The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 213: The Return of the Latvian Eagle

Episode Date: March 23, 2020

Steven Rinella talks with Miles Nolte, Brody Henderson, Ryan Callaghan, Phil Taylor, and Janis Putelis.Topics discussed: The things that won the war; melting your wedding band into your finger; chap ass and irritated sphincters; getting a tater on your thing; Dumpster Diver Cal; manipulating a briefcase full of pike decoys; a golf ball with an eyelet through it; thrusting spears into fish; hot tips for making fish cakes; the myth that old folks know what’s up; is it bad when you positively generalize about people?; finding worm beds to find fish; a quarter sturgeon per acre; whitefish caviar on Cool Ranch Doritos; sturgeon schnitzel; a paddlefish living inside a wet sleeping bag; Steve sings "Ch-ch-changes"; 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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Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with OnX. Okay, Yanni. Since you're not like the, you know, you're not a co-host anymore. Yep. Because you're always gone. What I want to do is go back

to the thing we used to do when you were kind of an up-and-comer. You could just call me a very experienced guest. Yeah. Very seasoned guest. What I'd like used to do when you were kind of an up-and-comer? You could just call me a very experienced guest. Yeah. Very seasoned guest. What I'd like you to do is do like we do where if I have a heart attack, because we're on

the ice. Okay. Let's do that all of a sudden the ice beneath me shattered and I vanished from sight and the current carried me under the good ice and there was no possible way out for me yep we're just like yeah and here you are you all of a sudden realize that um you need to intro the show i gotta jump in you gotta jump in uh-huh carry the flag so let's hear it so like like you got to set everything up right

you got to make listeners feel like they're here morning folks glad you could join us today on hunting and fishing with yanni steve's gone he floated underneath the ice that's what you're gonna call the show now yeah hunting and fishing with yanniishing with Yanni. Oh, I like it. That's good. Yeah. Jimmy Miller came up with that years ago. What do they call that? A voyeur something? No. A voyeur is when you get your jollies off

of what someone else is doing. Oh. Well, what do you call it when you can see into the future? Clairvoyant. Clairvoyant. Oh, I just figured with a name like that, he was some kind of marketing whiz somewhere in a tall building somewhere. The story we tell about Jimmy Miller, which we share many times, is Jimmy Miller once found a buck all tangled up in the twine used to bind hay bales,

and he freed it, and then the buck kicked his ass yep so anyways today on hunting and fishing with yanni i'm joined by my friends brody henderson hello ryan callahan miles and nolte morning Morning. And Phil, the podcast engineer, Taylor. Hello. Should we have a little moment of silence for Steve? At least a toast. I would really

like to do that kind of thing people do when everybody shares a word. Oh, just go around and everybody says some memory or something. That would be great. Yeah. Well, being as how I'm more into the logistics of things,

I think we've got to figure out how we tell the fam and then also figure out if we're just going to keep borrowing his stuff like he's still here just divvy it up and take it or divvy it up and take it yeah um i'll start um yeah and do we a kind man but also generous we fish out the day well at least until the bite slows down he would want that yeah he would that. He'd give you the shirt off his back. Yeah. I learned something from him.

So we're here ice fishing in Bozeman, Montana. It's super sunny out, so bright and sunny out that we decided to erect a nice Eskimo. What's this pop-up thing called? It's the fat fish. Yeah, but there's more than that, right? It's like a... 91... 50? I don't remember the numbers.

It's like you wouldn't fit this thing in a trailer part lot. It's a very large shanty. You'd have to get a double-wide lot. Well, Cal and I lived in it for a few days. It was very comfortable. Tell me about that, Miles. It was. We just came back last week. We went on a little

high-mountain ice fishing trip chasing around burbot and brook trout and whatever else we could find. We just put the tent up and slept in it. It's big. It's insulated. Had tons of room for gear. Cots. If you just heard Brody do a very faint

I think that might be weed. It was I prefer But Brody does... That's because when you're guiding and someone misses one, you gotta be quiet about it. Oh, you can't be like...

Oh, you can. Set, set, set, set. Never mind. Go on, Yanni. I'm still under the ice. You're still under the ice. You're still under the ice. Where do you want me? I wasn't prepared for this. You're about done.

You're about done. I'm busting up through the ice. Okay. Hey, Steve! I'm back in my seat. We're over here. Real quick. They're still not biting.

Real quick. A trifecta. Okay, there's a trifecta of finger stories that just came in. Oh, I was talking about people getting their fingers chopped off all the time. Inspired a guy. Go on Instagram. I just put it up. It'll be old now, so by the time you hear it, scroll way ass down.

You'll see a great picture. A guy just sent us a picture of him. Snagged his old man so hard on a back cast with a big saltwater fly that he snagged him so hard that he busted off a 40-pound tippet on the forward stroke. Oh!

And there's a great picture of half his old man's face with this giant hook just an inch below his eye. Oh, boy. I posted that on Instagram. At Steven Rinella. But a trifecta of good finger stories came in. Guy wrote in. Oh, fatty.

That might be the fish of the day there. Guy wrote in. My father is an electrician and was wearing his gold wedding band at work. That's a good conductor. You know when people like to do things about how we won World War II? Like, we couldn't have won World War II without Butte, Montana.

Yeah, because you stole my thing. There's a version that we couldn't have won World War II without the hydroelectric dams on the Columbia. Because smelting aluminum requires so much electricity,

requires so much energy that we were able to outpower the Krauts. Still calling them the Krauts, huh? Yeah, for another generation. I might have my children's children retire the anger. You know, my kids, when my kids have kids, I'm going to have them go to Yanni Solstice Party and chop into the log their anger at the Germans having fired upon their great-great-grandfather.

And it'll be gone after. And then the family animosity toward the German army will be over. Okay. They shot a hole right through my dad's rain poncho, Brody. Scared the shit out of him. No, I get it. I get it. And, well, I could tell you some more horrible stories.

He made me lose my train of thought. Things that won the war. Oh. Yeah, there's an argument that our hydroelectric projects along the Columbia. I don't know where this is articulated, but it's like we were able to produce aircraft at such an astonishing rate because we had such an ample supply of electricity from hydroelectric projects. I'm not telling you this is a fact. I'm telling you this is a theory I heard.

Another one. Cal, explain the one you were given well uh butte was uh producing more copper than any other place in the world at that time and and are all of our a bunch of stuff for fitting out ships and everything else but also brass for uh shell casings and i heard wiring that like the manhattan project all that stuff was gold wiring oh wow um there's a great there's a guy uh ed there's a right if you ever want to read a story about all this ed dobbs has a long article about butte in the in the metal mining in Butte called Pennies from Hell. It's a good explanation of what we're talking about. Anyhow, but why was I talking about that, though?

Somehow, I'm figuring this power plant or the dam has to do with someone losing a finger. Oh, it does. Oh, gold-wearing man. Here's the thing. I was saying that gold's a good conductor is what i was trying to get at because about the manhattan project and how they use gold wiring so guy his old man's an electrician he's got his gold wedding ring on at work oh this is all making sense now he got an energized wire in contact with his wedding band on one side and the ground wire

on the other side melted the wedding band into his finger and had to have it surgically removed. Now, he just has the scar ring and doesn't need to wear a wedding ring anymore. He's scarred into marriage.

Scarred into marriage. Probably a few folks scarred out of marriage i mean you see guys do that or gals just tattoo the ring on similar concept another guy uh writes in nerf uh same guy so the man the man that did this to his finger. Okay. He gets it in his head to make a jewelry box for his wife for Mother's Day using some locally sourced Russian olive from along the Yellowstone River. That's cool. Probably some squirrels around there too.

Loses the whole damn finger on the router. Couldn't find the finger, and a week later, they found it stuck to a window in the shop. Whoa. Last place you look. Last place you look. Oh, go ahead. Oh, I was making a bunch of faux sighting for the first light trade show booth and uh had to drive it all down to salt lake city and and was on a real tight schedule and i had to

go came up a little short so i swung by the wood shop that i was borrowing and was zipping, uh, you know, I was basically making veneers, right. Which is just take the fancy looking face off a board and cut it real thin. And then you just take that. So it's not structural or anything. It's just ornamental. Um, and, uh, and put my thumb right into the, into the blade on the table saw. But you still have it. Still have it, but I'll tell you immediate recognition of the whole situation, right? Cal, do you mind explaining to people how you're fishing and why?

Effectively. Yeah. No, I give up. You're right. That's why earlier when I thought you were wrong, you didn't invent this, but I just dropped this fish in the hole explain your explain your approach cal um then i got one last the last of our trifecta of finger stories so the the approach is basically just using the rod and reel to um dole out enough line and keep the line organized

and out of the way and then i just hold on to the monofilament and jig with my fingertip um oh fatty fatty but you know i'm over here just doing it like the old timers with a pole um with a pole but the reason being is like i'm just not a good i don't have the feel that you midwest folks do perch. Yeah, I can see that. Here's the final one. Final finger story. I like this couple. It's a couple, and for Valentine's weekend, they're going wolf hunting. Okay.

And a little Valentine's trip, but as they're loading up the... as they're loading up a side-by-side into an enclosed trailer, the dad has the mom guiding the winch line. Oh, boy.

Yep. Right at the first knuckle. He says, Happy Valentine's Day. Remember that one forever. Here's what I've been wanting to talk about for a long time. A guy in the U.S. Marines, most of the stuff we talk about,

you just ignore, but don't ignore this. The guy in the Marines says he's watching our show, Meat Eater, on Netflix, and he notices that when I am scanning my surroundings, I scan

left to right, which is true. And he's not talking about through binoculars. He's just talking about, you just walked up onto a little rise and you stop, you take a look around. He said that we get used to this because in our culture, not all culture, like in Japan, like you start at the back of what we'd call the back of the book and read it the wrong way. Here, we do a lot of left to right. He's saying that in the Marine Corps, they are taught to scan right to left. Does it make stuff jump out more? Because it makes things jump out.

Boy, I've been doing it. It is not the same. Because you're so used to going... And just moving too fast. I just started looking out my window because I scan the hill behind my house all the time. And I scan left to right. And I started doing it right to left.

It's a different experience, man. You experience everything differently trying to look right to left. I think it's a good idea to do both ways yeah because it's different like your eye hits different shit going right to left it's a good tip yeah hot tip uh last last story the the the finger losing stories led to have people, regular listeners have been following, led to a lot of nipple-losing stories. More nipple-ripping. Has anybody actually lost a nipple? This guy did.

Feeding a horse. As a kid. Holding a bunch of hay for a horse. The horse got aggro. And irritated. Took the nipple off. That's terrible. Wow.

I'll vouch for it. My mom's horse bit right through my jeans one time. He says he gets phantom. Did you get everything back? It's a guy telling us about his buddy that has this happen to him. But he says he gets phantom nipple syndrome now. And he gets within 100 feet of a horse, and his good nipple starts to twitch. You think of that?

I don't know about that. Now I'm going to close out this round. Hold on, there's a horse coming. I'm going to close. How do you know? I'm going to close out this round with what I think might be a bogus finger-losing story.

A guy says they used to always sneak into a swimming pool they weren't supposed to swim into, and one day they get busted, so they run out of the pool and jump the fence, and his buddy loses his finger jumping the fence. Then later, they go back to find it.

And check this out. I have a hard time believing. This is why it might be time to end finger losing stories. Because it might be that it's just entered bullshit. He says they go back and find a different finger. Yeah. I mean, that is a great story. They're like, yeah, what do you do then?

Do you be like, well, put it on anyway. I'll take it. It's a finger. It's what I've got. Cal, a woman sent, have you seen this box that we just got in the mail? We got a box full of a bunch of kinds of hand sanitizing wipes. Really? Baby wipes.

Oh. And Ziploc bags that are marked one says Ryan and one says Steve. And it was a watcher of the show remarking on how filthy we seem to be all the time and our filthy food handling

techniques and thought that we would be wise to start carrying these labeled bags full of these wipes. Thank you. Yeah. Which got me thinking, I had a note for a long time to talk about a thing like, we use a lot of wet wipes in place of toilet paper,

or in addition to toilet paper, backpacking. And I made a note to talk about this. When you get a cold morning and you got a frozen one. Yeah. How much that, what I like to do is I take that frozen one out and I actually tuck it against my skin on my shoulder. Soften it up. That's the first thing I do.

Then I pull my pants down and you know right no you gotta you gotta think ahead then i have that sucker and it is wet and warm that's a hot tip man that's better than scanning the deal all that left to right i'm not a uh not a traditional a traditional Baby wipe user You know It's I always get disgruntled with Extra stuff and what is extra

Stuff and what's just like Yeah but what about extra stuff on your butt Well Miles and I You like that Last ice fishing trip I was having a bit of what they call monkey butt. Chap ass. Yeah, a lot of layers.

I don't like calling it monkey butt. But hold on. You might not be talking about two different things. I feel like monkey butt or chap ass has to do more with the outer meat and the chafing. It's where your butt cheeks rub together but it can happen

from having a poopy bottom yeah i don't think so yes it can yes it can not to me but i've heard from reliable people well even if it's not that i feel like the solution though clarify your problem is to get get a good talk about what the problem is exactly oh just like a chapped butt cheeks. Where they rub. Butt cheeks. We're talking cheeks. Cheeks, yeah. Yeah, because it's a friction situation.

Your sphincter is fine. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think people's sphincters have anything to do with chapped ass. No, but I think... Oh, but sometimes I've had an irritated sphincter from... I'm sorry, how are you pronouncing this? I think the word you're looking for.

Earlier we were talking about Hogan's heroes. It's like talking to the... Colonel Clank. Colonel Shvink. My Shvink. I like the way... It's a tough one. I'm going to take a shot at it.

Shvinkter. Shvinkter? Shvinkter. Shvinkter. There's no C-H in there. I just going to take a shot at it. Sphincter. Sphincter? Sphincter. Sphincter. There's no C-H in there. I just call it one of my orifices. So we had wickedly low temperatures, right? And all we know is like in town, the one night hit 36 below in town.

I think we had a bit of an inversion, so it was warmer, but also we had a bottle of bourbon freeze up there. That's when you know you're fishing. Yeah. When the bourbon freezes. I've never seen that happen. We woke up in the morning and the bottle was frozen solid. And I did a little extra research on that,

and it seems like most folks agree that somewhere in that negative 14 to negative 18 range is what it takes to freeze a bottle of 80 proof whiskey. I said bourbon first, but, you know, whiskey. Anyway, so I went out to one of our ice fishing holes that we hadn't been using and just punched a hole through that and gave myself good cleaning out there on the ice. And really, totally fine even at you know whatever negative 14 to 18 to 20 it's totally fine like and i didn't walk away from that being like man i wish i had baby wipes yeah i'm with you wipes bring up, there's a disposal issue. Yes. Yes. With baby wipes.

And what I like is I like these single-use wet ones. Now, granted, I don't use them every time. The single-use wet ones, because what I'll do is I just do like the, it's just a light touch-up. A light check. A quick check at the end with a wet wipe. Then I just tuck it back into its little baggie. Oh, okay.

Gotcha. Or you can dry it out. If you've got time, you dry it out in the sun and you can burn it. Yeah. You don't have any babies, Cal. I think if you had a couple laying around, you'd use the wet wipes. I'm going to advocate for wet wipes beyond just the b-hole, though. When we were guiding up in Wilderness Camp in Alaska,

and you didn't get to bathe very often, taking one of those at the end of the day and just kind of hitting up the necessary areas. The hot spots. With a quick once-over really kept you going and kept you fresh enough for however long you had to be out there. It was kind of a lifesaver. You ever see the giant ones called shower in a bag?

No, I've never used those. It's an ample-sized wet wipe for doing a wipe down at night. Oh, you feel good sometimes. Yeah, no, it's amazing. You need that. Johnny! Bluegill! Bluegill.

Nicely done. Nice. Man. That's the Howley jig. Right? Yep. Nice. Man. That's the Howley jig. Right? Yep. Yep. Giannis, tell everybody about your – people have been asking how you got –

kind of like you quit being on the show and everything. You threw that one back too? I thought that was a big one. Miles Zahn. I'm just eating perch. Oh. Big perch. That's a fat perch.

Yeah. We haven't pulled one out of the ice that isn't a big pregnant female. No. You know, they're a free-cast spawner. Oh, they are? I thought they didn't, so no nests. No, they like to go off windy points and stuff and free-cast spawn. Disperse.

Disperse them. That's how whitefish do it, too. Let's try to keep these. A bluegill being a uh nest spawner bed spawner let's uh try to keep egg eggs and see if we can't cure them you ever done that uh we fry them but you know i've fried them and i've poached them i have not tried curing perch eggs yet well it's very simple to do so it wouldn't take but 10, 15 minutes to try it. So, Miles, you're actually being humane over there and dispatching your fish.

That is what I do. I know not everybody agrees, but. No, I don't think you can disagree with it. I think it'd be more like. Whether you take the time. Not everyone takes the time. Yeah, not everyone takes the time. I think that's a better way of putting it.

Yeah, like, let's say a big thing grabbed We talked about this before, but a big thing grabs you Brody's on Nice perch A big thing grabs you and drags you underwater Has no intention of letting you go Would you rather It drove a big spike through your head

Or Waited until you You know Died I'll take the spike through the head No question Or waited until you died? I'll take the spike through the head. No question. Yanni, you've been gone a lot. Can you tell people the project we've been working on?

Yeah. We've been working on a project tentatively called the Furhat Ice Fishing Tour. I keep hearing that there might be a different title. I like that title. Who did you hear that from? Well, Miles was involved in one of the conversations. Really? What do you guys think about calling it? No, no, no.

It's just that we're kind of separating out some episodes into the tour part and some into the local part. It's going to be Furhat Ice Fishing, no question. So the ones that I worked on, were they fur hat? Yeah, the ones that we went on when we were traveling around, that's the fur hat ice tour. Yeah, because I made it a point to pack around not only my

beaver fur hat, but also Steve's dad's coonskin fur hat and then Steve's beaver fur hat. And a lot of the guests that we speared and fished with wore them. We're quite excited about it. And listen, man, those hats are no joke.

They're amazing. Dude. Cal. Warm AF. Cal and I lived in them. Oh, I slept in mine. I was told on Instagram that I moved farther away from being a boomer by using AF in my post the other day. Oh, really?

I guess that's like a real hip thing to do. Anywho, so yeah, so Miles and I, Miles has been producing this content, and we took a couple videographers with us. I want to right now formally put to rest any notion of this not being the Furhat Ice Tour. Okay. Done deal. Chief creative officer speak. And yeah, we went to Minnesota first

and we fished the unnamed or speared an unnamed lake. Yep. It was the very first thing with old Mark Norquist. Not that it's unnamed. You just don't want to get into it. Yep. It was the very first thing with old Mark Norquist. Not that it's unnamed. You just don't want to get into it. Yeah. Yeah.

It has a name. It has a name. But he asked us to keep it. Yeah, I got you. Keep his spot quiet. And we speared some pike and some whitefish. And then Chef Lucas Leaf cooked us up some delicious whitefish cakes. And what else did he do?

We had some fried pike. Some fried pike. Yeah, that was really good. Delicious. You know, years ago, we did some whitefish spearing on Whitefish Bay. Mm-hmm. You know, in the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, he says how they would have made Whitefish Bay had they put 15 more miles. 15?

15. What does Gord say? Does he say 15 more miles behind her? The searchers all say they'd have made Whitefish Bay if they'd put 15 more miles behind her. That sounds right. Not 15.

Anyways, in that bay. What happened with your fish? It was a little guy. Oh. Anyways, we used to spear that bay. Did you guys line the bottom with anything for visibility? No, because it turns out that everywhere we speared had the same rule. You can't really do that. You can't lay down anything that you can't retrieve, even if it's organic matter. That's a good rule because we were just kind of like younger and didn't really think things through as much.

We would slice potatoes very thin. Yeah. And then drop sliced potatoes down the hole to where you got a nice white bed on the floor. Wild. So that you could see the fish pass over it. Because it was deep, murky water. And you'd have those taters down there. But what's funny about it is there was some current.

So you'd always have some dude outside the hut drill a hole, and the current would vary. So some guy outside the hut would drill a hole and fire down a potato slice. And you'd yell out, like, little farther! And then he'd kind of go and drill another hole and drop a potato slice. And you're staring down your hole to try to see. Then also when he's on bullseye, it's like live ammo, you know. Then you start firing in tater slices because they're bombing in at the right spot.

Oh, this is fantastic. But my brother Danny, he really kind of pioneered this for our group of friends. But man, you'd fish all, well, you'd like drink and fish all day to get a handful of these fish. But man, was it fun. And then your shanty, you had to have your name on your shanty. I remember one year, they had their name on their shanty,

but this thing froze in like it was wood. And it froze into a degree you weren't getting it off so they tried to just leave it begin being young and dumb they tried to just leave it and then they got a notice like get your shanty and they came out and had to burn that son of a bitch out of the ice there was no getting it out of the ice which is is also illegal most places. So I wonder if there's like a middle ground there where you could be like, well, I put a bunch of pontoons. I fixed a bunch of pontoons to the shanty. And tied it to the beach. Waiting for it to float.

Right. All right. So I'm sorry, guys. Go on. No, that was a good divergence. And I'd never done, I mean, I've done open water ocean spearfishing before, but I'd never done ice spearing before. Yeah.

The difference being that you're throwing a spear through a hole in the ice. Yeah, it's really, but it's a hell of a lot of fun. I didn't know how I was going to feel about it. You know, there's a lot of sitting and waiting, and I didn't know how that was going to go. But, man, I don't know about you, Yanni, but I thought that was really fun. That was great. I'm going to have a final wrap-up thought

comparing general ice fishing like what we're doing now to spearing. Oh, no. You haven't even started yet. I know I have a lot to go through. Because you want to talk about the sturgeon. Yeah. We speared there, and then we went over to Lake Winnebago.

Explain the process. Oh, you want to get deep here. Yeah, I want you to tell people about, because you've engaged in three kinds of spearing. Northern spearing, whitefish spearing, sturgeon spearing. True, but the whitefish and the northern spearing was through the same hole. Yeah, but they're not drawn to the same thing. They are. They are.

What? Yes, we were using the same decoys. Oh, you know what we used to use to lure them in? Sorry. In amongst the tater slices were a lot of boiled, the smallest macaroni you could find.

Boiled. Chum. And you felt like that was chumming them? Do I feel like it? You'd watch them down there eating the macaroni. Really? Yes. I bet they were taking them for little grubs. Yeah.

I bet that looked just like little grubs. You'd see him nose in, and he'd pick the macaroni that landed off target, and you'd watch him and the sons of bitches would be down there eating macaroni. So why were you spearing them because that was the only legal method of take. Why weren't you fishing with macaroni? These were a species of white fish called Menomonee. And they have a mouth that would make the pupil of your eye look big. So hard to hook.

Yeah. But they would go down and kind of, it look big. So hard to hook. Yeah. But they would go down and kind of, it's just very hard to hook. And it was deep, and you didn't throw the spear. It was a very heavy weighted spear with very fine needles. Many needles. Probably like 20 needles across. We used to make our own.

We made some of our own uh and it wasn't like a fan blade that you could propel you couldn't like you know that white some of those white fish Spears have like a what's the word I'm looking for plain like you can plane them like you could shoot off at an angle this you would have to hold over directly over the fish eyeball down it and just open your fingers and let it fall and it was weighted like you take a pipe and fill the pipe of lead and then out of that pipe with all these needles and drop it on them pin them to the bottom yeah but small little fish but there's no way they'd come into a uh the same lure you'd use for a northern so

you're picking up fish and taters at the same time? Yep, fish and taters. You just take it all home and fry it up. It's funny you mention that because you're right. Now and then you would get a tater on your thing. I'm like a poser. Danny and our friend Matt Drolls, they were like the guys that they pioneered. I just would go up and visit them,

and I'd go out there and, you know, basically be like mooching off them. Yeah. Like their shit, their spot, their know-how. And I'd be like, oh, that sounds fun. Right. Yeah. We wanted to do that.

Like I said, when we were spearing for the pike and whitefish, we were not allowed to put anything down that you couldn't retrieve. And the water was pretty clear we were only spearing probably five six feet yeah right yep um where you could really see the whole bottom which was sweet because when the perch came in of course they did that when we didn't have a rod ready and then the next day we had a rod ready the perch didn't come in but you could just sit there and watch them hanging out, doing their thing. You know, it was nice.

You're just watching the plant life down there, moving around in the current. When you're just staring into a hole where there's no bottom, it's a little bit tougher. It doesn't quite have that slow TV feel anymore. Because you're fishing northeast in such deep water. Slow. I mean, sorry, shallow.

Where we could see the bottom very well. So we didn't need... No, but when you talk about staring into a hole with no bottom. Well, that comes later. That's the sturgeon. Can you do a... Can you discuss this for me in a way that it's outlined? Like what the... How we moved through the tour? Is that what you're asking?

No, I want it outlined by fish. So picture like Roman numeral one. And under that is what? I'm also like fishing, so I might not have missed something, but what are we on right now? We're still on pike and whitefish

at the first stop. But I don't want to talk about them in the same way. But it's hard not to because we were doing the exact same thing in the exact same spot. One would just show up or the other one would show up? We literally changed nothing.

Nothing. Same spears, same decoys, same holes, same everything. Okay, do it your way. Go on. Yeah, so, well, if you really want to start at step one, we went out there,

we drilled a hole. Drilled or sawed? Drilled. And then peeked down into that hole with a jacket over our heads to check for clarity and for depth. Okay. And when Mark felt like we had both of those nailed. And what did he like? Again, that, you know, I think he was looking at five to six feet of depth and looking for just good clarity so that we could see fish coming through.

And a hole in the weeds. Oh, that's right. You want to have a sandy spot in the weeds that you can look at. Yeah. For visibility. Yeah. Not that you couldn't clear some plant matter out of the way once you drilled your spirit hole, but then it would muck it all up. It would take a while to settle out. It was better just to find a hole for better visibility. I'm realizing how much

I missed you, Giannis. Just hearing you explain this. Oh, thanks. That's nice. Then we drilled, I think, six holes, kind of like what we have here right in front of us in a rough three-by-four-foot pattern, and then connected those drilled holes by using a hand-powered saw that was specifically made for cutting ice. Is it like my ice saw? I don't know if I've seen your saw, but like a solid three-foot blade.

Folding. Yeah, folds. Was solid three-foot blade. Folding. Yeah, folds. Was it blue blade? Yeah. Yeah, it was. Did it have a pin? Yeah. Yeah.

You know, we used two different manual ones, though, now. One of them was that blue one. And the teeth are very far apart on it. Yeah. Yeah. It cuts surprisingly well. I was shocked. Oh, yeah.

I bought one for beaver trapping, but just never used it. I just used the axe and stuff. So we cut a hole, and here we removed, I say here, because later when we did some surgeon's fishing, we also cut a hole, and we did something different with the ice that we cut there. But here we removed it. Did you put screws in it and pull it out?

You know, it kind of broke apart, and so he just had these giant tongs, giant metal tongs that you could grab these big chunks with and yank them out. Ice tongs. Yeah, and it works pretty slick. Do you think it's additive when I tell you little things that I think of? I think that it's just part of the deal. At my sister-in-law's ranch, they still have, they have a pond that was made for, their ranch is some old ass ranch.

Yeah, I've walked across that pond. They still have a pond called the Ice Pond, and they still have the ice house. That's awesome. Next to the pond, and the pond was made for the purpose of like, it would freeze, you would cut ice And drag it into the ice house for the summer That's really cool

Still sitting there That's amazing So we removed the ice And then we set up a Dark house Very important when you're spearing That the inside of your shelter is Black or dark.

Colored dark. Yeah. I mean, not all of them are, but I think it helps because what you're trying to do is limit the reflection, any sort of reflection onto that open piece of water that you've just created. So you also throw snow all around the edges so you're not letting in any light coming. The only light you want is the stuff that's going through the ice outside of your shanty or pop-up tent and then coming up through the hole. I just thought of something. Tell me.

This guy rode in, and his buddy had his fish finder down, and the guy was fiddling around his own hole next to him. And his buddy sees something. He can't tell what it is, but he sees something dropping. And they think it's a fish. They can't tell what the fish is doing. The fish was at the surface but dropped down. And later, the other guy realizes his phone was gone. He realized that he'd on his flash or he'd watched the guy's phone.

We're going. I'm done. I'm just going to keep my thoughts to myself. That's too bad. We don't believe you. I'll make a bet. You can't do that. It's so annoying.

Five minutes. No, I will because it's so annoying. Go on. bet you can't five minutes no i will because it's so annoying go on um so there we were inside of our uh blacked out ice tent miles we were using an eskimo ice tent similar to this one weren't we exactly like this one you know one time i was out ice fishing no i'm joking and uh i'm trying to think well oh yeah so the decoys the decoys are a huge part of spearing. And Mark had decoys from maybe even his grandfather. Handcart.

Yeah, handcart from his grandpa. And just like he had it in a really cool old school briefcase. Really? Yeah, the briefcase was as cool as the decoys that were inside. Call it like a legit briefcase. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you know how it is. It's like, oh, a random briefcase laying around cool as the decoys that were inside. Call it like a legit briefcase. Yeah. Yeah. You know how it is.

It's like, oh, a random briefcase laying around nobody's using. Let's put the decoys in there. And so it was handed down. I think he said that he had to sort of share it with his brothers, but he was the keeper of the briefcase. That's pretty funny. Yeah. I just dug a briefcase out of the dumpster there at my condo complex.

Don't know what I'm going to do with it. I just didn't feel like it should have got thrown away. Tell them what else you found, Cal. This is Cal's story. I want everybody to know this is something Cal thought of, not me. But it got me thinking about what he was already telling me yesterday. Go ahead, Cal. I don't know what you're going on, but I found two pairs of boots in there, too.

That's what I'm talking about. And I didn't feel like either. One brand spanking new. What? The other one. Brand spanking new ditch diggers. Yep. Yep.

Irrigation boots. And then the other set is like a nice pair of ropers that just need a little bit of love, but the soles, like leather soles and totally in good shape. So then Cal's got to go hunting around for a home for this stuff. Are those the ropers that you left at my house yesterday? Those are the ropers I left at your house, yes. Ah, what a mystery. I've been asking everybody, and everybody's like, what are you talking about?

I'm like, yeah, there's a pair of boots out there with heels on them, laces, nothing. Nobody knew. Well, I asked your wife if she, I was like, I don't want to leave these with you if they just turn into something that then you have to go take to Goodwill. And then you got to dig it out of her dumpster. Right. But yeah, anyway, I got this neighbor who keeps like, if you want, there's a government building right next of cardboard that is in the dumpster,

like clogs the whole dumpster with cardboard that is totally recyclable, which ticks me off. And then he's always throwing away brand new stuff. So I'm always, every time, it makes me not want to go to the trash because every time I go to the dumpster, I'm climbing in the damn thing, pulling stuff out. Saving the world, Cal. Homestead diver.

Yeah. damn thing pulling stuff out saving the world cow homestead diver yeah hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking.

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Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Go on, Yanni. There you are. Big briefcase. Decoys.

Big briefcase. So anyway, I got a briefcase. Old decoys. And yeah, the decoy with the pike and the whitefish, we had a decoy stick, which had line just between like two small nails that were pounded into the stick, line wrapped around it so you could adjust the length of the

line down to your decoy. One guy, if you're spearing with two guys, one guy sits there and works the decoy stick. The decoys have fins on them that aren't there just for looks, but actually you can tweak them. They're usually like aluminum, so you can

adjust them and how much the decoy sort of planes out and how wide of a circle it makes when you drop it. So you can sort of, you know, jig it fast, jig it slow, and then just let it glide. And some of them, if you bring it to the top of the hole, they'll glide for, I don't know, 10 seconds before it quits moving. Wow.

Are these guys not into that little reel? There's a reel you hang from your. No, some guys will do the pulley system. None of the people we were with did the pulley system. They go direct rod. Yeah, I mean, it's not even calling it a rod. It's a stick. Jigging pole.

It's just like a stick you pick up off the ground. Yeah. With a couple nails pounding. It looks more like Harry Potter's wand than a fish and pull. Do you guys get the impression, though, that the actual look of the decoy is a factor? Or is it just something about the size they had? I think for Pike, it matters. But for none of the other species, my limited knowledge, which is granted very, very small,

but it seemed to me the pike were going to be keyed into something because they were the only ones that we were spearing that are predatory fish. Yeah. And when they came in, some of them came in hot, you know, and looking like they're going to smash your decoy. Cool. I don't think we actually ever had one. We had one actually eat it.

Actually eat it? Okay. Will those guys say, ah, this white and red decoy is not working. I'm going to try the green and yellow one. I'd try charcoals. Oh, yeah. For sure. It ain't no use.

It ain't no use. The red and white was actually the hot color. That was. And is this stuff that we can look forward to on some footage? You guys get some footage of that? Oh, yeah. You're going to see it all. No way.

And then how far below the ice do you want to work that? Because you want to bring them up, right? You want to bring them up in the spear range. Well, the bottom was only six feet away, and I speared fish from the bottom all the way up to probably two feet below the surface. When we used to set tip-ups, like if we're setting tip-ups in 20 feet of water, and this is in Michigan where you can use live bait. If you're in 20 feet of water, we would hang that sucker minnow

six feet off the bottom, thinking that he just has a better chance of seeing it from way the hell off, rather than it being down high and long. You imagine him cruising along on the bottom and seeing that black sucker minnow against the white ice. That was always the logic, right? Yeah. It might be that he's reluctant to then leave his little zone, maybe, but that was the thinking.

I like that. Yeah. I will say I picked up one tip from my own mistake with pike spearing, and that is when you see one coming in, because sometimes you can see them a ways away, and the only really what I think was a really big pike that I saw coming in, I got a little too excited. Spooked him. And I was like, pike, guys, pike! And that thing

just blew out. No shit. Oh, yeah. He didn't even come to the edge of the hole. Spooked. Like, turned and blew out. Huh. And you say you can see them coming from a ways because of electronics, or because you can actually see? No, no, with my naked eye. Because the hole is so, right, so you got a three by four foot hole,

and you could see where your, Cal and I are sitting opposite of each other right now here in this hut. And so if we had a hole cut here underneath us, I could probably see well past underneath your butt. Okay. Especially if a fish was two or three feet below the ice, and you could see the same thing underneath my butt. Did you guys take that saw and angle cut your edge so you get even better visibility? You know, we had shallow ice there, but in a later spearing story, we do.

You angle cut it. Yeah. That's a good trick. Yep. It's a good trick, but it's freaking creepy. Because when you're sitting there, it looks like it's two inches off. You look like you're sitting on nothing.

It looks like there's no ice. It's a trip. Wow. So we jigged the little decoy around, and the thing with decoys is that you can have the one that looks like a fish, redhead, white body, chartreuse, whatever, and then the next thing, the guy's

like, yeah, but you know what my favorite is, is this golf ball. And he's got a golf ball with an eyelet sticking out of it, and he ties that thing on and sits there. And after 10 minutes, I'm like, I'm sorry, but let's go back to the fish with the red head. They got all kinds of stuff that they'll put down there. And it's illegal to hang a sucker down in there.

Not anymore. They changed the law in Minnesota. We just found this out. Yeah. That you can now, we had, at one point, we had suckers on harnesses. Yeah. Swimming around down there.

Didn't do us any good, but we tried it. Got you. That rule has changed. Did he, do you remember when he said it changed? In the last five years, I want to say. Like a 14-inch sucker. No, we were fishing smaller than that. They were more like four-inch suckers. And and when you say harness it's like a set of hooks

right you're not like little handmade little chest harnesses for like see with people with their dogs these days no it was not hooked there were no hooks in that that fish at all what yeah purely harnessed can you guys explain why people would choose to spear rather, like kind of as Steve earlier, but like why were you spearing instead of fishing? I think a lot of times it's way more productive. Well, that's my question. If we're sitting here with gigs right now, you know how many panfish we'd have?

Not many. But shitloads because they're down there staring at it. We don't have a camera down, but I guarantee they're down there staring at it. Yep. I think there are a couple answers to that question. One is a lot of people get into the historic nature of it, right? Spearing has been around for a long time.

It's a tradition. Mark, who we were spearing with, was taught by his grandfather, who was taught by who knows before him. And for him, there's a sense of nostalgia and pride in continuing that tradition. Yeah. So I think for some folks, that's part of it. With the whitefish and the pike, I don't know, man, I think we probably would have done better just standard fishing, but it's so much fun.

It's so interactive and engaging because you're just looking into this hole and you can see them coming. And if you're not like me and get all excited and spook the fish, they actually come in and you can spear them. That to me was, it's a different way of fishing. And I found it to be differently satisfying. And then we haven't got there yet. Yanni hasn't got there yet, but when you get to the sturgeon, you're not allowed to fish

for them with hook and line. So that's the only way that you can take one of those fish. Okay, Yanni. Briefcase is out. You're jigging the golf ball. You go back to the red and white fish. Yeah, then eventually. Sorry, Brody.

You're all right. Eventually, I'm trying to think what the first fish was that came in. Was it a white fish or a pike? I don't know. Hard to say. Hard to say. Hard to remember. But it's tricky because you need to make sure.

You know, there's other fish swimming around in these lakes that you can't spear. And if he's at the bottom, you've got to be like, okay, you've got to know for sure what you're throwing a spear at because there's no catch and release with the old spear giant barbs on it. So either way, I can't remember if it was a pike or uh or a whitefish but uh yeah i got really lucky i think i ended up spearing two of each and then i only missed one i had a four out of five hit ratio over the course of two days that's great yeah big whitefish yeah they're both like uh i don't know close to 20 inches yeah they're both like, I don't know, close to 20 inches. Yeah, they're that 20-inch range, 19, 20.

Three pounders maybe. Son of a bitch, really? Yeah. Those are nice whitefish, man. Yeah, for sure. Just so folks know, these are not mountain whitefish. These are Great Lakes whitefish. Lake Superior whitefish, right?

Isn't that what they're called? You call them Lake Whitefish, and then people get confused, but yeah, Lake Whitefish. I should say Great Lakes because they're all over the damn place. Yeah. In Alaska. I think they're just Lake Whitefish. Yeah, they're confused, but yeah, Lake Whitefish. I should say Great Lakes because they're all over the damn place. Yeah. And Alaska. I think they're just Lake Whitefish. Lake Whitefish. Yeah, they're up here in Flathead Lake.

Yeah. But the ones in Flathead Lake- Not native, though. They call Lake Superior Whitefish. Yeah. Because there's both, right? There's Mountain Whitefish and- Yep.

In those guys. So then what happens, Giannis? Now, when you go to huck the spear, is it a jab? Is it like a- are you hucking it? It depends on what your target's doing. Because if he just comes in and then he notices the decoy and he's just sitting there, and like Miles said, they were spooky. And so you're holding, you know, you have your one prong of the spear

just stuck on the far side of the ice hole. And so when you see the fish coming, you just slowly grab it and kind of get it ready. The head's into the water. The head's below the water. So you don't get the refraction. Yep. And, yeah, if he just came in and is sitting there looking at the decoy,

you just slowly move it right over the top of him, and you can just drop it. But we had other fish, like the whitefish really, whether or not they came to the decoy, hard to say, but they were pretty much just swimming through the hole. So it's like there he is, and you're going to throw. Because you're almost having to lead him a little bit. So I might be right in that that whitefish doesn't give a shit about that big decoy.

Absolutely. I saw nothing. That's what I was trying to, I was trying to like, you saw me trying to like milk it out of Giannis. But we, it's hard to say. Like I don't think we know enough to know that. I never saw a whitefish that was clearly locked into a decoy. No. But they might have been somewhat interested in that

that brought them to the general area. I don't know. Yeah, no, you're right. Yeah, I've only speared for whitefish two days, so once I've got 100 days under my belt, I'll give you a better answer, you know? Yeah, I got you. Watching through the ice with a camera,

you can lower big stuff down and little teeny fish that have no, they can't have any notion that they're going to eat it, are still like, what the hell is that? Yeah, just curiosity. And they approach it like out of curiosity. Yeah. They're not like zooming in, they like come by and like, what the hell is that? And then just swim off. Curiosity satisfied.

That's something different. I mean, you know, you're swimming around down there everything looks more or less the same you see something different you're probably going to check it out i've been living in this pond for a year i've never seen that i've never seen one of those um the thing about the spearing though that uh and this is true for both the sturgeon spearing and this whitefish and pike is that you really get this feeling much the same way you do when you're fishing through an eight inch hole and you look out on the expanse of a giant frozen lake and you're like man we're really hoping these fish swim through this 12 square feet oh so funny you know yeah and not all that other stuff so you're like you know

hundreds of acres why not have something down there that may attract a fish you know yeah yeah but uh yeah i thoroughly enjoyed it i'm trying to think for any missing any like interesting details about the you know one thing in that that was different than what we did later was the the replacement of the ice back into the hole and then setting up all the sticks to freeze into the ice to keep snow machines from getting in there yeah which you know seems super obvious but i'd never done it before and i hadn't thought of that till we got out there and mark started cutting brush on the way out yeah the uh where i grew up you put your christmas tree down in there because then when the ice melts and this is. Because then when the ice melts, and this is illegal, but then when the ice melts, depending on where you are,

when the ice melts, the tree falls in and then supposedly it's great for crappies. Well, we had Christmas trees sunk and you would catch crappies in the spring off those Christmas trees. This is a separate conversation, but the reason that became illegal is because a lot of DNR biologists were

going, this is changing the pH of the lakes in a really negative way. Everybody dunking their Christmas trees down there. I'm not advocating. I'm just telling you. Yeah, fair enough. We used to live, when we were young, like in high school and whatnot, we lived divorced from knowledge. Just people, old people did stuff, and then they told you to do it.

Or you just did it too. No, that was what you did. Red squirrels eat the nuts off fox squirrels. It's just... The way how things are, son. It's not you to... You put your tree out on the ice.

Damn it. And if someone says not to, they're a commie. When we were done with Mark and Spear and Pike and Whitefish, Lucas made us some nice, like I was saying earlier, some whitefish cakes fried out on the ice, which were delicious. Those were so good. So he cooked and then formed his patty or formed his patty with raw fish? Raw fish.

How did he mince it? Hand mince? No, he cooked them first. He did? And then fried them again? Just until they were flaking. And then made his patties and then did a quick fry. Very large, chunky pieces of flesh in there. Wasn't all super shredded.

Like a crab cake almost. Because I got a whole mess of carp. pieces of flesh in there, you know? It wasn't all super shredded. Like a crab cake almost. Oh, yeah. Very much. Because I got a whole mess of carp, and I was thinking about just running some through the grinder. I would highly recommend that. Food processor works good, because the bones, when you food process it,

the bones, you're cutting the bones up enough where you don't need to worry about it. What my folks used to do with suckers is, they didn't do this a lot, but they'd now and then do it is cut up the sucker not worry about the bones and pressure pressure can it yeah pressure cook it in jars and then put the jars on the canning shelf and then anytime you just go and take that sucker meat out and the bones would have dissolved and then you'd make fish cakes with them. Got it.

Because the pressure cooker would just zap the bones. You're going to have to shoot me a good fish cake. I mean, I can whip something up, but shoot me a good bomber recipe for fish cakes. We're going to have one up on the website very soon from LucasLeaf. Excellent. That's good. So we've got one coming. That's a hot tip on fish cakes is you can just cook your fish.

Yeah. Just bake the filet, let it cool, shred it up. Picking bones is easier once it's cooked. Shred it up, make a fish cake. Good use for leftover fish too. I got one other tip from Lucas on that that I really liked, and that was his frying batter, which was just Cheez-Its put through a blender, 50% Cheez-Its, 50% pancake mix.

Crucial to use pancake mix that you still have to add egg and milk and whatever, maybe oil, whatever else goes into pancake mix. Not the stuff that is just, just add water. No. That was very important to him him yep and i tried it it came out good but i tell you you got to have a good food processor or blender for the cheez-its because you got to get it super fine you got to get just as fine as the pancake mix otherwise you know when you batter in it you end up the big chunks come out first yeah and then you're just

starting to work with a finer and finer mix. I can picture that. But, yeah. Tell me some more fishing stories. Delicious. We headed over to Old Lake Winnebago. You can say this now. Old Lake Winnebago. Millax, which means thousand lakes? Mm-hmm. Lake thousand lakes?

I think just thousand lakes. Mill-lax. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. I got you Thousand Lakes. Mill Lacks. Oh, I'm sorry. I got you now. Mill Lacks. And met a lot of very kind Midwesterners. I learned a lot about hospitality and just politeness. But you're from the Midwest.

I know, but growing up there, you can't... Nothing to relate it to. You can't judge because that's your home place. All you hear about is Southern hospitality. I'm not going to really dog on Southerners. I think they're pretty hospitable.

I'm married into the South and i've really enjoyed the hospitality down there but now being living out west for two decades and then going back to minnesota and wisconsin blown away like i feel like there people will actually invite you into their house a stranger and give you like a place to eat and sleep like just very very nice i just want to give a plug for the old midwest uh so yeah we went over to mill axe and where the plan was to go uh walleye fishing with mandy yurk that's how you say your last name yurk you know you're not supposed to generalize it's bad to generalize yep. Shouldn't it be okay to

be bad to generalize positively? I mean, people are going to get less pissed about it, but your point is valid. Is it okay to generalize positively? I think it is. That just makes people feel good. The problem with generalizing negatively is that it makes people feel shitty.

Crouch. Where were we? So, we got Mandy Urich. Oh, generalizing. Super nice people there. Super nice people. And Mandy Urich was going to take us fishing for walleye. Tell me about this individual, Mandy Urich. Mandy is, you remember her actual title for the Minnesota DNR?

She's like a habitat planning director. She basically works on all manner of habitat projects. And I think she, I mean. Like dumping Christmas trees in. Yeah. I mean, it could be like a brand new, even though it's not like what you think of wildlife habitat, but it's part of land that Minnesota DNR manages. But she might work on a new campground one day, infrastructure, and then it could be getting a piece of land that's just going to be used for grouse habitat or something.

Got it. Does that sound about right? Yeah. Good job explaining. Mandy, I hope I'm doing your justice here. Then on the side, she is a very, very busy angler, professional bass angler, and then a recreational angler of just about everything.

Everything. And that's just now. She's got a great story. I can go on for a long time, but just very quickly, she grew up in a family that owned a fishing lodge on- Devil's Lake. Devil's Lake in North Dakota. Mm-hmm. And out of her whole family, she was-

Cal, what you got there, an old boot? Maybe. Edge of the hole, something. Cal snagged up. She had brothers and a sister. Nobody took to the hunt and fishing like she did, and at a young age, they knew that she liked it so much that her dad just started sending her off to other outfits

to learn how to be a duck hunter or a duck hunting guide how to be an elk hunter or an elk hunting guide and so very early on in her childhood she was getting shipped all over the place to basically learn any and all different kinds of hunting and fishing but she never went the guide route she did no she did yeah so after she got that dialed in, she did some guiding for a while. And then I don't know really what took her out of it. But like I said, now she works with Minnesota DNR. Seems to be very happy. So, yeah, she took us out ice fishing on Mille Lacs.

And Mille Lacs is a giant. Oh, I missed him. I did too. That's weird. They come in waves. The school came in and suckers. I'm out of the game over here, messing with my setup. Took us out on Mille Lacs.

Mille Lacs is interesting because it's got a lot of controversy going on around their fishery. They have an excellent fishery. When the fish are biting, which they really weren't when we were there, but when they were three days prior, they can catch trophy-sized walleye almost one after another.

Is that fair to say? From my understanding, we never saw it firsthand. Yeah, we saw plenty of pictures. Yanni's fishing shallow. I might be in the weeds. No, I had a legit. I had a legit hit. It's the tightest slot limit I've ever heard of.

21 to 23. That's it. A two-inch slot. What is going on? And you can only keep one. Now, that obviously makes for a really good fishery, but a lot of people are bummed because not too long ago you could keep six. That is a –

Yeah. Okay, so – Tight slot. Tight slot. Very tight slot. For a fish that people are primarily going after for food. They ain't after them for the fighting. No, they're not.

They like them because they're good in the grease. Yeah, so to only be able to catch one is, you know. What percentage of fish that you're hauling out of the ice are hitting the slot? Well, for us, zero. Zero. It's tough to catch slot limit walleye over there. And I think that part of the reason we wanted to go there is that this is how they got to this place with such a tight slot and such a low harvest for recreational anglers is an interesting story. Minnesota DNR trying to keep the fishery really, really healthy, but at the same time keep a few people happy. They're on a tightrope over there.

Yeah. Yeah. At the same time, that lake, it's changed for a lot of reasons. It's become clearer than it used to be. And Miles is going to correct me here if I go astray with my knowledge and how shit works. But when the water is a little bit dirtier, and it used to be dirtier because of... Zebra mussels? No.

That's one of the reasons. But it was dirtier because... I mean, cleaner because of zebra mussels. There was actually, you know, not straight up sewage, but treated, you know, human gray water going into the lake, which causes micronutrients. Stuff eats micronutrients. The bigger stuff eats that. And walleye like it cloudy. They're like, they're a low light predator.

And yeah, zebra mussels cleaned it up. And the fact that they said, no, you can't dump this water into these lakes anymore, cleaned it up, hurt the walleye fishery. But it's made for a great smallmouth fishery. It's made for a great pike fishery. Trophy muskie. Trophy muskie. It's got drum.

Yep. Trophy drum in there. Talking like freshwater drum. Yeah. Obviously. What they call sheep's head over there. Yeah. Oh, really?

Yeah, we grew up calling them that. We call them gasper goos in Texas. Yeah. What do they call them? Gasper goos. Really? Huh. It's a Louisiana term, I understand.

Hit and miss on the eating on those, man. Yeah. Like a weird texture. Like the flays look like they should be so good. Really? The first bite, you're like, it's not that bad. But just like a third. You ever cut the rock? first bite, you're like, it's not that bad. But just like the third. You ever cut the rock?

Enthusiasm. Yeah, we get the rocks out. My kids got a handful. The one, we got two this summer out of a river here in Montana. And they were excellent. The flesh is like eating cheese curds. It squeaks when you bite it. And it's that dense?

It's like a dense, squeaky cheese squeak. Man, I'm bummed to hear that because I was like, boy, I am going to come back here and target these things. No, super. This was great. Totally edible. Enthusiasm does not grow as you eat the fish. Many little kids you'd eat mix like Pepsi and milk.

And the first Sip Be like It's good Right But you just couldn't Never did that You know

Never finished it Talking to a guy Who knows Who's a commercial fisherman In the Midwest And harvest those He claims That he can

Grade The drum fillets Based on color And that If you find Like the pearly white ones He claims You can't tell The difference Between those and perch He can sell them As perch fillets But if they have Any yellow to them on color. If you find the pearly white ones, he claims. You can't tell the difference between those and perch.

He can sell them as perch fillets. If they have any yellow to them, then they're really only good for the smoker. That's what this guy told me. Interesting. I was just bummed by the physical makeup of that fish. You look like you're going to get a load of meat

off of that thing. Low yield. A lot of head. Go on, Yanni. You're doing a great job. We caught some walleye with Mandy. She did most of the catching. I did watching. The very interesting thing that I've seen now that I've done all this ice fishing is just between walleye on different lakes,

completely different techniques, completely different like jigging strategies. Mandy's jig was, see, maybe you can describe this. Look at my hand and my rod tip. Yeah, the old pencil. I mean, it's almost just like you just don't have a steady hand. You got the coffee shake. It's like your hand's just shaking. Oh, I'm sorry.

I thought you were just shaky. I thought you were demonstrating the grip. No, no, no. Just a shake. That's like, yeah, you're literally. But what's funny is that we're using Hummingbird Sonars. Is that what you call that device? Flashers.

Flasher. Flasher. Which is not like a true Vexilar flasher because you're watching like a graph like you would on your regular fish finder. But you can see your jig down there doing that little shake when you're doing that to it. And you don't want it.

There's no... You're not lifting it an inch, two inches, six inches. There's none of that. It's just the shake. Good job, Cal. cal's got the shake down oh i got the shake oh buddy come on come over here brody and i do need one um so you're sitting you're you're actually this is where ice fishing gets interesting i'm gonna see what you guys all feel about it. Because here, we're not looking at a flasher.

There's no camera down. Well, we would be, but we'd be too distracted. Yeah. Okay. Well, there, we're looking at a flasher. You're not really paying attention to the hole too much. You're pretty much just watching that graph. And all of a sudden, your bait, depending on what colors you set up,

your bait's like a little squiggly blue line. And you're watching it shake around. Every now and then you lift it just to make sure that's what you're looking at. And the bottom's red. And every now and then again, a red line the size of a fat night crawler lifts up off, comes up out of the bottom. And that's what a walleye looks like. And it comes right underneath your little jiggly blue line

and just kind of suspends right underneath it. And at that point, you start this sort of dance with that red line, your blue line with the red line. And it's, you jig a little bit less, you stop maybe for two or three seconds. And at this point you're waiting for the tug, but you might, you know, lift it up a little bit. The red line follows. Sometimes you get a take. If not, you drop it back down or the red line loses interest. And again, red line is this walleye down there, loses interest, drops back down to the bottom. So you drop your bait

back down and you're just trying to hold it, you know, inches from his nose. Just eat me, eat me, eat me. And it seemed like, like I said, I only caught maybe, I don't know, three, four over the course of two days, maybe five. It seemed like the bite, I would jig, jig, jig, or shake, shake, shake, and then I would just let it sit still. And three or four seconds into letting it sit still, you'd feel it tug. And you pull the walleye out did not catch a single one in the slot oh man and we're you're that make walleye fishing real hard for me man

real hard yeah i think well within the group you know we had some other people helping and while we were manny and i were fishing they'd be fishing off by themselves i think we ended up catching a couple over the slot most of them shy. Most of them were 18 to 20 inch type fish. But no, nothing in the 21 to 23 inch slot. We got them to 20 and then we got them at 24.

Which makes sense that such a popular lake, so many people fishing. Any of those fish that are in the slot, they're coming home with people like immediately. You got to think there's a lot of people that just avoid that lake, right? Oh, like, well, I'm just, just want to not mess with this. Yeah, it's a trophy lake. And I'm not, I'm not like, I don't know enough to criticize. I'm not criticizing the management decision there.

I'm just saying for me personally, like I view walleye as walleye for eating. Well, it's an eating fish.'s an eating fish in my view. That's why that lake is an interesting story, right? Because it's not that far from the Twin Cities. Tons of people grew up walleye fishing there and taking tons of fish out. And the fishery has changed and more and more people are fishing it, right? And they want to make sure that they've still got a walleye fishery. Sure, man. Like I said, not being critical.'ve still got a walleye fisher. Sure, man.

I said not being critical. No, no, I get it. I get it. But to me, it's not a sense of whether or not you're being critical. It's that this, if you're looking at the universe of fishing stories, that one to me is worth checking out because of all the things folks,

nice fish priority, all the things, the different things that are having to balance there, the different user groups the the amount of anger that exists in that community toward that slot over that yeah people are up in arms and well you know it's not permanent not necessarily no the fishery rebounds oh man but if folks could have the ability, I'm saying in general, you go to these fisheries or hunt areas, if folks had the ability to look beyond what they're doing that day, the world would be a much different place. I mean, my gosh. And the other thing that's funny there is, yeah, the walleye fishery, it's still great. It's not what it used to be, but people are pissed off and they have one of the best, arguably the best smallmouth fisher in the country now as a result of the changes to the water clarity there. Right?

Like when, when it was really turbid and the walleyes were kicking ass, it's because they could out compete everything else. Now you got much clearer fishery. Smallmouth, they're really, really good. They're not an ice fishing fish on that lake, but in the summer they are. And the pike are really, really good. And they've, I heard a number of people in the Midwest tell me that that is the best trophy muskie fishery around, hands down, period.

Like you want to get a 50 inch muskie, it's like green Bay or there. Yep. Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes. But it's just funny to complain about, you know, I'm so pissed off about this. We have great small mouth and muskie now. I'd prefer to catch either one of those fish.

It's just like the pace of wildlife management is never going to meet the pace of expectations. Have a good t-shirt, Cal. Well, I tell you what, they haven't not figured out that smallmouth tastes almost as good as walleye either. I brought that up to a lot of them. I'm like, why don't you guys just start frying smallmouth? I mean, really? If you're going to put some bunch of batter and seasonings on it and then fry it, eat the smallmouth. No, no, no.

Those are just for catch and release. I'm like, well, maybe you guys will learn later. I know that on the half shell gets tiresome for folks, but that's, man, you cook that thing on the Traeger, indirect heat is all it is. But with the skin on, scales on, skin on. Small mouth. Yeah. And that fat just bubbles up through the meat, and you can take that, hook your fingernail into that skin and just give it a little shake, and that whole chunk of meat just slides onto whoever's plate. Oh, my gosh.

It makes a guy like me who can't fillet anything well look real good. All right, jump into the sturgeon, Yanni. Yeah, that's pretty much what we did with Mandy, right? Yeah. Tried to catch walleye. Tried to understand what was going on in Mille Lacs. Yeah. So we left Minnesota, came home for a bit,

then we went over to Wisconsin. And, yeah, first thing we did was went to Lake Winnebago for the opener of sturgeon spearing season. Miles and I had applied for sturgeon spearing permits back in, I don't know, sometime in the summer. October. October was the deadline. Closed in October. Maybe. And if you apply, you get one.

It's not like a draw thing. Lake Winnebago is part of a chain of lakes. What river? That's... Oh, man. Wolf River? Wolf then becomes the Fox further on down. Somebody can correct us. The upriver lakes have a permit uh fishery there because as we'll get into you

we've we had a spear deeper dirtier water the upper upriver lakes are clearer and they're shallower and so they're you're much like you just see more sturgeon. To make it make sense, Lake Winnebago has about a 5% success rate. The upper lakes are closer to like 50% or 60% success. So they limit the number of permits out there. Yeah, big time. It takes about seven years. Don't apply because Steve and I are starting to apply this year, and we want to go in seven years. We don't want everybody messing us all up. Yeah, so don't apply. It and I are starting to apply this year, and we want to go in seven years.

We don't want anybody messing us all up. Yeah, so don't apply. It's not that cool. I'm going to make it sound cool, but it's not that cool. So, yeah, we hooked up with Jake Andrews, his whole family. And when I say his whole family, that includes a bunch of cousins. They make up for at least.5% of Sturgeon Spears on Lake Winnebago. No, I'm kidding.

It did seem like that, though. Yeah, and the Floyd family helped us out a whole bunch. And Jake is like the – he's sort of the captain of their Sturgeon Spearing team. And he does a lot of the scouting, which i'll get into what that looks like and he helps everybody get set up everybody else pretty much rolls in besides his buddy brian brian also is hardcore but pretty much everybody else i think we had seven or eight total shacks everybody else just rolls in for cut in day which i'll explain in a second and then they fish for the season and then they're done jake's out there not yearround but once the ice comes he's thinking about sturgeon getting

ready for for sturgeon spearing everybody just draws off his teeth yes for sure yeah and he's very happy to be helping everybody out he really carries that like he feels a lot of pride in anybody spearing sturgeon from though yeah because he's put so much time and effort into it and he feels a lot of pride in anybody spearing sturgeon from that group because he's put so much time and effort into it and he feels a lot of pressure uh like the first day he's like as soon as someone just sees one and we can say yes we're like we've chosen well we're in a good spot somebody saw a sturgeon the pressure he can relax a little bit you know um so yeah, we hook up with him. So prior to us hooking up with him, his scouting.

And Miles, you can tell Phil if I get too many details here, we're going to cut this out. But a lot of people do this. They go out and they look. You're protecting his trade secrets? Yeah. There are certain things we can talk about and just a couple things. They're trade secrets.

They're trade secrets. Yeah. I think you've got to start this. I'm sorry to interrupt you, Yanni. Even earlier? Yeah. Well, the first thing that they figure out is, is it a shad year? Yeah, or not.

Or not. Yeah. There's a fish in there called the gizzard shad, which is a non-native, correct? And it's at the northern end of its limits. So on a warm year, they come up in there and they spawn and they do real well. And they die off every year because the water just gets too cold for them, right? So you get this massive shad die off. A lot of years, if it's just too cold altogether,

they just don't show up in that lake at all, right? So if it is a shad year, all these shad, it tripped me up at first because I was like, well, hold on. How does a bottom feeder all of a sudden start eating on shad? Well, he's still eating on the bottom because he's just eating dead ones. Huh. No. Yeah.

Why are you nodding your head, Brody? He never heard about this. Because I've heard about it. Oh, you've heard about it? We used to see those big shad die-offs where I grew up, and all kinds of fish would get on the bottom and eat those things, catfish and other stuff. Yeah, not a way.

So if it is a shad year, then- Brody's got his Orvis and Doris guide hat on. It's doing me a lot of good today. It's supposed to a lot of good today. It's supposed to be doing me good. You're the endorsed guy, dude. If it is a shad year, they find

the big beds of shad and they're basically going to spear over these shad beds. You can get a lot more protein out of a shad. It probably takes, I don't know, 100 red worms. And a red worm is basically a chronomid larva. Oh. So, I don't know.

Maybe the biggest one was an inch long. Maybe. Maybe. Half an inch more likely. Yeah. And so, this year was not a shad year., so you got to go out and find worm beds. Okay. Worm beds are there year after year, but like the nucleus of the worm bed could change by 50 yards, 200 yards, maybe 50 feet.

So you're looking for density. Density. Exactly. So they got these. Jake had his own homemade contraption, which basically looked like a coffee can. A wormometer. With closing flaps at the bottom. And drill a hole.

Drill two holes. You need the second hole later. Drop your can down there. And it's on a chain, so you can kind of pound the bottom with it just a little bit and then on like the third or fourth pound drop it in there and the little flaps are open and then you pull up the secondary chain which closes the flaps and you basically have taken a substrate sample this is great man three next level stir chaser so what's an example of something you can't tell me? This is high level.

This is like high test fishing. Yeah, but there's a lot of guys doing this. Not a lot, but I think we asked and he thinks that maybe like 10-15% of the sturgeon spears are doing worm sampling. And then he knows even more stuff that you can't tell. Yeah. Like, tell me in pig Latin. You gotta just think that this right here is a level that a lot

of people would be like, yeah, I know of it. I don't want to deal with it. Sure. Yeah, I know. But it makes me curious about what is the thing he's doing. Oh, absolutely. Is it peeing in the hole? Did he take any samples like that?

Kind of like that. You guys were there? Yeah. He did? Yeah, we filmed a sample. Oh, yeah. Like, was the mud just crawling with those worms or we didn't actually get to film because he'd done all this this scouting beforehand yeah

so when we filmed it it was it was sort of like after the fact he was demoing it yeah and we didn't get a ton we didn't like move around until we got a real dense yeah but he'll basically run a grid pattern and then make and then draw down on a piece of paper and then start writing numbers of per sample you know three worms no five worms six worms three worms and then all of a sudden it gets to 10 i can't remember what his threshold of good was but eight eight or more and so then he'll go out from that point and sort of triangulate and be like, okay, right here, in these five holes around it, there are more worms per scoop than everything around it. So this must be where the money shot is.

That's pretty interesting. Yeah. That's great. It's like gold prospecting. Yeah, for sure. Now, other guys also will go out and just literally sit in a shack watching a camera over a worm bed or not waiting for a surgeon scouting to to go trail like running a trail cam yeah but you can't there's no like trail cam for underwater so you just have to sit there for

eight hours like live trail camera yeah um and they like. And they get on to one. Like, he's here. This is his zone. Well, I think, again, you're looking for consistency. No, you're not looking for one particular sturgeon. An area they like. Yeah, you're like, okay, I was in this zone, and I saw three today. Because this is a big-ass lake.

Huge. And the density of sturgeon is not very high. There's one sturgeon for every four acres of lake. Yeah. Wow. Oh. Yeah. So let me just put that into perspective when you're hoping to get one.

As the biologists put it, a quarter sturgeon per acre. Yeah. That was a very weird way of saying it. They're big fish. I'll take a quarter one. No shit. This is great. Oh, it was very interesting. This is going was very interesting very interesting television program i hope so

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So, yeah, Jake had the spot picked out. Am I missing anything else out of the scouting? Not that we can talk about. Okay. God, man, would I like to know the secrets. Just teasing that out there. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. But I think one other thing to mention is the it's not like he just goes out and samples once the guy I'm good he'll go out day after day before work and keep checking like is his worm bed still here is this still the center for months as long as he's got good ice up until opener I'm gonna go on a limb he goes out in the dark man to do this. I'm going to go on a limb and suggest that this man is not a skier. This man does not ski. Not in Fond du Lac.

This is a true outdoorsman. He is a, I don't know what you call a guy that runs a sugar shack. Oh, a tapper? A tapper. I don't know, I'm making that up. A tapper or a sapper? Yeah, a tapper? A tapper. I don't know.

I'm making that up. A tapper or a sapper? Yeah, you can just throw that into the foraging bucket, though. Okay, so here you are. You got your worms down there. You know you're on the worms. Yeah, so you're not allowed to put a dark house spearing shanty. Now, these shanties are specifically built just for spearing sturgeon.

You do not – I mean, I guess you could. But it sounded like these shanties are out for the two-week spearing season, and then they're back in your yard for the rest of the year. By law. Yeah. Well, again, you could go out there and drill holes and just ice fish through it. But I don't know why people must use different ice shanties for that reason. But these are set up.

Man, I forget the dimensions. Yeah, and you just got – oh, never mind. Probably 10 by 6? 12 by 6? I know that it was 6 wide. Yeah, I think 10 – they weren't all exactly the same. I think it was 10 to 12, right around there. They come in different shapes, and they get into painting them.

You know, the classic one is finishing in a sheet metal, right? Riveted corners. Yep. And then like a pretty plain two or three foot spray painted or plasma cut sturgeon. And it's got to have your name and address on it, you know? We saw one that looked like a Green Bay Packers helmet. We saw one that was painted as Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon. That's a choice, man.

Yeah, it was nice. See you on the top. People get into it. Is that the album that Money's on? I feel like Money kind of ruined that album. I don't know if I'd say ruined it. I go back and forth on it. It was their radio hit.

So you can only put them out there the day before, and the day before is called cut-in day because you're going to cut in a giant hole in the ice. So put them out there the day before and the day before is called cut in day because you're going to cut in a giant hole in the ice so we roll out there jake's like i'm putting my shack right here on the money spot you guys all make a horseshoe around me and horseshoe yeah okay and i forget exactly what that was for luck maybe just the way the way yeah, maybe luck, but maybe the way the worm bed was running. I can't remember. How much of a gap between shacks? Yeah. What's your spacing like?

Probably 50 feet. Oh, okay. So you're not jumping between shacks. Not too far. No, no. I mean, you're not right on top of each other. Yeah. If someone, if something happens in a nearby shack, you can hear him yelling. Yeah.

Okay. Could you have jumped down, swam over, and popped up? No. That'd be a great trick. Oh, buddy. Oh, man. That'd be a good way to get jabbed with a spear. Yes.

Oh, my goodness. And die. Oh. So, yeah, we cut in day. We all pull out there. Now, that's not a legal thing, though. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, you can't cut in and set up until the day before. So everybody's out there on cut in day. Everybody. But after the season, it's okay. What's okay? You said that you can hang out in your shanty after the season. But you can't cut your big holes. You can't have spearing

holes after the season or before oh okay okay i got you so the day before the season opens is what we call cut in day yeah you can you can start setting up for spearing but you can have a big asshole for season once season ends i'm with you now i understand Yeah, so it's like a mad flood of people. And Jake, to protect his spot, we actually didn't go out until late afternoon because people know what he looks like, what he drives. He scouts. They know this group. And he believes that the sturgeon do react a little bit to activity,

especially a lot of truck activity. And so he liked a spot that was quiet. Like we only had a couple other shanties outside of our group that were like within a couple hundred yards of us. There was plenty that were four or 500 yards away. But he wanted a quiet spot. And so we waited till pretty late in the day

to go and do the cut in. So we all, these shanties are on their sleds, basically. A runner. Skids. The ones we had weren't on runners. They were actually on suspensions. He had one with a full suspension, but you have them on runners. You have them on wheels. You have them on a full suspension.

People are dragging them out there in any way they can. Any way they can get them out out there if you can move a shed or a shanty or a shack and and a huge variance between the really really nice ones that are you know hooked up on tongues and and have a full suspension and the other ones that look like someone just took their plastic yeah garden shed there's a guy locally that actually makes the frame and the trailer that everybody builds their custom shacks on, and it's set up in such a way that you basically unhook a couple pins and the tongue lifts up, and that lets the shack fall down onto the ice.

Gotcha. So, yeah, you mark your spot and where you want it, and then you bust out a chainsaw and cut yourself a, like I said, ours was probably the biggest hole because he has the biggest hole inside of his shanty, and it was six by three, maybe three and a half. You had to be able to jump over it. Just big enough that when you go to jump over it, you're like, pay attention, dude. You don't just nonchalantly pass me the trail mix and jump over it at the same time.

You're like, where's the safety bar to hang on to as I cross this chasm? So you take a chainsaw and cut it. like you said you cut at an angle it's it's funny because you think it would have to be steeper to get that effect that you were talking about where you can just see farther and there's not an edge of the edge of ice that you're looking at but it wasn't that steep of an angle i mean maybe i don't know 15 degrees yeah? Yeah, 20 tops. Yeah. And it's spooky for me because Jake cut the first two edges. I'm like, okay, I get it. And you have to hold the chainsaw opposite-handed, which will work good for you being a lefty

since you're always keeping your air intake up. I don't hold a saw that way. Up top, right? Follow me? I throttle with my right hand. Oh, okay. So it would be opposite for you too. But, yeah, you hold it.

I held it opposite. So your air intake's up top, and your blades always run in bottom because you're pushing a lot of water, and you want to keep your saw dry, obviously, in the engine. And so I'm cutting the second two but to get to be able to cut and hold that the saw the proper way i've got to be standing on the chunk that i'm cutting out of the ice for my last cut it's like something from like uh wiley coyote and roadrunner yeah and i think we're we're working with like eight minimum, I think up to 14 inches of ice, right? In that zone.

Yeah. They had a really crappy year. A lot of people did not. I'll just add this in right now. Most years they have, they sell about 12,000 permits. They have 10,000 spears. This year they probably sold 12,000 permits because they had to be bought in October. And they only had 5,000 spears. Usually 5,000 shanties, or no, sorry, 5,000 shanties, 10,000 spears. This year, 2,500 shanties.

They figure about two spears per shanty. God, that still seems like a lot. Yeah, it is. It is. But remember, it's a huge lake. Right. And that was because it was just not good ice yeah so most people drag out with um trucks and the ice just wasn't of truck safety thickness and so a lot of people would either have to get like a atv or a side-by-side or a snowmobile and if you don't have that equipment or your you know buddy doesn't have

it you're not going to get to go out. Sturgeon fishing in the Anthropocene, man. Yeah, spooky. So this chunk that you're cutting out, though, I realize it has enough buoyancy that a 200-pound man can stand on it and cut the last corner and nothing's going to happen. You're not going to wildly coyote it down to the bottom of the lake all of a sudden. It kind of bobs a little bit, but you're fine. That's great.

So once you come out. When you got your rod on your leg like that. You keep thinking I'm getting hits. It really throws me off. I kind of watch everybody's rod. I'll set it down. I'm going to fish high in the water column. Then you take these giant...

Pokers. Yeah, it's basically a, what, 12-foot pole? 10, 12-foot pole? They were using a fire. They were actually like firefighting equipment poles. Yeah. With big hooks on them. Yeah, it's got like cant hooks.

It's got a hook and a spike. Oh, that kind of, yeah. Yeah, like a spud bar. For poking, yeah. Yeah, like a spud bar. No, but for poking. Yeah. Kind of like a spud bar. Ripping through walls and poking holes and stuff. Yeah.

So what they do, because it's a big, big-ass chunk of ice, you can't just tong it and lift it out. And if you did, by the end of a two-week season, it would be frozen solid. So you'd be making, you sort of have two dangers then, right? Death traps. An open hole plus a giant chunk of ice that someone can run into and have issues with. So they do what's called sinking the cake. They call that chunk of ice the cake and they sink it. So

two or three guys are pushing down on it to get it below ice level. And then two guys get from one end and start pushing it underneath the ice. And then once that gets going, then two guys get from one end and start pushing it underneath the ice and then once that gets going then the guys that we're pushing down all come to that end and everybody pushes as hard as they can and try to get that one chunk of ice as far away from the hole as possible just in case if you have a sturgeon that's near the surface you don't want them to be coming towards your zone your hole and then see that big chunk of ice and then cause them to veer away. Got to avoid that. Yeah.

So you're trying to get it away from you. Then you pull the trailer over the top of the hole, drop it down, shovel snow all around the edges, again, get the light out. And you basically open a big hatch in the middle. And there you are. So you're basically sitting on a plywood floor that's carpeted real nice. And you just got a hole in the ice that looks like you're not sitting on any ice because of the angle you cut in the ice. Now, we were spearing in like.

16 feet. 15, 16 feet of water, which on a clear year, you can see all the way to the bottom. But this year, you can only see about 12 feet. So bottom feeders are going to be on the bottom. How are you going to see them in that depth? Taters. Well. Start peeling.

No taters because you've got to be able to retrieve them. If it had been just a little more clear, we all would have had down crosses made out of vinyl soffit material, like 10-inch soffit. They basically just make an X and then drop that thing down in the hole that's attached to a string so that you can later retrieve it. And so you're looking at an X. And even if it's kind of murky, if you get a big white X down there, it would give you some reference and then if you saw a giant black shadow go over it, you would throw at the shadow. Yeah.

Too murky for that. So instead, we were running cameras and same fish camera that everybody has. You basically run it down. Was that a hit? That was a hit. On mine? Yeah. You don't think so? Well, my rod was up and now it's parallel. I just watched it it down. Was that a hit? That was a hit. On mine? Yeah. You don't think so?

Well, my rod was up, and now it's parallel. I just watched it go down. Eh. Could have been. You guys are distracting. So, yeah, you run a camera basically between your feet. If you're sitting in the middle of the hole, you run the camera straight between your feet. If you're sitting in the middle of the hole, you run a camera straight between your feet, straight down.

And then it's maybe 18 inches off the bottom and it's pointed straight out in front of you. So you're looking at, depending on the water clarity, you're looking at a cone that might go out to six feet. For us, it was so dense that we figured we were looking maybe three to four feet. That's all you could see is a cone that went out to three or four feet in front of your camera. And you're supposed to spear the fish off of what you're seeing on the camera. That's right. Very, very difficult. So Jake had a camera down between his feet, and then between the two cameras,

we had a decoy that just hung from the ceiling. There was no jigging of this one. just was stagnant there static not doing anything um sturgeon decoys were even crazier than the pike and the whitefish decoys we went up into a gal's uh attic who Attic, who we've been spearing for, I don't know. 70-something years. 70 years. Bowling pins, Bart Simpson dolls, orange traffic cones, things that did look like fish. Colanders were very popular for decades. When it would come up to be steering season,

you couldn't find a colander in any kitchen store, thrift store, nothing. Everybody wanted to drop down a colander. The latest thing that's very popular is the white coffee mug. And then you got to choose if you want the coffee mug suspended or actually sitting in the mug at the bottom.

So, again, people go nuts on their decoys. God, Yanni's doing a good job. Yeah, this is great. You know what it is? It's like, you know how, like, in theory, you're supposed to go on vacation and come back all, like, reinvigorated for work?

It's like, that's what happened to Yanni. Oh, for sure. I felt it, too. Just tearing it a new one. Go on. We haven't even gotten to the white fishing with Pat Durkin. Oh, we're going to have to save that one for another. I don't want to burn it all up right now um so yeah we picked a uh well we're still on cut-in day um so cameras no you're not you're

on the coffee mugs and whatnot yeah well i'm telling you about the decoys they're using but the camera deal i think most people are just looking at their little six inch ten inch screen that's attached to their camera right well jake's an electrician pretty handy with that sort of shit so he's got two big screens yeah 24 inches so we're sat we sat across from each other so my screen was directly behind his head and his screen was behind my head. Instead of staring down with your neck getting sore and looking at a 10-inch screen, you can chat with the guy and at the same time be looking at the screen behind his head. They're thinking, man, this guy never breaks his gaze when he's talking to me.

Yeah, totally. That takes place of staring into the hole. Now, there is a chance that you could have one come suspended through at 10 feet or even 6 feet. And it has happened. We heard plenty of stories where the fish came through, like, his back rubbing the top of the ice. And, like, you had to take this because our spears actually hung off of a – they just had – I think one side he had an actual hook that was just barely, it was bent open, so it just still had a little bit of a lip to hold the eyelet of the spear. Mine actually was just a deck screw that was just at the right angle,

and that little lip of the deck screw was enough to hang it onto. Because we also heard some stories where people had the giant sitting there looking at their decoy and they couldn't get their spear off of their hook and then the fish ran swam off you know so you got to be ready it's going to happen fast um so yeah you're sort of 99 of the time you're watching your screen one percent of the time in short glances you're just looking down it was interesting too too is what Jake made clear to tell me about was that don't expect to see in this murky water, don't expect to see

a 6 foot sturgeon. When he's down there at 8-10 feet, it's going to look like a football. You're just seeing the main part of the mass and you just know that there's 3 feet on either side of it or 2 feet on main part of the mass and you just know that there's, you know,

there's three feet on either side of it or two feet on either side of the football. You know, you're just seeing the main mass because that's, what's coming through. That's what your, your eye can pick up. Um,

so yeah, the heads of the spear, the spears are heavy, 30 pounds. I'd say 25, 30 pounds. Yeah. They, they, they've come up with regulations because people were getting a little bit crazy. Spears are heavy. 30 pounds? I'd say 25, 30 pounds right in there.

They've come up with regulations because people were getting a little bit crazy. They're like, imagine like a guillotine broadhead for a turkey, which is like two big razor blades, like four inches diameter. But they took that idea and took it to sturgeon spearing. So they had these like two foot heads crossed. Criss-crossed spears. Criss-crossed. And so it's just like you're covering more surface area when you throw the spear, right?

You have a better chance to get a tine in them. Ours were, I believe the limit was 16 or 18. I think it was 16. 16. And ours were a couple inches shy of that. We probably had eight t times we were working with. The spearhead detaches from the handle so that you can fight the fish more easily. Because, again, it's not like you just speared a 5- or 10-pound pike.

You've now got a fish that might be 50, 60, upwards to close to 200 pounds. Yeah, tussle with him. Yeah, he's attached to a rope. So the rope's tied into the shanty. There might have been 20 feet of slack line, I think, between where it's tied off and the spearhead. And the tines, too, are serious. They have, oh, what's the little toggle called that flips out? Like a barb.

Yeah, but it's a toggle. What's the name for like a? It moves. It's like a spearfishing head. Like a harpoon. Yeah. I think it's a toggle. Yeah, it's an inline.

And then when there's any back tension, it's out. It's out. And we saw a couple of them get speared. And it like literally one time through a minimum of four inches of flesh, and that fish ain't coming off of there. Plus, a sturgeon, that skin is like shark skin. Exoskeleton. Yeah, it's not coming off of there.

So, yeah, fast forward to opening morning. You get there, 6.30. You can't start spearing until 7. Sturgeon spearing goes from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. every single day. How the hell do you regulate that? Everybody's inside a house. You can't have your spears inside

the house. If the hole is open, like your trap doors are open, your spears have to be outside the house until 7 a.m. And then at 1 p.m., the spears have to go out while you're closing everything down. Once the hole is closed, the spears can come back in, you know. Wild. Yeah. You used to be able to spear 24 hours a day.

Shine a spotlight down in there. Yeah. And that actually proved to be a little too effective. Ooh. They used to have these party tents, like 40 feet across. They would cut giant holes, and the whole thing would be lined with dudes and spears just eating, drinking, and waiting for a sturgeon to come across.

I mean, a thing that you could swim across, you know, and just a giant-ass tent, and they'd run them all night long big big light in there no shit kind of sounds like a good time um but uh yeah so for me opening day so yeah basically at seven it's like okay spears in and then start watching the camera um and i think it like we the group started seeing some around nine, we might've had a, someone missed one at nine and it wasn't long after maybe 10, 11 AM. Um, Jake's like, he, he caught a fish on his flasher. So he was running a flasher just to be like, maybe it might give us a second heads up that

a fish is coming near, but he's like, is coming near but he's like um looks like a small fish looks like a small fish and then all of a sudden you know he sees it on his screen he's like no no fucking surgeon surgeon like get ready you know so we all jump up and i'm looking at my screen i can see so in my screen i can see a decoy and then his camera behind it and he's seeing the decoy in my camera in his screen and it looks like the fish has come up and is basically angled and right at the decoy and so i see that i kind of place my spear like parallel with the line of the decoy going down i look up again he's still there and at the same time jake and i we weren't counting or anything. It just happened. Both of us throw spears and I think that we corralled him.

I look back over the screen and I just see the tail swimming straight away from me. I can't explain it. The decoy was there. I knew where the fish was on the right side of the decoy. Both of us had spears on the right side. And it was either that. We also heard stories that their head is so bony and strong that you can deflate. So there's a chance we could have deflected the head,

especially if he was right out of the decoy, because I probably wasn't. The head's 18 inches long. So I might have not been back far enough. Do you remember when in Guyana when we had that big catfish, that big banana catfish? Yeah. I cocked back with my bow and a fish arrow on there

and shot him. Everybody was like, oh, you missed, you missed, you missed. But it ricocheted off his head. A fish arrow out of a bow. No water. You aimed for his head. A fish arrow out of a bow. No water. You aimed for the head. Not aim.

I held it up to his head. Oh, I don't remember that. A fish arrow. Right. So there you go. It could happen. Yeah. And probably, what, 45 minutes after that, we had one swim under our shack

and did a similar moment. And it's difficult to describe how hard it is to triangulate your position. Because I didn't have the big screen TVs. We just had the little 10-inch Markhams. And I'm looking down at that going, okay, that's what the screen says. There's the decoy.

Should be here. And just hucking that thing and praying. And I thought I nailed that first one. I was so excited because there was a bunch of tension on that line. And it was coming up kind of wiggling back and forth. I'm like, oh, I got him. I got him, Brian. I got him.

And what I had done was drilled three times through that soffit. And it was just buried in that muck and started coming up and like swinging back and forth. And I'm like, oh, man, I got him. No, not even close. Oh, I got him and he's a good one. He's going to be tasty. You can get one just like him at Home Depot.

It took me a good half an hour to dig those barbs out of that freaking soffit. Like I had to take the whole thing out of the shack and it took forever. So out of your party, what was the haul? Two. Which is really, really good because that weekend, I think that, not weekend, three days

we fished Saturday, Sunday, Monday speared and I think the whole lake produced around 100. Right? Yeah, I'd have to go back and look I've been reading the reports as they come out daily through the whole season so my memory is muddied I'm pretty sure it was right around 100 in three days and that's

5,000 spears and we got two fish so I think that Jake's homework pays off and we missed I I mean, I missed two. We definitely had some other opportunities

in the group. See, having not been there, I'm sitting there being like, I would have gotten them all. I know you think that. It's the luxury of having not been there. That's why you should never go somewhere. Because you just sit and imagine how good you would have done had you been there

something to mention is that the camera use is pretty controversial because of what we're explaining right you're basically chucking it into the darkness hoping to get a tine in there you don't know sometimes you know what's happening down there if you're hurting them at all

the DNR has surveyed the public like two or three times about it and it's every time it's been a third are cool with it a third don't give a shit and a third don't aren't into it so they're like until it right now it's like kind of a social problem because there's just people sort of you know fighting about whether they should be using or not he's like until it becomes a biological problem and it becomes too efficient like it's not our problem what's your personal take on it king here you are king of the king of the universe um even with the cameraman it is hard so king of the universe yeah so i'm gonna let it roll um and It spreads people out too, because listen, there's like the other side of the lake because of currents and less algae bloom or

whatever. There was plenty of people that we talked to that speared sturgeon in eight feet of super clear water and they could see the bottom. So you could choose to go and do that. But Jake's theory is like, yeah, that's fine. You're going to see the fish. But over there, I think that there's 10% of the fish over there than where we were fishing. It opens up more water. Yes. So it spreads people out. Did you bring me a container of the caviar? Yes. How come you haven't handed it over to me? Oh, I didn't bring you a personal little Steve container. I brought home one quart, and it is in the office refrigerator. Miles and I are planning on having basically an office little party so everybody can get in.

Nice. There's so much that if you want to take some home, you will be able to. How are you fixing the – We'll have some crackers. Crackers. Yeah, you want to keep it simple. You got your ivory spoons? No. Oh, I used to keep it simple. You got your ivory spoons? No.

Oh, I used to have a caviar spoon, man. When I was working on my first book, I had occasion when I was working on my first book to get a caviar spoon. But we had so much whitefish caviar, like Great Lake, you know, Lake Whitefish caviar. We were eating it on Cool Ranch Doritos. I mean, we couldn't get through it all, man. We were eating it like salsa. Yeah. It was just like too many eggs, man.

Did you make your tasting spoon out of something highly illegal? No, I didn't do that. I wish I would have. I can't remember how, but as part of the book, I can't remember why, but I did order a couple caviar spoons. Not illegal ones, though. Gotcha. Like abalone shell, ivory.

Mother of pearl stuff, yeah. Did you get robbed over there? Your bait get robbed, Yanni? I still got half of it. I'm going to let it roll. Yanni, I know there's a lot more to it, man, but like I said, phenomenal bit of whole. Great job. Thanks.

Good to have Yanni back. Interesting day on the ice. Good to have Yanni back. I wonder if there's anything we need to wrap it up on. The cultural part was awesome. Yeah, we do need to throw a shout out to Mary Lou Schneider. We have to talk about the Schneiders. She's the decoy carver.

Remember the Eurythmics? Kind of. The videos? I don't remember the videos. Sweet dreams. Well, yeah, like Annie Lennox would be doing everything, but then that dude would always be in the background. I feel like that's Miles.

Like, Yanni's like Annie Lennox, and Miles is like that dude in the Eurythmics who would always be in the background. Oh, I was listening to Annie Lennox train in vain the other day. Is that season closed based on quota or just a date? Does it just stay open? Either one. If you're looking at when does the Sturgeon season end? It ends in one of two ways.

Let me hit that. How So the season is two weeks. Let's say conditions are perfect and people are just killing them non-stop. Is that a possibility? Yes, it does happen.

Again, I can't remember the exact numbers, but I think we heard of seasons that were closed in four or five days. Oh, that's what I'm trying to ask. Yeah. So the season doesn't necessarily run its course. No. It has every year for the past five years because the water clarity has been pretty bad the last five years.

But before that, they had consistent good years, and the seasons were closing. DNR would set a quota limit saying, based on population, it is feasible for us to take this many without hurting the spawning. And it's male-female quotas? Both, yep. And the female quota is the one they're really looking at. When so many females are speared, it's over.

Gotcha. Gotcha. But the last four years, it's run its course. Two weeks. Yep. 16 days. 16 days. It's a 16-day season. Yeah. I guess that makes it three weekends probably. They have weigh-in

and check-in stations all over the lake. Not on the lake, but these bars. They call them supper clubs. We went to Jim and Linda's and, uh, right out there in, in pipe, Wisconsin and, uh, crowd gathers there every day, right around 1 PM. Cause usually people wait till about one, if they have a fish to go and, uh, go and check it in. And, uh, there's a pretty big crowd gathered there. You weigh it, and then the DNR cuts it open,

checks to see if it's a male or a female. They then scan it. They're looking for tags, if the fish was tagged, if they can get some data off of it. And then that's it. I mean, I think you give them some of your personal information, and you're ready to go. It was fascinating to me because sturgeon spawn

in, I think it's generally a six-year cycle. So a female will take six years, males are shorter, female takes six years in between spawning runs and they'll run up river to do that. But they'll cut it open and just by looking at the color texture of the eggs, they'll call it an F1, F2, F3, F4, all they'll cut it open. And just by looking at the color texture of the eggs, they'll call it an F1, F2, F3, F4, all the way

up to six, depending on how developed those eggs are. And the F6 is the one that everybody wants, right? Those are the really, really nice. That's the good caviar. That's the best caviar. Mm-hmm. Um, but they had one fish that they had tagged. It was like the, one of the biggest ones they ever

tagged up river when she had spawned. And she came in at like 240 pounds or something. And then the next year she got speared and she had shed like 60 pounds of weight. Gotcha. Same fish, same length, just between those cycles of spawning, how long it takes for those eggs to develop and how much mass they have. Are most of these guys, I get the caviar, but are most of these guys, they're grilling it, frying it, cubing it up, and putting cocktail sauce on it? Man, I feel like a lot of people did not respect the meat of that fish enough.

We heard a lot of people saying, oh, it's not very good. I thought it was fantastic every way we ate it. It's a fish that they love. As much conservation that's been done around it, they love to kind of hate it, because it's not like when you look at it, it's not the most appealing looking thing. It's kind of covered in a slimy mud.

You know, the first thing everybody says you got to do as soon as you get it home is pressure wash it, you know, before you start, you know, filleting it or whatever. So that was a little bit interesting because we didn't really find anybody that was like, oh, can't wait to put some, you know, hopefully I'll get some sturgeon meat from my freezer. But it was sturgeon meat and, I mean, habitat destruction, but it was like commercial harvest that knocked them down so bad.

Yeah, but that was about caviar. In the late 1800s. That was all about the eggs. That's what they were after. Yeah. Now, we did get lucky and went over to our friend Chester and Ike and Fenton Floyd's parents' house. And they had invited us over for dinner. And we said, you know, dinner sounds great.

And Ike had speared a sturgeon. And since Ike had speared a sturgeon, it'd be awesome if we could try some sturgeon. We really want to try some sturgeon meat. And a few people had said, oh, you guys are going over to the Floyd's for dinner? Lucky you, you know. Was it Peggy? Peggy. Peggy.

Shout out to Peggy. Peggy, real good cook. Pickle Peggy. Okay. Well, you know, yeah, typical Midwest mom. You know, probably throw it out and be some good cooking. Well, we roll in there, and she's prepared six courses that would go toe-to-toe with any of the six courses that I could prepare. Like, just solid.

She had smoked some and then turned it into a dip. She had, I don't know what she did with the meat, probably posted or something and turned some into fish cakes. She did a plain fried piece over a little salad with a little vinaigrette. It wasn't even fried. It was just sauteed. It was just like salt and pepper. What's her name?

Peggy Floyd. Peggy Floyd. How old is she? She's happily married. But she did that one specifically. I'm not asking for me. I just, I don't know. People might be wondering.

She did it specifically so that we could just taste the flesh. Yeah. And it wasn't covered up with sauces and this, that, and anything else and really get a taste for it. What else was there? Oh. Curry. I got to make fish curry more.

You know, we've had it a couple of times over the years, and for some reason I just don't do it at home. But she made fish curry, served it over rice, real plain and simple, and just awesome. So good. That's great. And then a sturgeon schnitzel. Really?

With asparagus and hollandaise sauce on top. Rolled out to red carpet. Oh, buddies, like a double red carpet. Gold line, man. Incredible. And every one of those preparations, that fish was really, really good. Very, you know, steaky, I'd call it. She needs to go down to that supper club place and do a little sampler

so people stop being dumbasses about their sturgeon meat. Well, I mean, it's one of those things. We talk about this all the time, right? It's how you take care of your game is what it's going to taste like. And a lot of the tradition there is you get your fish and you parade it around the ice to every bar. Like, look what I got. Yeah. Yeah, but it's cold out.

It's probably still not the best way to handle your fish. Yeah. Yeah, but I want to get some beautiful bluefin tuna, I doubt they... No. They tend to probably get it on ice. You want to get that thing iced up real quick and away from the guts. Yeah. Quick story.

She didn't turn it into hot dish or casserole. Nope. Nope. That's the next day. I know a guy that, you know, their close relative, the paddlefish. Mm-hmm. I know a guy that caught a paddlefish, and he was a giant, and he wanted to get it officially weighed, and he wrapped it up in a, he got to sleep, he was camping, so he got a sleep

bag dunked in the river, wrapped the paddlefish up. I heard this through the tax numbers. Tax numbers are telling me a guy caught a paddlefish, wrapped it up in a wet sleeping bag, drives it an hour to him because he wants it mounted, but he doesn't need the body, and he wants to get a weight on it. But the tax numbers doesn't need the body

because they just use a fiberglass form. He takes that paddlefish down to the river, and same river that it came out of, takes it down to the river, lets it go, and it swims off. No shit. Yeah. That's awesome. That's a badass fish.

Driving around in a guy's truck in a wet sleeping bag. That's a badass fish. I bet you these sturgeon, even with a couple spear holes uh in their tail they could probably go to a couple bars and hang on a a fish pole for it's basically like a big buck pole but they have them at these bars for the sturgeon and uh hang out there for a few hours and you could probably release those things and they'd probably swim off too yeah i'm not saying it i'm not saying it to contradict your observation that you have to take good care of it. Because like

JT Van Zandt says, man, when you catch a fish and you treat it right toward the meal, you're sort of like setting there's like a spiritual quality to it. Yeah. You're setting a thing into motion. Yeah. You know, that you

gut the fish, you gill it, you wash it. It's like you're, you're, you're, you're putting it on a path. Mm-hmm. Right. A path of respect. Yeah. And, and you're, you're conceiving of that fish as food from the get-go, not just something to be proud of and show off to your buddies while you get drunk.

Yeah. Which nothing, I'm not dogging that practice in any way. I've done that many, many times. But with these fish, to me, it seemed like the culture, and who knows if it'll change, but the culture really was more about being excited about the catch more than being excited about the consumption. Yep.

Gotcha. And I was skeptical. I mean, I don't know where you were, Yanni, but I'd heard so many people being like, you can't eat them. I mean, we do. Oh. Oh. Good way to close out the show, ladies and gentlemen.

Talk about biggins. There we go. Yanni. Everybody else had their rods in their hands. Miles is selfish. Yanni did great. I know we didn't cover all of the Fur Had Ice Tour adventures. There'll be more in the future.

You brought me some caviar. Well, not necessarily me, but you brought some caviar that I'm going to be able to partake of. Good to have you back. I'm sure you'll miss more of our shows. Thanks, everybody. Phil the Engineer. What was that song you were singing earlier?

Ch-ch-ch-changes. I saw my dog run by. Ch-ch-ch-changes. Phil the Engineer, I'm assuming you enjoyed yourself. You didn't really say much. I'm just soaking it in. I don't have much to add, but I want to try some sturgeon, though. Good job, Phil.

Hey, thanks. Way to bring her home. All right. Thanks, everybody. See you. See you. See you. 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

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