get to one and look down and be like, oh, shit,

and you see one cross the road. We go out and wander around. Not so much wander, because we're headed to this big opening. What would you guys call that giant opening we were in? I mean, I'd call it a meadow. I'm sure they don't. The big one down there, they call it the plan grande, the big plain. It's a couple miles long, and it kind of weaves through there.

It's that low spot that floods out some years, but it was very dry this time but it's natural yes it's not cut yes yeah and we pull up in there and you can you can just see forever and you take your binoculars and it's just like white tails and nil guy yeah just scattered and there's bulls running around a smattering of gazelles with a smash there's. There was one gazelle. One gazelle? Yeah. One gazelle up near the house. No, we saw more.

Really? Driving. No, not a gazelle. Are you talking about the orcs? No. Other, like those little guys with the straight horns. Not the water bucks. Not the water bucks.

I think that was the same one. The same Thompson's gazelle that lived in the pasture near the house no I think we saw more of those somewhere not many anyways lots of critters running around yeah yes but the weird thing is it's like I always saw all that shit was like fenced in in Texas right and it normally is but except for here that's why I mean it's just a little in spot oh absolutely yeah absolutely but they got crazy Africa stuff running around everywhere well there's hundreds of thousands of acres down there that are all low fence that all have a mix of these animals on them so it's you know i don't know what the proper term is but there are you know there's oryx and

waterbuck and no guy running around out there or for that matter feral hogs and no regulations on them no like that dude we were with that part of the family that owns the place if he felt like and no guy running around out there, or for that matter, feral hogs. And no regulations on them. No. Like that dude we were with, part of the family that owns the place, if he felt like he could go out and shoot a big pile of orcs. Yeah, all of them. There's no limit.

And the license, the out-of-state license, I believe is $55. And now there's no, you can hunt pigs with no license. Correct. Even non-residents. Non-residents and residents can hunt feral hogs with no license. That's absurd.

Yeah. That wasn't Parks and Wildlife's call. You mean because why not have the state pull some revenue off it? Yeah, why not educate a hunter and collect some money for conservation? Yeah, I don't know why. Well, yeah. But it wasn't Parks and Wildlife's call. You know what I like about Texas?

When they made it that you could shoot pigs from helicopters? You know you can shoot them from a hot air balloon. Well, I know. They cleared up shooting them from helicopters recreationally, but then someone realized that there was like an oversight or a mistake was made, and you weren't allowed to shoot them from hot air balloons. So the Texas State Legislature got back together

and cleared up that little bit of nonsense. So now you can feel free to hunt them from hot air balloons as well. Well, you don't like ambiguity. Yeah, but it was fun, man. And we go out and uh crawled up on one and we were hunkered down low and they're they're rutting yeah they're rutting and they have a long rut like a couple months of rut right i'm not i'm not sure about the the rut how long it lasts but they were what was noticeable to me was the color they were almost black instead of the normal kind of grayish blue but they're they seem to be darker in their behavior i mean the way his behavior towards towards you was was pretty interesting yeah we were hunkered down and he

just caught our movement but see like caribou do that and antelope do that we're hunkered down and he caught our movement and then so he's so cocky because they don't have there's no predators right he's like that's got to be a nil guy i'm gonna go beat its ass and he just started coming trying to get our wind and coming at us and coming at us he calls the distance he was 300 yards away and all of a sudden he's 100 yards away yeah and then you have the thing like about um a lot of people warned me about that they can take a hit yeah i think that's valid it's absolutely valid i mean i shot the top of his heart off yes and he took off like he had no plan of stopping yeah like no plan of stopping

yeah the guides are are ready on that second shot to back you up and i what was uh what was mondo shooting i don't know it was a it was a big gun i remember it was a 250 grain bullet but i mean they are ready to keep shooting until they don't get up anymore it's a an incredibly resilient uh powerful strong boned animal yeah he was kind of quartered at me and i sort of he was close and just holding dead still and i had my tripod out but i shot and kind of came on the inside of the shoulder blade shot the top of his heart out went through the lungs lodged against the hide and he just took off as doug dern said he was carrying the mail i think that's something doug says um i don't understand the reference yeah i

don't either man maybe like a pony express or something i'm not sure postman these days are pretty slow i think it was could be pony express hauling ass okay um and they're saying they don't they don't bleed much so they're hard to track yeah well the no exit hide yeah the hide and there's no there's no exit the big um ran off uh and i shot a couple more times and then fell over but yeah stout wow yeah yeah took three shots but i mean i i mean he would have been dead with the first one but i don't know what he was saying that once it's very hard to find them yes that's been my experience he says he goes that you when you go 100 yards if they hit that brush and they go 100 yards it starts getting dicey yeah yeah like fanning out and looking yeah when they get in there yeah

because there's no blood it becomes very difficult to to locate them if you don't keep shooting at them. Right. And I'm glad we found it. I mean, obviously. And he was in the field. It was very interesting to watch. I got to watch that whole thing play out from about 150 yards away in the brush line.

And it was pretty exciting because he hit that wind line like right when he got downwind of you. His posture changed, and that's the moment you shot him. It was, I don't know. For me, it was pretty exciting because he hit he hit that wind line like right when he got down wind of you his posture changed and that's the moment you shot him it was uh i don't know for me it was pretty exciting to watch oh yeah and uh you guys sell a lot of that in your restaurant we do so there's a there's a harvest is a lot of them um and they go down there with uh professional shooters that have state inspection come with them and now those, they're shooting bulls too? Yeah.

I mean, I think they're shooting anything. They're going down. So you're getting both cows and bulls. They're paying the ranch a per pound price. And I really like- And they shoot it down, then the inspector checks it as they got it. Yeah. Yeah.

And they have that electro tenderizing. They hook it up to a car battery, battery basically to initiate the bleed out of it. And really high quality meat. And also I like serving that. And we can call it an invasive. And one animal gives up so much protein. And it's renewable because you see how many of them there are. So I think it's a very good

meat to serve so in in both restaurants that's what we use uh for our you know basically like in the venison roll right there's no guy almost predominantly yeah i don't know is it accurate we can talk about this some other time can you call it venison no i mean it's an antelope yeah so uh but it i mean like i said the venison roll you know where of the the lean um nicely flavored wild game meat and it is truly wild that's another thing is that we're able to give some people something that's wild it's not even hitting corn feeders i mean this stuff is grazing so from every aspect i think it's a very superior meat it's a it's grass fed it's uh it's not hitting any corn like i said um just really healthful meat hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever

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Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. I wonder if part of the thing about why they're not super popular because they don't throw a big dramatic horn. Right. You know? Sure. When I say popular, I mean like it's not, you know, with people that just want a head for the wall. Yeah.

I don't know that it's on there. They're that excited about it. It's a little head. It feels like a mountain goat, like basically like a thick mountain goat horn. Right. Well, yeah, I mean, an elk represents its size with its antlers. A Nilgai absolutely does not represent how big it is

with those two little horns. Yeah. Sharp little sons of bitches, though, yeah. Sharp though yeah sharp yeah yeah there's something to that uh tell everybody about what we cooked with the what how kind of like what we cooked with the nil guy when we were when we were doing that well we did um you know we ate all the really good fresh cuts first you know we did the heart uh we did made a. We did the heart. We made a ceviche with the heart. Yeah, you better explain that, man,

because people are going to be real curious about that. Yeah, it's not like a true ceviche where we're going to cure the protein in citrus, but more of like a ceviche flavor where we're just tossing. We cubed up the heart. We cleaned the heart real well. You took off the outside. Yes.

Which I never do. Yeah, because I wanted to make it super tender for a raw preparation like that. And toss it, lime juice. No, I'm sorry, we used Valley Lemon for that because we bought a little roadside stand because we're in the middle of citrus season. Onion, chilies, cilantro, radish, avocado i mean you can you can really vary it at

that point and put whatever you want in there and you add tomatoes if you wanted or you know fresh peppers and whatever and then served it on chips um just a ceviche but made with the heart uh we made some boudin out of the liver which is i think was new to you guys where you cook the liver and grind it and mix it with rice, and it's pretty highly spiced. And then we bake that into a kolache, and we bake that into some dough, which is a pretty traditional

Central Texas Czech food. We poached off a tongue, or the tongue. I thought that was pretty good, and just simply pan-fried that. Breaded it and pan-fried it. You know what I wanted to mention about the heart ceviche thought that was pretty good and just simply pan fried that. Breaded it and pan fried it. You know what I wanted to mention about the heart ceviche which is weird is

super tender and you'd eat it and you'd feel like you were eating fish but you weren't. There's no fish. It's the flavor recognition. The temperature, the flavor, it's a chip right and you'd be like oh yeah it's fish yeah but then you're like but there's no fish yeah but it's just had the mouth feel yeah and then we get here and the first thing jt makes for us is that ceviche which was awesome

very good with redfish how long does the heart stay in line like moments yeah oh we just ate it yeah it is a tartar it's just like it's just a ceviche flavor more than that uh we had uh what else um we had the liver we ate the uh so the tongue poached it till it was tender yeah i think about six hours with just bay leaf and salt and then peeled slashed paired yeah uh the skin off it yeah slice it in generous slices yeah breaded it in bread crumb flour egg wash bread crumb and then pan fried that and you could do butter you know we use lard of course uh and we had the tenderloin uh which cop out to say was fantastic but i thought that tenderloin was which cop out to say was fantastic, but I thought that tenderloin was truly incredible. And that was done over open fire.

Yeah, cooking over mesquite. Oh, we made some sausage too. Yeah, lay out the sausage. Yeah, I made a little sausage that is bound with, not a little, actually it was quite big, in a large casing, bound with ground corn tortillas and charred onions and a bunch of different chilies, cinnamon.

And then we smoked that over mesquite. I thought that turned out pretty good too. Yeah, and it a little bit tasted like a tortilla. Yeah, yeah, it's going to have that nice little masa flavor in there and it acts as a terrific binder for a sausage. Amazing bone broth too, ginger. Yeah, that's good man yeah well yeah we took a shank he was feeling a little down he was feeling a little down he's having a battle in the sore throat yeah yeah which I won yeah it's true you know why know why? Because of the bone broth. Because of the bone broth. So yeah, Chase, who's here working with me, he was like, let me whip up some of that bone broth.

And he took the shank and put some ginger and garlic in there and cooked it down. And then we shredded the shank to make a little banh mi sandwich for lunch because we needed boat snacks and then took that broth and add a little bit of honey to that and some chili piquin. Oh my God, that shit was good, man. Spicy ginger garlic. You drink it down and you got that ginger in the bottom. You chew those little bits of ginger up.

A little touch of cinnamon too, I guess. Yeah, a little cinnamon, a little star anise in the broth just to kind of give it some flavor. It's just super nutrient-dense, really good stuff. If that was the only liquid I consumed, I'd be all right. Yeah. You've got to find a way to make an alcoholic beverage out of that stuff though, man.

You could add in, I think, some sotol into that. It'd probably be pretty good what else do we oh oh we ate some various steaks uh the first day you know but they were you know a little on the on the chewy side i thought flavors were good but you know it didn't have a lot of aging time on it we were uh incredibly lucky with the weather and it was so warm when we first got down there and then that cold front blew through and we were able to hang the animal outside which which i was pretty excited about being able to keep it cold like that rather than transferring to a to a cooler where i just don't think meat ages as well that doesn't happen often in texas doesn't no uh drastic uh temperature

drops do you just we just got lucky with it um especially that far south i mean it got it went from 85 to the high 30s yeah that same hunt could have been pretty grueling even this this time of year yeah and it'll probably be back in the 80s sometime this week you know you oh really yeah you can hit 90 any any month of the year down so yeah we talked a lot about that that you like to when you're hanging the carcasses up you know like i i'm not i'm not big on hosing them down right but i like to be able to but it was so like cold dry breeze we're able to hose the carcass off a little bit clean it up and just let it hang and oh it gets so nice man

dry to the touch i mean the operative terms cold and dry so much easier to butcher when it's like a handshake that you're touching you know dude it's a pleasure i'm gonna have to steal the handshake that's that's perfect you know a really good way to put it and i think there's such a noticeable difference when you're able to keep stuff dry like that. And it affected the meat quality. And the Nilgai is one of my favorite game meats. I don't want to say because it's mild. I mean, it has a pretty definitive flavor to it, but it's fantastic.

It's a really good meat. I would, on the taste, the problem is there's so many things that are good. So we're always talking about, oh, it's one of the best, it's good, whatever. I think that that, like Nilgai would be, if you had 100 people, okay, you have 100 people that have,

don't eat wild game, and you gave that 100 people antelopeope mule deer nil guy and these are not wild game connoisseurs i would bet that the bulk of them would pick nil guy as their favorite because it's so like easily approachable yeah there's nothing that someone's gonna get where it's like they're not gonna have like oh that's different to get where it's like, they're not going to have like a, Ooh, that's different kind of thing. It's just very good. Mild, tender, um,

meat with a lowercase M. Yeah. I'm excited to have it down. You got a bunch. Yeah. I don't know. I got divided all up. Oh,

damn right. You do. There's that. So sad. Well, you got fish too yeah but the no yeah the no guy deal man it's it's it's interesting because it's like you said how many how many are in this state 30 to 40 000 100 000 in india and 30 to 40 thousand here that's another thing that texas likes to do is uh texas likes to uh i like this it's a good it's a good rhetorical strategy texas likes to justify its bizarre quantity of non-natives by throwing out the well texas has more revitalize the population we have more rhinos in africa

more tiger wasn't there more tigers here at one point that's somewhere in anywhere in the world but just like captive uh i don't know pet tigers or whatnot uh a lot of tigers residing here as well but not no not free ranging what i've come to love about texas is it's funny because uh always hearing about like from being from the north come to love about texas is it's funny because uh always hearing about like from being from the north and always hearing about texas all you hear like people just like talk it's basically you talk bad about wildlife management in texas and so you expect to come down here and have it be like a disaster but then you come down to texas and it's like oh and there are animals everywhere so you kind of wind

up wondering like what is the problem because it's like everywhere you know it's a really hard place to screw up but it's not from the lack of trying yeah i think that yeah you have animals everywhere but i think that the main gripe uh this would be good watch this transition the main gripe with hunting in texas is there's just like the animals are largely commodified there's a there's a value attached to them the land is private a lot of the hunting land is owned as recreational hunting property and so you people that don't have access to associates family with land right like you're just screwed you're kind of screwed because there's very few people that have there's very few i gather there are very few properties where some guys like oh i just let all the locals come on right it's like they they that's not true

no no no one does that i think the greatest luxury you're saying no one let no one no one lets people come on yeah it's like it's like wildlife here is like thoroughly commodified it's like there's a value to it if you want to add it largely you're going to pay me to come get it and you're if you want to go on my land you're going to pay me to come get it. And if you want to go on my land, you're going to pay me to go on my land. And so the frustration that people have is you don't know anyone and you don't want to jump into the commodity, the commodification, not the commodity. You don't want to jump into sort of the transactional nature of Texas hunting

where it's like, if you want to hunt, you pay. And that pisses people off. i get a lot of inquiries i mean people contact me and like i in in the past week i probably fielded three or four of them uh hey i just moved here from blank and i don't understand where i go hunt what what are my options and it's like you know it's we always it's it's hard you know uh public but you know it's it's crowded and it's a process to get on there and i always i i always recommend you know start with hogs you know because your best chance of getting on a place for free or cheap is if you're helping with hog control and like you know yeah but even that's a we've talked about this a bunch but even that's a fallacy yeah because you go online and you'll see like help texas is overrun with hogs yeah i know that

and it's a ad it's an ad for you to come pay so people are like if it's overrun with hogs and hogs are such a problem why can't i go hunt hogs without paying for it but it baffles people man yeah it's like are they really no one you know up in montana like there's a lot of guys that hunt coyotes no one in montana uh there's cattle ranchers sheep ranchers that don't want coyotes no one in montana is paying or wyoming or wherever is like paying to go hunt coyotes because people legitimately of are of the opinion that the coyote some people are legit like have the opinion coyote should go it's not transactional it's like oh you want to get coyotes please go ahead but here's like psych psych i don't really want to get rid of them. I'm just trying to sell you some shit.

Right. More coyotes than people up there, probably, in Wyoming, if you counted it out. I mean, there's a huge population here in big cities that probably just don't even know, don't have the first thing of hunting culture in them. Yeah. don't have the first thing of of hunting culture in them yeah it's from where i'm sitting it's one of the best places to hunt with a few relationships made and in the privilege to be able to access over seven generations you've got a couple it didn't come from that because i was the i was really the first person in my family to hunt or fish um but by being nice to people and making relationships um i don't think it takes

money or status to find some people through relationships that you can go especially hunt pigs but even get a deer um and and those tend to be pretty high quality experiences because a private owner of land takes good care of it so you're not running into trash on the river banks and stuff like that yeah it's it's definitely a double-edged sword yeah we've gotten a lot of you know well just through the the work that we're in and but it's like everything with us is just it's different like i always kind of caution people um like like doing what we do it's just you're in an alternate you're in a whole different alternate reality the business that we're in right um where people talk about like how do you

scout like what are your scouting like how do you scout for stuff i'm like i can tell you how we used to scout we used to scout like everybody else where and i still know how to do it but you'd scout by like traditional scouting things you might make a trip out go look and you know you look online and get on on x and get on google earth and do all that but after you build up such like after you build up such a network of individuals that you know that hunt and fish a lot to be absolutely honest for us scouting is a lot of being on the phone yeah because we're always one phone call removed if that would be the most would be like a phone call removed from someone who is a expert in that area right you. You know, um, back to that point, I would say small town, Texas,

Rockport, all the way to the panhandle, all the way to West Texas and all the way down South where you guys are. If you're, if you're living in a town of only several thousand people, I guarantee you every kid in that town, whether they're landowners or not, has an opportunity to hunt. Is that right? Small town, Texas, small town Texas, it's just such a tight-knit community of people that everyone's going to know somebody that you can go on to somebody's land and have access. Maybe not on your own, like just the combination to the gate, but even that's super common. But if you start talking about Austin and you just came here, you took a tech job and you don't know anybody yet, it's going to be tough to figure out, but not super tough. And if you've got money, there's a ton of like lease opportunities where you don't have to own

land. You can pay five grand a year and partner up with some other members and have access to, you know, thousand, 5,000 acre place, treat it like your own, put a trailer out there, put some blinds and feeders up. I think that's also where that culture comes from because I call it harvesting. There's very little stocking you can do in Texas unless you have access to a giant ranch. I've got 300 acres in Hallettsville not far from here.

If I break one twig, my deer jump the fence and go into other people's land and they might not come back for a couple days so you have to set up a blind and a feeder to attract those animals onto your place and and if you're a working man you only get to hunt that saturday you don't want to go out and waste that opportunity and chase your animals away by doing a bad stalk on them you know so yeah i i balanced like i said i was trying to get to the point where you look from a from a perspective of being in a place it's like a like always have lived in public land states yeah like a lot of public land a lot of access

like you know i've lived in michigan montana washington right all these places that were just like a ton of places to go so you look down here and you get this sense that it's uh disastrous in some way but then every time you come down here it's just like being here is different than viewing it because you come down here and you're like oh man just a lot of wildlife a lot of space a lot of wildlife yeah and it doesn't feel uh it feels like in so many ways it's enviable remember earlier i was promising a good segue holy shit you guys got a lot of public water yes and you can hunt up to the high water mark on a lot of those rivers that's that's an untapped resource a lot of people don't think about you can you know

take a canoe down a river and shoot a deer or a pig on the bank and it's it's almost impossible to go five miles down any one of our public rivers and not see animals you can hunt oh really yeah um but i was talking about fishing yeah if i If you lived here, like if you moved here and had that like tech job you're talking about, dude, just fish. Yeah. Tons of fishing. Like describe kind of the area where you work. So down here in Rockport, it's basically the middle Texas coast. So I think we've got something like 480 miles of shoreline.

It's almost smack dab in the middle of the curvature of our coastline on the Gulf. Very shallow estuary system that's separated from the Gulf of Mexico by a protective barrier island. So the longest barrier island in the world. It's separated roughly every 60 miles by a pass to the ocean. Oh, I didn't know that. And so there's nowhere you can get to the Gulf of Mexico except for these passes. So a Ranz's Pass is one of those. Yeah, and that's a jettied system where barges and tankers come in.

But it's also the main artery for the recruitment of larvae so most of our species uh sheephead drum redfish blue crab all the minnow species and shrimp of three variety pink white and brown all you guys get you guys get clever with name and shrimp yeah yeah the white shrimp's kind of gray the brown is like a tan but yeah anyway the um all those fish and and and critters have to migrate out the passes to spawn. And then their eggs come in with current and filter back into all those grass shorelines where we were. And they hide out until they're big enough to swim freely on their own as adults. I want to make sure people are getting this right. So there's the mainland of just flat out the mainland of Texas.

Yeah. there's the mainland of just flat out the mainland of texas yeah and then there's the mangrove sort of border in the marsh and then how like if you're going to go if you're going in a straight line you leave the land and you want to head out to the gulf of mexico how what is the distance you travel typically in most places what's the distance you travel before you hit what would be like waves on a beach? Right. If you're a good swimmer, you can make it to the barrier island. I want to say probably five miles is the maximum distance from the mainland of Texas going due east until you encounter the barrier island. And I want to say the barrier island at most is probably three to four miles wide before you get to the dunes and

then the gulf of mexico oh so that barrier island gets that big yeah and but it's confusing right so when we went to the barrier island um from the outside shoreline it looks like an impenetrable body of land but small creeks lead into big expansive shallow back areas of marsh just like on our mainland so they're kind of mirror images of each other yeah it's almost like if you cross section the the Texas coast on the mainland side and flipped it over you'd have the marsh on the other side as well so yeah it's just this incredibly resilient muddy bottom clean watered estuary system that we have it's very prolific very abundant with life like our biomass yeah our men are swimming or mullet like you can't run your fingers through

the seagrass without coming up with you know a handful of critters so very productive estuary and how far um how far do you roam like as a fishing guide i know the coast i would say every little creek and inlet and back area for for about 40 miles to the north and about 60 miles to the south um it accumulates to at this point my life's work just exploring and navigating all those little channels so from the Laguna Madre um that we have we have uh um Teddy Roosevelt designated the national seashore so we have this national seashore of Bird Island which starts in Corpus Christi and goes down to Mansfield Texas um pretty incredible beach that's maybe one of the longest stretches of undeveloped beach in the country. And on the inside of that, like you can walk over the dunes and be in the bay or you can fish on the ocean side. Um, so yeah, just a ton of opportunities. I tend to focus within 20 or

miles North or South of Rockport on a daily basis, maybe 50 mile round trip. Yesterday, I bet we put in, oh, about 40 miles if you added it all up and followed our tracks. But I go that extra distance. It was duck hunting season where we are now. So the land, the island just adjacent to where we are sitting was loaded up with airboats and duck hunters. I took us a little farther north, hoping we would be undisturbed by other people. Did we see a person yesterday other than ourselves? No. Not once we got back in where we were fishing.

On a weekend? We saw there was two boats parked at those right at the inlet. On those creeks on the outside. Yeah. We did the courteous thing yeah you go on you give people a pretty wide uh you give people a pretty wide you don't have that guide like attitude um i own it i can be aggressive uh yeah and going back to it um i i call austin home um but i would rather be in rockport than austin and for all intensive purposes i live here i spend you know

250 days out of the year in rockport and the other the other times a year if i do go to austin it's to trade out gear get a rifle and my camo and get straight to a buddy's ranch to hunt like i i don't spend any time in austin it's a very busy place not my scene i tend to love to be away from people although it allows me to love people being distant from them right yeah but uh um i i live on this i live on this uh on this kind of motto that there there shouldn't be a needless behavior of my own that has a negative consequence on someone else's outdoor experience and if somebody's discourtesy whether it's intentional or based on ignorance affects my day then i become very upset to the point and probably even confrontation because

you have to protect this out here you have to make sure people understand that to approach you is going to have consequences because if they were to if someone had come in there just to scout around and motored through the water we were in we worked really hard to be where we were and the water's so shallow we can't just kick up anywhere and go to a new spot and so yeah if i see a boat in a little creek that person had that he got there first i'm going somewhere else even if i want to be inside of where he is super bad there's other places to go yeah and your specialty is uh sight fishing for redfish yeah on a fly that's right yeah i think redfish are one of the friendly they're the fisherman's friend so like you know you could rack up 20 grand chasing a

permit and might not get your first permit depending on your skill level or your luck that day in mexico belize, Florida Keys, wherever. Redfish belong in the Gulf of Mexico. They're Texan. They stretch up the Atlantic coast quite a ways, but they're unique to this part of the world. You can go to other countries and find bonefish and tarpon and the Gulf Coast and its culture and and being the texas coast there's no other place i could i could really feel the connection to my heritage and appreciate an animal that much it's like you get a view of the texas coast if you go to the beach in galveston it's kind of muddy murky water it's not a beautiful place as compared to the west coast know, but when you get in there and you, and you, and you become intimate with that abundance of life, like in our marsh,

um, it's hard to shake that. It's hard to go somewhere else and be as happy as you are here. But, but I do have a big problem with the way Texans perceive their entitlement to use that, that as, as they see fit and to, in my opinion, abuse that country. I would be happy forever in Rockport if I felt like we appreciated what we have here, but I don't really, I don't feel that way. I don't feel like as a culture, we put enough importance on stewardship and conservation. You know, and people are pouring into the state and we're basically showing them, look, you can come down here and do whatever you want.

It's a grocery store. Just keep your limit every day. Yeah, I would love to see, and I'm doing my part to try to educate and try to spread the news that this is super special and it could go away. You know, one hard freeze this year and all the fish we saw would be floating upside down right so it's delicate it's fragile it's beautiful and it deserves a lot of respect gig and flounder this is not this is not your preferred subject you know um i love flounder you saw me last night on that

on that fish tray i mean i i was glued to the flounder i like to put a little more work in i like to to uh i don't like to be on noisy fan boats yeah um but i think everything when i when i think about the beauty of something i usually picture a father and a son waiting together with you know with with spears over their shoulder and a flashlight at night um yeah the the guide the guide thing kind of takes me away from but i i love flounder yeah so we went out flounder gigging um which i was like real curious about wanting to do uh part of it comes from in the like in the north you know there's not opportunities to for spearing in the north and freshwater opportunities for spearing game fish or spearing like really good fish to eat or shooting them with your bow are like very very limited

because of depth no just because of legal structures regulatory structures like there's like very like strict method to take stuff and generally any fish that people really want to eat are game fish even down to where like bluegills and perch are game fish right crappies all the stuff's like listed as game fish and generally speaking um like it's like native game fish and generally speaking you don't jab them with anything you know there's some there's notable exceptions like you can spear pike through the ice and some various things like that but generally like you can't you don't do it so to hear that you can go out and gig flounder which everyone knows like flounder goody is it's enticing yeah it was fun to go and so

it was like i don't know if you'd call it a fleet here but there's a industry around flounder gigging yeah you're gigging for southern flounder and we went out with a guide that uh that's what he does i don't know how many a couple hundred nights a year yeah um and they got rigs for it man they got like these guys got big ass wide welded aluminum boats um with a big deck on the front and they got light systems they got one light system that goes underwater like a submerged light system then they got other light systems that shine down in the water and they got an outboard for traveling from spot to spot but mounted on a like basically it looks like a polling platform above the outboard they got a small fan motor

no shroud on it but just like it looks like a helicopter or like an airplane prop on a fan motor and they can use that and drive over what like five six i don't know yeah pretty sure pretty shallow depending on how many people are Yeah, you can cruise with that fan motor over, let's just say, I don't want to exaggerate, 12 inches of water. And you got these bright-ass lights, and they can control that fan from up front. He's got a throttle and a steering switch. And everybody lines up on the front,

and you got a big ass heavy weighted spear but it's only like a four-time spear maybe the whole thing's five inches side to side and i don't know what it is in a flounder's head but they don't spook they get in the silt they're incredibly hard to see like some of them i i like consider myself like good at spotting fish i was blown away by that guy's ability to spot fish we would have passed oh man easily 60 of the fish that we did get we got nine i feel like i would have saw two or three of them. I saw the first one.

I was like, ah, it's a piece of cake. But then I would not have saw. We would just roll over and not have seen because they don't jump. They just let the boat go over. But you cruise along these bright-ass lights, and you see these very subtle indicators of where a flounder would be laying under the mud. bed the easiest thing well yeah the easiest thing to see is where he's not because when he leaves it leaves a very it

leaves a bed that is a depression but when the flounder lays in there when he's actually present he makes that level like he assumes like his body basically assumes assumes the level of the what's the word the seafloor yeah he is his body assumes the level the seafloor so it's all just color and maybe like subtle lines around the edge but then when he leaves it leaves a flounder thick impression of a flounder in the bottom you can always tell where he where he's not but holy shit and then they change colors yeah so like we found one over oysters they had a way different pattern yeah exposed that fractal pattern and they can turn light they can turn dark and they get and they're good because they that when

they're in there they're flipping in and they actually get that silt to come back down on top of them yeah but when you do see them so you're cruising along it's only like air pushing this boat along and whoever's gig has got a gig and then the dude op the guide's got a gig and he uses gig he can like jab his gig into the bottom of the sea floor and use the handle to stop the boat because he can immediately like throttle back. And there's not a lot of force. And he can just like stop the boat and even back it up. And then the flounder is laying there and other stuff's hard to gig. But the flounder, you just you get all the time in the world.

And you get above it and hit it in the gill cover. And then up into the boat. And then there's other stuff that's much more difficult to hit. The stuff that's not pinned to the ground. I mean, it's really the best way for flounder. You can catch them on rod and reel. They are a very difficult fish to grab, if you can imagine. Flipping on the boat.

Like a redfish, you can just get them behind the head pinch them and lift them up but a flounder's like it goes ballistic out of the water and so i mean can you imagine how good the indians had it here oh they were like torchlight yeah just oh man yeah i would like recommend i would definitely recommend um that people check it out the noise might the noise might get to you like i like a lot of times i'll go somewhere and do something and i'll be like if i lived here would i be way into this you know and i feel like i would if i lived here i would strive to find a more peaceful way to hunt flounder you're walking you know you just have a i mean they make flounder lights now that are really um they're light like leds and you just hold them and you rig them up to a 12 volt battery and you put in your backpack and you go out with a really light

gig and you're not going to cover the water and you're as well as in a boat so maybe you're going to get one or two a night but yeah um i, for me, that's a pretty nice experience. You can go out in the bay and it's just dead quiet and you're just walking around and you have a successful night is when you gig a flounder. But you could probably use JT's tactic too and go to places where those airboats or the gigging boats are not small.

And I'm sure that they are limited to some extent and there's probably water that holds flounder that they're not getting to. That's a good thing though. You could probably. But I'm just saying that as a guy in a small rig that was going to go away, you could probably find some good stuff.

Pulling around for redfish during the day, you see a bunch of flounder. And what they'll do is when you spook them, they pretty much hold their ground under lights at night but during the day as the boat goes over them they'll quickly get out of that spot and then you see them kind of flutter their fins and get back into that embed themselves in the soil 12 feet over and it creates a huge plume of silt and i mean you could just start like you'd find him right oh you could gig him during the day um yeah i i don't condemn that method it's highly effective so the only

thing is like you gotta watch regulations make sure the population's doing good but it's a delicious fish and if you're going out and spearing it yourself i'm all for it if i didn't like i'm on the water every day as an occupation. So if I get a day off, I'm not thinking, man, I'm going to flounder all night. Right. Yeah.

The way, the way I would picture doing is I would picture getting my canoe, putting some shop lights on the edge of it, putting two or three car batteries in there and putting my kid up front. You know, it works really good. Two kids up front and one of them gets the right side and one of them gets left side.

Yeah. Do you remember those? They don't make them anymore, but it was the best kick boat in the world the hobie cat made like a double pontooned like like it's got a real comfortable seat on it and it's got even a little rack on the back of it and we had these things called the fishing pal down here which were basically like a giant styrofoam pontoon thing six foot tall three and a half feet wide and a platform you could sit on and kind of a crossbar to put your feet on and you can basically just sit on that thing and crawl

around in shallow water with a powerful headlamp and a little spot and you could just do it from there then you're not walking if you see something there's an alligator in the weeds you can pull your legs up and be on this thing, right? Yeah. You're not as exposed as if you're wading around. But what's cool about them is they tend to want to be on a pretty hard bottom of sand. And so that's easy wade fishing, flounder habitat. Because you guys saw there's some places down here in the back marsh where if you stepped out of the boat, you'd be to mud up to your thigh, and you're pretty much stuck. And flounder don't tend to hang out in those areas.

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slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. What do you think about all that, Seth? You know, it was cool, gigging uh the the noise of that motor got old quick i think yeah i would definitely recommend anybody goes bring yourself bring some earplugs no yeah were y'all not wearing headphones no it wasn't that bad it's just a lot

man you ever like bow fish out of a boat where you the guys run the lights off a generator it's that same thing it's fatiguing yeah yeah it's like it's already like your world's already shrunk down to what's lit which is fine like if it's quiet you know like i was talking about like that rig i'm talking about you put a couple car batteries you got limited time so you know you got a couple car batteries you're gonna get an hour light off each battery so it's like we're not gonna be able to go for long right but you're out and you can hear everything you hear birds you hear frogs your things splashing in the water it's like you can just hear you hear a raccoon walking through the mud you know and so you your world's shrunk down visually but in an audio sense it's like more

enhanced and more expansive. But in these rigs, like bow fishing with a generator, doing that gigging on an airboat, your world shrunk down visually. And audio is gone. That's crucial. I think that's- Yeah, if you're trying to torture me into telling something- Stick you on one of those. After a couple hours like i

here's what happened just let me off this boat silence silence except for the sounds of nature water bugs critters birds i mean silence is one of the most important elements for me doing what i do yeah you know i remember this musicologist uh reading this musicologist who was talking about um you can't you're talking about you can't appreciate music or anything until you appreciate silence like you have to respect silence to like understand that there's an interruption in it you know it's just it's like it's fundamental to like have for a sound to be nice you sort of have to recognize the absence of sound yeah or he did a better job of articulating it but oh it's just yeah it's not jesse do you feel like i sound ungrateful because you took us out flounder

gigging no not at all i mean i think it was uh you know you came down here, I think, to do some specific and tangible things, but also I think that in a way, I was kind of playing Texas host a little bit, too. For sure. And I feel like, especially when we got down here to the Bay, we got to experience kind of the big ranch historical and cultural

heritage of South Texas, which is truly unique. But we get here, and I'm not going to say that I intended to do it beforehand, but what ended up happening is we experienced probably the most drastic spectrum of bay experiences between JT where it's stunningly quiet out there and you're moving through the water without making a

sound and then you are looking for this fish and there's the the approach is extremely delicate the way that the fish is cared for after it comes to the boat i mean jt allowed us to kill some fish which i'm i'm really appreciative of And I understand his perspective on it. And I'm a bona fide fish killer. And I feel very respected by him letting me kill some of his fish. Oh, man, it's your total right. And I enjoy the hell out of it. Yeah.

But the way that, I mean, I've never seen a guide gut or, you know, probably apologize to the fish first appreciation oh yeah i'm not apologetic i just uh and you know there's a community of rednecks down here that when there was very few people here they they they perfected ways to be most efficient and how to pursue these fish airboats flounder boats those things belong here just like the oyster the cactus the rattlesnakes this is a tough and inhospitable place and to survive down here in the past took a lot of grit and for someone that they would label um some hill country sort of liberal over romanticized philosophical guy like myself, I get it. That would irritate me too.

If someone like that showed up. I love those guys. Some of my best friends down here operate airboats and they operate flounder gigging boats. I was attracted to that tough culture. And the last thing I want to see happen, the very last thing I want to see happen is for a bunch of young fly fishing guides to start popping up who don't have that history with this place, who don't have that real connection to this marsh. I would rather see airboats. And my friendship with those guys allows both of us to understand and influence

one another a lot more than if we had contention and animosity towards each other was that uh you know what people should go do um that was you and me were on the first episode of das boat right yeah so we did a fishing show if you go on youtube it's just on youtube it's free on youtube um go look our look up our fishing show das boat um because you can do that right now you can go what we're doing right now will be a show later um will be one of our like you know flagship meat eater episodes but if you want to like write this second go look up das boat and me and jt fish and have a couple debates about killing not debates conversations yeah about

fishing with bait killing fish sight fishing just like a little bit of like a like a mini exploration and you see the areas jt fishes um you're not a numbers guy at all i lose count after three or four yeah but do you would it um do you think it's helpful or not helpful if i was to say how many fish we caught i don't think it matters yeah i'm happy to share how like i can say that yeah for sure i don't know if it's harmful to you as a guide because then there's an expectation no not at all not at all it's all about ability and you guys you guys came with ability to fish and so we were very successful we i mean we we sight fished like like casting like specifically casting flies to fish we were looking at and we caught five yesterday like that but then we just went to some spots with spin and tackle and artificials

that the whole gang of us i mean we caught in a well in excess of 60 fish probably more yeah there's times that those creeps that was a specific condition um and that's where just got all the accumulation of failure and learning for me um we had a condition where for the last couple days a northern was blowing directly into that bank and what happened was it pushed a lot of water into that back area when we started actually in the morning came in there was current moving with us as we went up that system and we saw active fish when we looped around and finally were on our way out at the very end in that creek the wind had slacked and so um current simply from an ebb so there was no more force of wind driving water a wind it's like a wind driven tide yeah we have tides not the right word but wind driven current current so it's relative whether it's

it's produced by like you can the wind is pumping water up into when when the wind slacked did you notice at the end of the day was pretty calm so all that water that pushed in there now was flushing out so those fish came in that creek and were facing that current without current that that creek is a ghost town yeah and we were casting up i guess yeah because the current wasn't out right the current current was going out so we were we were casting down current down current retrieving and retrieving up current because everything faces and moves into current even the shrimp are looking for little tiny zooplankton and stuff they eat that's coming out of those back areas yeah you know like people talk about getting one on every cast there must have been 10 11 casts when i getting one on every cast. There must have been 10, 11 casts when I had one on every cast.

But I actually had, if I took 10 casts, I actually had 11 fish. Yeah. Because at one point in time, I took a fish off and was fiddling around and had my jig hanging in the water and one grabbed it. So I was positive. 10 casts, 11 fish. Yeah. That doesn't happen very often we showed up a

little late to the party but it was so quick and easy to get on to that like by my i don't know fourth or fifth fish i was like watch this i'll catch this one on the drop and just like as soon as it hit the water as long as you had your line tight enough where you could feel it hit as that thing's dropping through the current it's like boop there he is you know you don't even have to reel like it's like uh you know the the the good fishing makes up for less than one percent of the actual area out there oh it's this giant vastness and so you have to learn conditions that attract fish that's one thing i wanted to bring up then i want to talk about cooking fish a little bit is you um each you guys has something like hopefully you realize it each of you guys has like something you're very very good at um i'll start with you jt where if if i go fishing with you right people if you didn't know better you would make

the mistake of just thinking that there are fish everywhere but i've been fishing enough to know that if i just came down here and rented a boat i would probably spend a lot of days being extremely frustrated i realize this without having done it i would be really frustrated i'd be like i don't get it i thought it was supposed to be good down here there ain't shit it's all fished out right because you just be trying to figure it out but yeah you've been doing this for so many years you just make you make this it's like this optic this like this illusion that everything is just loaded with fish right but then we took the boat over a course of a bunch of miles and stopped in specific spots and those specific spots were filled with fish and one day the second day we went out and you

went to a spot and it wasn't what you wanted and some light bulb off in your head and you're like based on that i'm not seeing what i want here it must be that i need to do something else yeah and then we went to that something else and so i saw you like not screw up but i saw you go through your calibration process where you're like i want to check this nope that means this and then it was just game on yeah for the rest of the day man yeah it's really fun it's fun to watch because like like i said you'd have to know if you just came down from somewhere and didn't hadn't done a lot of exploration you'd come away with the real wrong impression that just anybody's going to pound them. Yeah, saltwater, you know,

I love fishing in the mountains for trout. And for me, that's a lot more about just the surroundings. You know, being in the mountains, feeling the air, the beauty and the clarity of those rivers, the cold water, the entomology, how it all works. I don't need to stick any more trout. I do love trout. I appreciate trout. I'd rather see my young boys. That's going to be, we're going to walk some creeks in Colorado and Montana and put on big dry flies and, you know. But down here, the learning never stops. It doesn't, the learning doesn't

stop in the mountains either, but there's a complexity to this that i keyed in on early on and i would go to spots and treat those spots like why isn't something happening here it looks perfect everything's like all the equation didn't make sense to me but a spot is the last place you saw fish right conditions are what you have to learn and um you know i've got a system now that makes me feel really confident when i go out in the morning with someone different every day i don't have butterflies and like oh my god i hope i find fish for these guys um i just have to follow my my go through my little handbook and follow the equation and i'll end up on them you know you know it's funny to talk about the conditions saying we had some guys on one time and we're talking about a very difficult uh basically

over-the-counter bighorn sheep hunt and uh they were talking about the trouble that happens when you're hunting last year's like you can't hunt last year's sheep right you know you can't fish for yesterday's fish man that's it yesterday and tomorrow it is it changes that fast yeah especially this time of year um you can't be like they should be in here they were here yesterday yeah and i've got a ton more every time i go to somewhere i think should have fish and it doesn't oh man that's just the perfect opportunity to go back to the books and figure out what what element i left out of that equation and there's a lot of randomness to it too like they fish don't sit still so those those fish move around they might be over here they might be over there but if you follow the

rules of those conditions you can limit 95 of the spots on the first couple steps i mean the tide the wind direction the water temperature what bait is present what the fish are primarily feeding on when you when you isolate those factors then it's going to limit it's going to take 90 of the map out of the equation right yeah um and that's kind of what i've spent the last 20 years trying to figure out i think the coolest thing i saw yesterday um was we were watching a redfish and he was going to eat something and he like charged up to eat something so shallow that he almost had to like back out he had to like flop his way he always had to like flop his way back out in the water a big group of mud menas up onto the

mud bank and had to wallow himself back into enough water to swim yeah it wasn't like quite like he was like oh shit like he knew what he was doing but he very much had sort of like how cool are they so a redfish is just like super predacious super aggressive but as you approach that fish if you drop a penny in the boat it's over so it's this very um difficult stock and where everyone has to be totally no shuffling of feet no like moving your stance no vibrations in the boat but if you get that fly or that soft plastic there and he he mistakes it for something you know for a piece of prey they're just wham nail it yeah i just love that at one point he kept saying like talking about

how the cast has to be very precise and you're saying it's all food he doesn't care yeah it's like he's a lazy southerner it's just all food and you said you need to make that thing lay on like a mustache right right and when you did that they were just without hesitation redfish are very enjoyable and if you get good at casting a fly rod um you know think about this if we were looking for keeper fish there's a lot of those you know 40 or 50 fish we caught at the end of the day um not many of them were of keeper size yeah so what's what's the legal fish 20 20 to 28 inches yeah and there was a bunch of like 16 16 18 yeah 19 and three quarter um but with a fly rod

all the fish we saw they're all foraging and even shallower water were all big fish freaking giants yeah and there was sometimes i'm like not that closer when get that one a little farther on the right that's an interesting point you're selecting the fish you want to put on the table open that like 12 inches of water it is big fatties yeah because they know they're not going to get hauled off by a bird so yeah bird predation yeah um and Jesse back to the you know they're they're in a world with the right amount of human beings and the right resources for those human beings to survive keeping fish is a much more pure there's a perversion to what i do i harass these fish i stick them in the mouth and put them back with with a slight wound in their face

and and those fish are a commodity to me so i exploit those fish for a living the individual who wants to to feed his family by going fishing on their own and keeping fish, that's as beautiful and as pure of an outdoor pursuit as I can think of. Um, you know, I, I protect those fish kind of for selfish purposes, you know, cause I want to go catch those same fish again. Um, but, but I, I'd just like to clarify that, that I think it's a beautiful thing to harvest your own food and what both you guys are doing, um, and the way that you teach people is really awesome.

And you specifically, Jesse, like taking a working man's approach and not having fancy gear, fancy guns, and just going out with your granddad's shotgun and learning how not to, not to, not to hunt and fish on your own, but how to cook on the level that you prepare those animals. That's the highest level of respect towards nature. Man, that's just like class act, buddy. Both you guys, cheers to you on that. That's what I was going to butter Jesse up about in a minute,

but I had one, I'm going to transition. I'm going to pivot with one thing I forgot to mention. Now and then when you're in that flounder gigging boat, you're tucked up against the mangroves, so you're up against the shoreline, and there's all these mullet. And schools of dolphins come in, and they know,

and they come in and hunt with you. Where anytime you're on the shore, the dolphins show up, and they just parallel the boat because they know those mullet got to make a deal where the mullet want to get out. You'll see those mullet getting out, and they'll know those dolphins are there. They'll veer a little out of the way of the boat. They're like, damn it, the dolphins.

They'll come back, and they'll come back. Now, one of those dolphins will just be like, one of them will make a slight mistake and go in just deep enough water, and then wham. Boosh. That was the coolest thing about that whole thing, was watching the dolphins. Dolphins are awesome. They would come up, and they would turn on their side. To look.

And then you could see their heads like they'd follow a fish. You'd watch them for like 10 minutes. They'd follow a fish, and then all of a sudden, for whatever reason, they're like, oh, that's the right one, and they'd take off after it. Yeah, it's funny. They can't turn their heads. You picture a dolphin laying in the water, belly down down he can't look right and left yeah but he can look up and down so when they're parallel on the boat they turn and pitch so their belly's facing

the shore then they can bend their chin down yeah at a right angle and stare in at those mullet managers and look at you guys too I often wonder what their level of comprehension and understanding is. I mean, they're super smart animals. We spent a long time. I don't know if it's new ones coming in, but a long time with those things. I mean, I could have gigged one for sure.

Yeah, they were close. Don't think that didn't cross my mind. The dolphin? I was just being like, man, a fella could if one wanted to. I wonder wonder if our crew always comes up anybody eating one of those what would that taste like i know that they harpoon them in indonesia uh yeah okay so now that i talked about the dolphins eating here's a good transition uh how about me eating your food because i was gonna say that um yeah like i like to cook and i've cooked wild game for a long time and if i have that like

if i've added anything to sort of the wild if i've added anything to wild game conversation in america it would be kind of like a celebration of it and also i've i guess i've found out things you can do like ways to take a lot of things and make them into other like dishes you know like oh you can make corn beef like everybody knows corn beef and i'll be like oh here's a really cool way to take a beaver and make to corn it right or like oh there's like pickled herring but you can catch some little shitty fish out of your lake and make like something that's like really cool and it's's pickled herring, but you can catch some little shitty fish out of your lake and make something that's really cool and it's like pickled herring.

You know what I mean? I guess I've done that a fair bit. But you're like whole... It's almost like hanging around with you, I'm not going to talk about... It makes me almost not want to talk about cooking. Yeah, but you've got all this you just got like you're at like a way different level man well i mean maybe maybe i mean i'll take that

compliment that's very kind but it's it very much applies to down here you know like like what we've got available and you've you've seen game all over the world and and different animals in big game. You know, I've never really handled elk or a moose or a beaver or a walleye, things like that. I mean, so you've got those experiences too. But, I mean, I think at the end of the day what we're both trying to do is put these wild foods that you can go out and attain into comprehensible and familiar forms. Because I think that's what appeals to people the most,

is trying to get people away from thinking that deer is something that you only eat on a special occasion or it's something different when it should be Tuesday night dinner. And if you have that mentality when you go into it, that you're going to, you know, that I'm going to eat redfish for dinner tonight because I'm taking back a couple fillets. And I'm really looking forward to that. And it's making it a day-to-day thing. And at that point, you tend to steward that resource a little better, be more concerned about conservation efforts.

I mean, I'm not trying to, like like make a jump to a big, big picture. But that's what I like to do is convey the eating of it as something that's not unattainable. And that if you do, you can be creative and clever about it. But I try to just take things that are familiar, just like what you were saying about corned beef, you can corn a goose breast. Same thing. Just take those ideas and you're going to have failures, but if we can convey that to the hunting and fishing public, then I think that we've done our jobs is to convince them to celebrate it and not view it as something strange or, oh, my family doesn't eat that. I mean, that's a big component of it too. It's just like if you put it in familiar forms,

then you're going to get the people that you're also not. I mean, you're the eater, but also the people that you're feeding. If you can put it into familiar and recognizable forms that taste really good, then you can introduce that really nutritious and well-caught or killed animal into their diets too does the new school of traditional cookery uh should people come look you up or you got like you booked way into the future we're we're booked out for the year or i say the year the the season we're starting up with uh spring bookings um would love to get, if anybody's got six buddies

that are going on a turkey hunt, things like that, we're going to start looking to book those and then we're also going to look to start booking fishing. And that'll mostly be coastal trips where we can come down here because, in all honesty, fish cooking, seafood is, if I had to say, is really my favorite. I mean, game get, you know, if I had to say, is really my favorite. I mean, game get, you know, the big animals, they get all the play.

That's the romantic side of it. But I mean, I love cooking and eating fish probably the most. Yeah, we had a really, really good meal last night of how many varieties? I think we had six fish. Well, let's rat them off, everybody. So last night we had a meal that was comprised of stone crab blue crab sheep's head drum black drum black drum red fish sea trout lost track flounder southern flounder oh and when we were out gigging flounder we gigged up

we gigged up two pompano two sheep's head and a few black drum yeah that's where the that's where the spearing skills come in handy yes yes all right man so people can go find you uh they can do your class they can learn how to cook wild game in the way that everybody's gonna love it new school of traditional cookery go to your restaurant die do a d-a-i-d-u-e and austin it's all on the same website a lot of information there but then and he's on instagram he won't change it to what he should change it to sir he's not at jesse griffiths he's at sack him sack a lot sack a lay spell it s-a-c-dot-a dot A dot L-A-I-T. It means sack of milk.

It means milk bag. It's what they call crappie in East Texas and Louisiana. Oh, they do? Yeah. And then JT Van Zandt, how do people, do you have a website or what? I know on Instagram you're active. Yep. Website, JTVanzant.com and at JTVanzant on Insta.

Yep. You want to catch some fish. Yeah, buddy. With a dude that knows the landscape. Let's go sight him up, put a fly in front of him, paint a mustache on him. Yep. JT will tell you what he's happy about. He'll tell you what he's sad about.

He'll show you a bunch of fish. I'll share myself with you. I expect you to do the same, and we'll appreciate a resource together. And form a friendship. I don't want to beat this in too much, but bring your own sandwich. Oh. yeah. I provide ice water. Yeah.

Bring your own sandwich. Your snacks are on you. Do not make that mistake. Okay. Thanks guys. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada.

It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.