The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 476: Fishing with Jedi Master Fly Tyer Son Tao

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

Steven Rinella talks with Son Tao, Ryan Callaghan, Brody Henderson, Chester Floyd, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider. Topics discussed: The "master" label; when you're a Master Sergeant in the U.S. Military; fish names abbreviated down to initials; guide flies; tying flies that actually catch fish; fleeing Vietnam in a banana boat; Steve's friend's mobile bar; announcing the launch of MeatEater Season 12; get our Dirty Dozen 2024 calendar; Phelp's mind-bending and devastating Unleashed V2 bugle tube; sifting through what's actually a population-level effect; the Weird Al of fishing; getting started on the fishing rod your neighbor couldn't sell at his garage sale; no wasting food at the dinner table;  crispy skin; if you're not a doctor or lawyer, you're not my kid; how we withdrew from Afghanistan; when your fish on a fly rod is a trophy-sized bonefish; Healing Waters - Fly Fishing; God talking to you through your car radio; arts & crafts; tying to perfection; commercial ties from overseas sweat shops; the bonds you form when you endure together; CALL 9-8-8 now if you need to talk to someone; find a hobby you love; and more.  Your life is important. Please reach out to someone. There are resources to support you, whether you're an at-risk veteran, a friend or family member, and really, just anyone who is suffering. Remember, you matter and you are not alone. Call or text 9-8-8 24/7 9-8-8 Lifeline Stop Soldier Suicide Military One Source Overwatch+Project America’s Warrior Partnership Veterans Administration's efforts Warriors & Quiet Waters BHA's Armed Forces InitiativeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-t-l-i-t-e.com is being a master fly tire a thing or is that just a description that's just a stupid description it's not like sommelier exactly that like somebody probably just labeled you that right yeah one time i got a label it was like one of the top five tires in the the world and the ironic part was i was only time for like

three years so it's not something that i wanted that label with because it causes a lot of haters oh really oh yeah they're like uh like to me fishing is fishing but in fly fishing you have a lot of pretentious motherfuckers that uh are you recording phil uh yes i am recording but i have not been switching cameras but we've got it all on audio yeah we're good we're gonna go but he's saying it but how many people are competing in tying that are we on phil we're on we're joined today by one of the top five fly tires please god no top five in the world the entire world the entire world one of the top five santau welcome thanks what do you think he was trying to say that off air not he was trying to say it off air because he was saying it with a certain eye roll. I want to hear more about.

A modest eye roll. I want to hear more about what you're getting at. Well, with the advent of social media, you have a lot of people that are on there more or less just for the Insta fame. No. And the haters? He's going to be talking about haters next. I love it. What's your Instagram handle?

Probably about 5 out of the 10 people that you'll see Post on there don't even fucking fish They just post flies just for the likes And you could look at them They'll be like these super colorful flies That I don't know what the hell they mimic But it's more artsy And it is a form of

The fly tying, fly fishing industry Is some people will just tie just for the tranquil aspect of it and for the mental health. But the vast majority don't even tie the fish that you see post-upped on there. So there's a social media, let me say something else too. What started this thing is we have him described here as a master fly tire but also a master sergeant so you are a master like indisputably that is definitely a master sergeant in the u.s army yes questionably a master fly tire questionably lower very questionably lowercase m uppercase m in the military, lowercase M as a fly tire.

Like you're not a certified master fly tire. No, that is just labels that will people give. For whatever reason, people like to label everything in, in the fly fishing world. Like you got these master casters, master tires, et cetera, et cetera. To me, fishing is fishing. Yeah.

You know what? You want to know the most annoying thing fly fishermen do? What? Catch and release everything? No, no. That doesn't bother me. I'm glad. Yeah. You know what? You want to know the most annoying thing fly fishermen do? What? Catch and release everything? No, no. That doesn't bother me. I'm glad.

I wish everybody did that because that'd be more fish for me to eat, right? The most annoying thing they do is they have taken certain fish and they've broken their name down to letters. GT. So a giant trevalli becomes a GT. Why is a bluegill

not a BG? It's like it doesn't make, or like a yellow perch. Oh, you know, I was out for YPs, LBs, YPs, you know?

What, uh, why are you not hitting the bobber? Strike indicator. It's so obvious. Well, I mean, that's just like. He was, he was attacking, uh, pretentious carp fly fisherman the other day, which I totally agree with.

I was doing that? Yeah, we were talking about how stupid it is. Listen, I fly fish this summer more than any person in America. Really? That's how much I fly tied this summer. Didn't see you do it once in Alaska. That's how much I fly fished this summer more than any other american master angler up at the uh at the spot up there i mean i have hours probably two

into it oh then me and yanni fly fished uh went fishing cutthroats on the i'm not gonna say like i'd love to talk in greater detail about it i have never seen anything like uh this lake we rode horses up to in wyoming i have never ever in my life seen cutthroat fishing like that nice fish and it's some souped up crazy cut. Bonnevilles? Bonnevilles. Now you're giving away where you were. Dude, unbelievable.

Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Big black spots. What's that mean? Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm sorry. Fish. Did you release them?

We killed three. How big are we talking? Probably 18 on the top end. Sweet. Probably 18 on the top end. Yeah. And you'd look for them, you know. Sight fish for them.

Oh, so much fun, man. Maybe like fly fish. Because I had kind of outgrown it, but it made fish for all so much fun, man. Maybe, maybe like fly fix. I'd kind of outgrown it, but it made me kind of love it again, man. Well, you had fun with all the times you went fishing with me. Oh yeah. Did he abbreviate cutthroat or do you call them cuts? Cutties. See giant, they're giant.

They were giant CTS. Beats. B CTS. Cause it's the best. The BCTs. Uh, get back to the arts and crafts. I'm only joking. So in the fly tying world, there's a social media element to the fly tying world.

And there are fly tires that don't fish. There are. That are just in the craftsmanship. Yep. The artistry. Yes. So, like, you get a mix of people that will try to showcase their flies that do a lot of fishing.

They showcase a lot of different guide flies. And you have other ones that will just tie. Explain that, a guide fly. Guide fly is, like, basically a fly that's really easy to tie that will catch fish. San Juan worm. Yeah, a San Juan worm. An egg or a midge or something like that.

You bust them out and clients are going to lose them. Then you have other ones that will tie, like these super intricate flies that have like a ton of material, a lot of different wild colors. And so there's a big difference. Flies that have been known historically to catch fish for decades, in some cases even hundreds a year, like the Royal Coachman, for example.

Then you have these other funky, wild-color flies that people that aren't into fly fishing, per se, they'll look at them, and they see all these wonderful colors, and they hit the Like button. So that's the disparity between the two. And my heartache with it is that you have a lot of new people

that have no idea what the hell they're doing when it comes to fly tying or fishing, and they'll see some of these flies and they these some of these individuals have like pretty large accounts and they think that's actually a fly that they should be fishing with or learning how to tie in reality they're they're totally wasting their fucking time but outside you like tying you like tying stuff that can be fished yes that's what my my pretty much my account is based off of flies that actually work. This is the most amazing.

This is probably, I mean, I haven't, you know, I'm not like a hobbyist, but this is probably the most amazing fly I've ever held in my life. That thing's awesome. It works. Maybe it's like, yeah, it is unbelievable. The artistry and then the life that's in this thing. Yeah, so a lot of these

are tequid flies. And how much it looks like a sculpin. And do you feel like that would catch a fish, Steve? Catch a lot of fish. Feels like it's fishing. When I say that, I'd catch a lot of kinds of fish. But does a fly like that earn you a master title? or do you have to tie specific flies

in order to be a master no uh basically there's there's really no criteria like to me that's a stupid label master tire i put it in the script you guys can blame me yeah you know to me like i wouldn't even come close to like you have people that have been time for like 40 50 years that have set the the foundation for everybody else that is starting or has just started in the last 10 you know 15 years and they're the ones that came up with the innovations of using different type materials where there was like uh using deer hair at one point in history or parts of a pheasant or a muskrat or whatever the case may be. It wasn't me. It wasn't like anybody in this generation. Those guys are

the master tires. They're the ones that, you know, wrote the books that showed people that you could use hair from a llama and catch fish with it. None of us are very innovative nowadays. I mean, there were people that will label themselves as such but those folks that from 40 70 150 years ago they're the master tires is there uh is there some specific old school tires that you you emulate or like really you're into them uh yeah more or less because uh of the their personalities versus, in a lot of cases also, you know, their flies are exceptional. But one of the local guys here, Kelly Gallop, he's the one that came up with a lot of these different flies here, like this sex dungeon, the mini sex dungeon, him and his crazy fucking names. But they actually work and they catch a lot of fish. And then other guys like Pat Dorsey out of Colorado that fishes a lot of tailwaters and basically mimic all his,

his guide flies off of what the fish are eating there. And they, they work like crazy. Uh, that one boxer has like a bunch of 24, 26s that are flies that Pat designed and they work. So those are just a few of the guys that, that I have looked up to over the years and they really want to know what they're talking about. And two, also they catch a lot of fish so it's not like they're just coming up with crazy shit that don't work the stuff that

they they put in their books it's stuff that they talk about all are proven patterns that work everywhere in the world we're gonna we're gonna cover off on your life history a bit but just just to just to tee it up then we got to touch on a couple of things. Um, you were born in Vietnam, in Vietnam and then grew up in, in Pennsylvania, but you spent some number of months in, in, uh,

in not in Vietnam. No, uh, for like the first, uh, almost a year and a half of my life, I lived in a refugee camp in Malaysia. So,

uh, my, my dad was in the military in vietnam and as part of the south vietnamese army if we would have got caught or he would have got caught he probably would have been executed yeah and so as uh after the fall of saigon the uh the north vietnamese and the communists started you know sweeping down further south and the town that i was born in is called baklu which is all the very Southern point of Vietnam. So that gave us a couple extra years, but eventually they would have came through there anyways.

And so we- They gave you extra years. Yeah, because they were still working from what they renamed the Ho Chi Minh City on the way moving down to the Southern point of Vietnam. And it was- But not like, you're talking like post 1975? Yeah. Yeah. They were still fighting their way South or just

moving their way South? Just moving their way South and basically implementing communism in like every single town. Got it. So they weren't encountering like resistance all the way South. No, no. I see.

Yeah. Basically, I mean, I was the opposite of most kids that grew up in Vietnam. I came from a very well-to-do family and my grandfather pretty much owned the entire like port. So he got all the royalties of the ships and stuff coming in. I had pretty much everything that a kid could want growing up in Vietnam. And then to baby basically no.

And, and my, this was my parents. I was so young. I had no idea of the shit, but what they told me was that all that was going to be taken away. And, uh,

also at the same time, my father run the risk of being executed. So we literally left in a banana boat. I mean, we fled out of there in a boat and landed on the shores. You want to talk about bad luck? An actual banana boat. Yeah. Right.

We left there and went to the refugee camp in Palau Badong, which is about the size of four football fields, but it housed at any given time, about 10,000 refugees. So it was packed like sardines in there. And that's a sour subject in itself because I refused to eat sardines because that's what we had. That's what we were given as far as that.

Is that right, really? A can of sardines and a bag of rice like every day. Who ran the camp? The Malaysian government. They ran it. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, uh, totally,, totally off subject, but as well, similar to the subject, but on the trip there where, while we were on the boat, they suffered probably about 35% casualties from dysentery and other diseases. And so like as a, at that time, I think I was four and a half and I was seeing like babies and people just being thrown overboard as they died. And that, that like left an imprint in my head for a long time because I started having nightmares when I was a teenager, basically

just waking up and. Well, also being able to avoid disease at four and a half years old. Yeah. Seems like a minor miracle. A whole family made it. So that was a minor miracle in itself there. But, um, there was a lot of people that died and

they just like chucked them overboard. And it was actually Thai pirates that saved our asses because the entire ship was out of water. And so we were getting raided and everybody was like swallowing all their jewelry and all that stuff because that's what they were going to set their, their future on.

But in exchange for basically pillaging the boat, they gave us water and we made it the rest of the way to malaysia what year were you born i was born in 74 you're 49 yep be 50 in march what was the island called again palau badang p-u-l-a-u b-i-d-o-n-g then you guys spent how many months at the camp? Almost 18 months there And then from there to U.S. Yeah, the U.S. wasn't my parents' first choice Because we had no family over in the U.S.

We had family in Europe, Australia And other places And so they applied for political asylum In all those other countries And they all told us to fuck off And the U.S. was the only one that said yes And then it was a Mennonite family that's how I end up in Pennsylvania was a Mennonite family from this church called Groff down Mennonite

Church that end up basically picking our family name out of some refugee book and then sponsored us and helped us with the paperwork to get to the US and we started off in like Oakland California for the first I think it was almost a year there living in there in the city. And then eventually they got us to Pennsylvania where they helped my parents settle and find work and whatnot. The manner of speaking for the Mennonites didn't rub off on you. No.

I think the military soured any of those beliefs that I might've had growing up. No, but they did lay a pretty good foundation because it's basically you learn to appreciate things a little bit more coming from that type of culture. I mean, we went to their churches for a little bit, but they allowed us the freedom to basically worship how we saw fit. That's awesome.

That's amazing. You know, my mom and dad's church, when I was a little kid, they had sponsored some south vietnamese refugees who'd been in the military and for i don't know where they went but they came in they stayed there and my dad and him would ice fish together which he had to have thought was the wildest thing in the world right to like also to come to the u.s and like instantly be ice fishing um but but they just I don't know.

I'd love to find out what happened to that family. Yeah, we still actually stay in touch with them. I was probably like four or five years old. Oh, you stay in touch with them? Yeah, we still stay in touch with them. My mom is still very close to them. So she still lives like 20 minutes away from where they are. Were you guys near Lancaster?

Yeah, Lancaster County. All right, hang tight. I you guys near Lancaster? Yeah. Lancaster County. All right. Hang tight. I'm going to talk about some stuff. If you've got any comments, feel free. Okay. I mean, as a master fly tire.

Or a master sergeant. Or a master. Yeah. You can weigh in as a sergeant or a fly tire as you see fit. Oh, one thing. What was it? I got to replug it. I got to replug it um i gotta replug it where is it if you have an event planned if you had an event planned in northern michigan and you need a my buddy's bar my buddy has a new business he has a camper trailer rigged out like a bar so if you're

having an event wedding whatever and you want a bar there's no change of money like what you hire his services you buy the booze they he picks up the booze pulls the bar up all the mixers custom cocktails at your event so your guests just walk up to the camper trailer full bar back there love it he's gotta he's gotta do like a tiki bar version of that and then we'll do like a meat eater podcast well him and phil do a collab yeah he'll do a collab we'll send him some forest floor foods garnishes for his bar too oh are you serious you better be i'm serious you don't don't throw that roaming nomi.com roaming n-o-m-i so roaming northern michigan.com packages prices phone numbers and all matt droles very dear friend of mine from growing up a lot of hunting a lot of fishing a lot of drinking a lot of drinking

a lot of drinking. A lot of drinking. A lot of drinking. Too much drinking. What else we got? Oh, season 12 announcement. So a bunch of new meat eater episodes premiering. When is this? It launches on October 12th. Yeah, premiering October 12th.

So you'll go find them. Go to our MeatEater website or our MeatEater YouTube channel. So the website or the YouTube channel October 12th, a bunch of new episodes. We have the episode coming up of hunting black bears in a wetsuit. All kinds of stuff.

Big mule deer, big elk, lots of cool episodes, big squirrels. October 12th on the MeatEater website and on the MeatEater YouTube channel, brand new episodes. You can catch them first there. Also have a live tour coming up in early December.

We don't have all the dates yet. Starting like the first week of December, it's going to be a bus tour. We're going to do. We don't have all the dates yet. Starting like the first week of December. It's going to be a bus tour. We're going to do, I don't know, like 10 cities in 13 days or something like that. You'd love those live tours. We're going to do like Tales from the Tour Bus. It's going to be like Tales from the Tour Bus. Big trivia component to the tour.

Spencer Newhart has to go to all tour dates. Is he driving the bus? He's driving the bus. He's driving the bus. He's driving the bus. So it's going to be, yeah, we're doing a live tour all over damn place. In a bus, which is, I kind of like the idea of this bus thing. In the tour bus. Spinal tap.

So stay tuned for that. You better buy some tickets, man. Better buy some tickets. Got a new calendar out called Meat Eaters Dirty Dozen. So it just so happens. Hold it up. Oh. It's coming soon.

Yeah. Picture that you make 12 seasons of a show, and then you got 12 months in a year. At some point, someone's going to be like, I got an idea. So this year calendar, every year, every month, you follow me, every month is a year. Huh? Yeah. It's genius. Who would have thought?

Look at that facial expression. 12. I know, 12 smirks of Steve. 12 years. 12 years of the show captured in 12 months. So like January is, I don't know what the hell, 2012 years ago. You can see Steve age ever so slightly. Oh yeah, a lot, dude.

No, no, no. I don't think a lot. Just a little. 12 years of smirks. So check that out. Also, oh, Phelps Unleashed. Why does it say don't read this because i put the whole description in it and it takes a long time to read all of it those are just some highlights oh that you can hit well

phelps's bugle tube is is improved i'm just gonna skim through it yeah so jason phelps who comes on the show often host of cutting the distance founder of Phelps Game Calls, has a new generation of the Unleashed Bugle Tube. I didn't think that there was a problem with the old one, but apparently never satisfied. So, basically, people that had the Unleash tube had various comments about it, and Jason, being the obsessive that he is, has gone on to address various comments. One, the new version of recycled plastic. That's cool. Some people had a problem with the mouthpiece. So now you can remove the mouthpiece meaning your tube comes

with a mouthpiece on it but some people like the smaller aperture so now when you get it you either like the mouthpiece which I I think the mouthpiece is great I don't know why you wouldn't like it but some people don't want the mouthpiece these blow straight into the tube comes with the easy bugler and the flared mouthpieces it's lighter so 12.5 ounce 20 inches in length so v2 version 2 he says it gets the same exact sound in a little bit smaller package they dress the whole thing in neoprene. Reduce noises from touching on brush. And adaptable. So a complete calling system

for any calling style with one purchase. Two, comes equipped with a flared mouthpiece for diaphragm calling. Earlier when I was talking about people not liking the mouthpiece, that's what I meant. Meaning there's a read piece that goes on it too if you don't like using diaphragm calls you can use the reed mounted on the bugle tube or you can pull the reed off put the flared mouthpiece on it if it's over your mouth better or if you want to go

ultra lightweight i suppose a fellow could just pull the freaking the flared mouth piece off as well and run it that way outstanding back pressure for no articulation devastating bugles mind-bending screams who writes this copy is this you corinne nope let's think about this for a minute devastating bug, it's not me. Devastating bugles. Love it. Just knock him over dead with a bugle. Mind-bending screams. Makes him go crazy. You bend their mind and devastate them. Thunderous chuckles and grunts. I'm sold. We need a sound effect there for that.

The Unleashed V2 is a new standard that all bugles will be measured against. Now, I gave a buddy of mine one to borrow. I let my buddy borrow one. He went out, but he's got nothing to gain from this. He went out of the way to text me how wonderful it was, and they killed the bull. Good on him.

He said it was the shit and bitching. Wow. We need to add another line of copy yeah so the new v2 is out uh here's a lengthy one this is interesting a lot of the news is full of uh a lot of uproar going on around refuges. Oh, Cal's covered this a fair bit. Wildlife refuges and lead ammo. Okay, so certain refuges, you have states that are getting rid of,

that are banning lead ammo, banning lead sinkers, fishing sinkers, switching those over with sinkers that when you bite them you hear your teeth crack uh and there's a thing now where certain wildlife refuges are looking to ban or have they implemented a cow or not implemented it yet it's a plan to implement a ban on lead ammo in wildlife refuges i think that there's probably some that always have had for sure in the regulations but you know because one of the the interesting things right when you

bring up refuge it 99 of people go like, well, migratory birds. Yeah. Right. And for how many years now has it been illegal to use anything but non-toxic ammunition for migratory birds? Since when I was a little boy. Long time.

Yeah. Right. So, um, I had to go through each one of these and make sure that there was big game hunting, uh, as a, you know, legal means of recreation on each one of these things. And, and you can hunt white-tailed deer or, you know, blackwater refuges on here, uh, for Sika. Um, and so, uh, yeah, you, you would have to switch over but yeah i think in some regulations uh it's just straight up non-toxic across the board got it which is kind of an interesting thing right because we always complain about how complicated regulations are yeah but neither here

nor there so the u.s fish and wildlife service looking to add or or there's a proposal or new rule going into place to ban traditional ammunition, which we'll call lead ammunition, on eight national wildlife refuges, including Blackwater, Chincoteague, I don't even know how to pronounce that one, Eastern Neck, Erie, Great Thicket, Patuxent, how do you say that? Anybody know? Well, it's not for me. Patuxent Research Refuge, Rachel Carson Refuge, Wallops Island. The NSSF National Shooting Sports Foundation foundation uh shared a letter they had written to Martha Williams and Martha Williams has been on

the on the show as a guest because Martha Williams who heads the um US Fish and Wildlife Service used to head Montana's state fish and game agency so in that capacity Martha Williams was on the show before we have not had her on in her current capacity,

but would love to have her on and talk about some of this stuff. Note to Corinne down there. You get that Corinne? Got it. Um, so that'd be interesting. So the NSSF shared a letter. It's sort of an open letter challenging,

um, it's sort of an open letter challenging um challenging some of the assumptions within the lead ban tackling first goes on like like any good compliment sandwich it congratulates the u.s fish and wildlife service for expanding hunting and fishing opportunities on the refuge system and then gets into the meat of it and it's it lays out this interesting argument that the so the u.s fish and wildlife service is tasked lack of any evidence that lead contamination from ammunition is having any population level impacts on wildlife there's no sound reason to ban lead ammunition meaning reason to ban lead ammunition meaning bald eagles are it's commonly pointed to bald eagles like a bald eagle can get onto a carcass anyone wants to argue the truth this is just wasting their time like this is a thing that

can happen a bald eagle can get onto a deer carcass that someone killed with land ammunition the bald eagle can eat that lead ammunition and the bald eagle can die from lead toxicity it's just like this is not a debatable point that is a thing that happens and there is a very few bald eagles around at one point because of not because of lead not because of lead because of ddt but now the eagles are back to bring this full circle yep partially full circle we just mentioned the rachel carson refuge rachel carson wrote if you've heard people over the years mentioned the book silent spring rachel carson wrote a book called silent spring about the devastating effects of ddt on birds it was a so it was a insecticide is that correct prolifically used insecticide an insecticide if you watch old movies that they like to have the thing where they're spreading ddt

and kids are playing in the clouds as it goes down the road. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring made the case of how DDT was devastating to birds. DDT gets into a bird system. How it would impact the bird is the bird, it would, for some weird reason I have never studied up on, would cause the bird's shell to get very thin. The bird incubating its own egg would crack its own egg the the shells got so thin that a bird would crack its egg trying to incubate it and this devastated a bunch of raptors eagles peregrine falcons um ospreys all these other birds got devastated from dT. DDT was having an absolute population

level impact on birds. DDT was banned. Since then, bald eagles have recovered so much that they're one of the very few species to ever come off the endangered species list. I think 2% of things that go few species to ever come off the endangered species list.

I think 2% of things that go on the ESA come off because of recovery. They recovered. However, a bald eagle can eat lead ammo and it can die. A bald eagle can hit a wind turbine and it can die. A bald eagle can get hit by your car and it can die. Three-strand barbed wire fence. A bald eagle can hit a three-strand barbed wire fence and die one of the things that can kill a bald eagle is lead toxicity so the argument here is without being able to point to any population level impacts of lead ammo how can you ban lead ammo in protection of wildlife populations

um and this letter makes this case this letter also points to a couple things like this recurring and you see this all over the place. This recurring idea that there is a lead toxicity element to humans from eating harvested game, which is completely unsubstantiated. The only time they've ever gone through this, they went into North Dakota and tested a bunch of hunters for lead, and the hunters all had lower lead than people that live in cities. The reason people in cities have high lead is because up until the 80s they were putting lead in fuel and that was a soluble lead so i'm not going to go through the whole letter but it's really compelling but it's like it's this thing where if you want this is the thing that happens so much in anything contentious anything political is if you're pushing for a thing that you want to be true like you're sort of pursuing an agenda

that you have and you welcome you welcome information but then you wind up welcoming like somewhat suspect information if it helps make your point and i think that the the issue here the reason we keep talking about this is the issue here is as eight management agencies states whatever try to mandate a move away from lead ammunition i think it's important like at least tell people the truth. Stop acting like there's a human health concern when no one has been able to substantiate it. Don't act like there's a population level bald eagle concern when nothing substantiates it. If your argument is that if you kill a deer with lead ammo and leave it out, you could kill a bald eagle. Have that be that right and and people make their call mitigate this which this is one of the there's some things in here that i

don't like the way it's written and there's some things that they included that i do like but tell me some of the ones tell me tell me a highlight of each of those. So, um, population level effect, right? And we've covered this many times. So it'll just be really brief, right? They are talking about bald eagles and, and most of the, and it seems like all of these refuges are in bald eagle territory. Got it.

And that's the raptor of concern. But if, uh, you had a, a refuge system in an area that overlapped with condor populations. A condor death could have a population level effect, and then it would be necessary to take further precautions, right? Yeah, because a condor is a population level impact. Yes, exactly. Um, the other piece of this, um, is you can mitigate that, uh, raptor eating off your gut pile by, uh, removing the guts from the field or by, uh, burying, uh, the guts on site. So this weekend, and I apologize to, uh, some of the folks I know, but, uh, lead kills really well. And I went out and shot a bunch of upland birds with seven and a half shot lead. And I made the decision to package up, even though I was like way the hell out on BLM ground, I made the decision

to remove all the guts and the carcasses from the, from the field. So if you're in the heat, you're gutting birds, you're gutting into a bag and just throwing the bag into your game bag. Which eventually became a really horrible, disgusting bag. Yeah.

But. No. It's not going to go kill something I didn't intend to kill. So I did like the fact that they provided a good alternative, like a common sense alternative. Yeah. And in this letter from the NSSF, they applaud education efforts.

They don't they're not chastising people that are making non-toxic ammo they don't use the word non-toxic they're not chastising manufacturers of they're sort of pointing to they're sort of applauding the free market economy or the the the choice but pointing out that um i would not have guessed this uh some of the percentages on on some of the percentages on use of ammo where is this stuff oh the one percent of uh were you looking at the rifle ammo yeah i saw that too um that copper is one percent of centerfire ammo used yep my social circle like my social circle which includes people that that use copper for a handful of reasons some performance issues some some lead issues.

I would, it reminds me of one when I have a skewed sample size in my social circle. It's like we were doing the kids trivia and my younger kid had to guess what percentage of kids went fishing

during the pandemic. And he thought that 90 some percent of kids went fishing during the pandemic. Like he had a some percent of kids went fishing during the pandemic like he had a very he has some biases like that's all i did that's all my friends he's had everything everyone i know here it is non non-lead centerfire rifle ammunition makes up the smallest share of the market and is approximately one percent of all ammunition produced. So, yeah, but produced, so that includes all target ammunition.

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I'm going to make this relevant to our guest. Watch this. When you tie in flies, are you using non-toxic or do you ever tie a fly with lead? One of the most common means to weigh down a fly is using lead wraps. And you're still using it? I use it partially.

They have the alternative where it's stainless steel to also weight, but in some, some patterns, the lead works way better. Lead's a split shot. He's like lead till I'm dead. Is that what you're trying to tell me? And then also weight with the split shots. Yep. It also wraps really nice yes it does it does uh i would view i would imagine that i would imagine the amount of you see fishing get rolled into this i i do

not see this being fishing's problem. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, there's very few states that have all lead weights. I mean, I know New York. I don't know, man. New York was one of them. I went up there for some lake run salmon, and I was missing some weight, so I went to a local tackle shop to get some, and all they had was the alternative.

I'm like, what the hell? I had no idea. It kind of blindsided me that I couldn't get lead weights. I get the lead. So just for folks, folks listen when we start talking about lead split shot it's a different thing lead split shot is not like there's different ways that lead gets introduced into to wildlife center fire like deer okay deer hunting that's introduced because you shoot the deer and you got the deer and your bullet fragments and there's lead around you leave the guts whatever later on you throw the bones in the ditch stuff eats that they ingest lead unintentionally split

shot and steel shot or sorry back when you could use lead to hunt ducks and split shot you have it can enter an animal by an animal could get hit by a chunk of that lead and not be lethal then it has lead in it but they pick it up as grit so or they pick it up they just see something shiny and different and they're down there feeding and they ingest it so the lead sinker thing is that they're just intentionally ingesting it it's not getting like blasted into something it's being picked up not eaten along with flesh is that clear is that a global job and i think a lot of bad hosting a lot of times they're just picking it up as they're feeding on the body it just happens to end up and happens in right oh yep it. As they're straining through the bottom. Yeah. Yeah.

But I just, man, I just feel that the fishing thing has to be just like almost a non-issue. I think there's places where there's a carpet of leadhead jigs on the bottom of certain places. Oh, yeah. I can name a few. I could go there and- But I mean. I can name one lingcod hump that's got about 40 pounds of my leg. But, you know, what I think is interesting about this is the NSF, NSSF is weighing in on something from the wildlife service, this

agenda, but that agenda had to come from outside. You think it's being imposed on the wildlife service? I don't know. I don't know about that. No. It might be, you know, like the stuff in Alaska with them trying to, with them trying to subvert

Alaska's ability to manage its wildlife right that came from on high for sure that came from like it i'm not a conspiracy theorist generally speaking but i'm i believe that that was driven by donors that that was driven by now and then when you see something in politics it's so like what do you remember when who the hell was it that got elected for mayor in new york and right away he goes after the central park horse carriage rides oh de blasio was it him yeah de blasio wins to become mayor of new york and his first thing is central park carriage rides. And you're sort of like, this has to be from a donor.

It's so out there. And so outside of the concerns of voters and so outside of what your mandate must've been when you were elected, that there's no way this wasn't a quid pro quo from from a donor class yeah i don't even really understand everybody in the city is like what yeah that's what i'm thinking right now i don't really understand like what like he just didn't like the horse this is that they were mean to the horses in central park meaning it was so outside of anyone's concern it was so outside of the campaign and you get it you're like that, that is like, I don't know

this for sure, but that is satisfying a particular donor who made a deal. Like set the horses free kind of. Yeah. I mean, I don't know, Cal, do you know of like outside forces that were pushing this agenda or is it just. I mean, the, the lead free thing's been around

for a really long time. Um, the refuge system has, uh, certainly like a lot more traffic, right? Like think of like the birdwatching community and refuges. Um, so there could certainly be some lobbying from, from different groups there for sure. Um, you know, I, I do think about like the, um, where we were hunting

Sika deer, like think of the amount of copper in, uh, you know, like a 50 Cal muzzleloader, uh, Sabbath or whatever, or the equivalent, like 12 gauge. I mean, that's a. It's a chunk of. That's a big chunk of copper. Like that's not, uh, just falling out of the sky. That's we're digging that out of the ground

there too. It's not like that stuff doesn't have cost. Right. So that's the point this letter raises is that lead is comes from recycled car batteries. Lead ammunition comes from recycled car batteries and it points up just the tooling and lead comes from recycled car batteries. Lead ammunition comes from recycled car batteries, and it points up just the tooling and sourcing.

Meaning it's a little bit like extremes. If all states right now were to somehow miraculously say that you couldn't use lead ammunition, there's no way they would ever satisfy. It would take a long time for the demand to be satisfied. It would be a hard time to find any bullets. The letter gets a little punchy. It says, the service's unsubstantiated statement of possible risk to hunters

due to the use of lead component ammunition to harvest game is very concerning. And it goes on to attack this, this, uh, thing that came out years ago. I remember when it came out, it was like x-rays of deer showing how many, how much, um, how much lead fragmentation from the wound channel. But then it goes on to say that they never substantiated this leg fragmentation.

They're Jack. It's a jacket and ammo and all they're doing is showing that something showed up on an x-ray but no biopsy to show what or no digging around to show what it was that was on the x-ray and then the study was only done with one specific kind of ammunition and then extract so they do a study with one specific lead ammunition and load in a certain way out of a seven mil rem mag and then they take what is there and then extrapolate out that all harvested venison has blank right even though there's this huge variation in how people harvest venison and all the ammunitions used,

but the statistic came from a study in which only one type of ammunition was used. Oh yeah. I mean, sometimes, you know, I've shot, I have seven mag.

Sometimes you, you know, you shoot a certain bullet out of there and the thing blows up, you know, and it led everywhere. Other times, just clean as a whistle. If I punched Brody 10 times and gave him seven black eyes, I'd have a lot of lead in my system.

Would you be able to say 70% of all punches result in a black eye? I'm not going to talk about this for too long but again i just want to continue to make it clear man if you as an individual like if you as an individual don't like the idea of the of that you leave your gut pile out, if you're using lead ammunition and you leave your gut pile out, there is a chance that you will kill a raptor. Bear that in mind and behave accordingly. You might decide that you don't care, but I think that most people are thinking about it

like that gut pile right there. Like that gut pile that I'm walking away from right now has a chance of killing a rat like it actually killing a raptor. No one ever really. Not a lot of people think. No. Of that. No. Have that in the back of your head and have that in the back of your head if more people had that in the

back of their head this speaking of cause you know causal relationships i'm just going to go out on a limb and say hypothetically true if more people had that in the back of their head we might not be talking about ammunition bans right now i don't know is that a wild statement i don't think it's a wild statement um we'd certainly because you know there's a statement in this that that i would fall on the the list of things that i don't really like the way it was written into this uh letter um there's a really specific study on uh uh, Falcons. Okay. Eating lead paint off of water towers where these Falcons nested. Oh.

And in this letter, it kind of says like, who knows where it came from? All birds, all birds land on water towers and build nests on water towers and eat lead off of water towers. Yeah.

But if you talk to the bird people, they're like, it's not all birds. There's two super smart birds out there, falcons and vultures that have a lot of free time because they are very smart and very efficient at what they do. And they mess around a lot and consequently

get in a lot of trouble. Got it. Do you know we have a grey-horned owl roosted under our office? I saw the picture there, which is awesome. Well, there's two of them. Um. Do you know we have a grey-horned owl roosted under our office? I saw the picture there, which is awesome. Well, there's two of them. There's a couple of them. Yeah.

He lives in the, he lives in the eave supports. Must be why you don't ever see skunks or raccoons or anything wandering around. You know, it's a fun parallel here for our guest is the fact that the millinery trade was one of the things that absolutely decimated all types of birds, mostly pretty birds all across the world. And fly tying has its hands in that.

You got a lot of blood on your hands, buddy. It's a long letter. Oh, Phil, hit us with the fish and lures song. Oh yeah. We'll appreciate this, son. Am I saying your name right? Yeah. Son.

This is one of the best songs ever written. It really is. Is it a Chester original? This guy is the Weird Al of fishing. Got to find Corinne's email here. Which was a niche we had. Phil, you've had how many hours to get this thing squirted? Oh, it's kind of a little Jimmy Buffett vibe, maybe.

This was not what I was expecting. Rip. Yeah, rip. Rip Buffett. I love fishing lures. I love to cast them while I'm drinking a course. Or while on the rocks I'm drinking a doors. Clever little mechanical works of art

I love fishing lures Got a whole tab to box of them Wouldn't want any fewer I bet I'm a better fisherman than you are When I'm at the spawning good store, I love loading up my car. This is this guy who's like, I can rhyme anything.

Give me a line. Yeah, come on, Chester. Chester's gonna cover it. Sometimes your line gets knotted. Some skitter on top of the water look at that big bass

I'm glad that I caught her some are peace some are art this guy's got a rhyming dictionary it's like Eminem I feel like Eminem stole all of his shit from this guy probably some of them rattle

all kind of exotic colors as your boat you paddle The solo's amazing. Do you imagine him doing that with one hand while he's recording here? Yeah. These are real crooners Oh yeah dude I can see some success doing the old folks homes

around the UP or something. He's from Bowling Falls, Michigan, the artist. Oh, your buddy should get him to tour around with the bar. Yeah. Bring those two together. For an added fee.

Like three-time co-last. George Peter Block Jr. of Bowne Falls, Michigan is the artist. Unbelievable artistry. You think those flies are cool. That song. That's Grammy material there. Just unbelievable. I'm just going to give this shit up now.

I know, yeah. You're going to be like, I went into the wrong business. I should have been a songwriter right let's let's dive back in um walk me through getting from well let me let me let me do a quick recap uh just because people are so blown away by that song yeah it's hard to focus your father fought your father fought um for the nr no how's it go nr the south vietnamese army yeah nrv it was nrvn was no no no no the nva was the the opposite opposition arvn i guess oh i know south vietnamese army got south vietnamese army I know it's the South Vietnamese Army. South Vietnamese Army. You were born the year before the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam. Yes.

U.S. pulls out of Vietnam. Your family was from the south of Vietnam. The communists came from the north. Your father saw the writing on the wall that he would wind up in a re-education camp or wind up executed. Yep. You guys flee um have a treacherous uh journey to malaysia correct correct apply for asylum all over the world and get asylum in the u.s correct but here's one part i'm a little curious about uh did you did your father like did your father have colleagues friends whatever that he met from the u.s military or

was he not working hand in hand with the u.s military during the war uh he did um prior to the actual official u.S. involvement. I don't know like all the details of it, but I know like in the 50s, he had worked with some of the initial advisors that came over to Vietnam. And then from my recollections, I believe it was some of them that helped get us. Got it. Okay. So that's what I wanted to jump to is how you, at this point you're in malaysia and you're how old uh got there i was about four and a half okay fly tying not on your mind all i was staring at was sardines sardines on your mind yeah and then you come to the u.s and what happens like

like how do you get accepted your You get your asylum gets accepted. And all of a sudden what? A plane shows up. How does that work? You're in a, you're in a refugee camp in Malaysia. Like, how does it,

you get a letter saying you've been given asylum in the U S well, then, then what? Uh, like I said, it was, I don't know like all the details, but that Mennonite family from Lancaster, Pennsylvania helped us with the paperwork and then eventually got us onto the plane where we ended up landing in California.

And then was there for a couple of years while I guess with getting our green cards and all that other stuff. How many family members? Five total. My brother was born in the refugee camp. So I got a younger brother, a younger sister, and then a mom and dad. Okay. And then, uh, eventually that, that, uh, Mennonite community got us over to Lancaster, Pennsylvania and helped my parents, uh, find work and whatnot out there.

And how, what in the world did you get? Like, how'd you ever even get introduced to fishing? Well, uh, when I was, was a when i was a young kid uh basically being an immigrant we i didn't have all the luxuries of most of the kids where parents spoiled them with toys or whatnot so you guys are poor oh we were poor shit and so we were playing like with sticks or hand-me-downs and whatnot and then uh my first fishing rod was like some old shakespeare spinning rod that my neighbor couldn't sell from a garage sale and he gave it to me. You know you're into the real bottom end tackle when it's the shit that doesn't sell at a garage sale.

Like when you go to a garage sale and you look at the rod and choose not to buy that rod, that's a rough rod. Yeah, from what I recall, we had like 30 pound test line on it. I know the difference between four pound test line and 80 pound test line back then. All I knew was that I could use it to catch fish. And the guy gives it to you. Yeah, he gave it to me. And then where I grew up there, there was a small creek that runs through the area. It was only, gosh, maybe half a mile from my house.

Okay. It runs through a little community park there and Conestoga River. And in there, everything from carp to all sorts of panfish and smallmouth bass and the whole nine yards. And so that's where I pretty much spent most of my childhood was just basically fishing there on that creek. Were you self-taught? Yeah. Yeah. Were there other Vietnamese dudes running around or was it just your family?

I think we were the only minorities in the whole town. Really? Did you guys feel some pressure on that or were people pretty accepting? People were very accepting. I mean. Because they probably knew the history too, right? Yeah. Like Pennsylvania gets a bad rep because of like the left and the right because of Philadelphia

and Pittsburgh. But everywhere in between it is very, very conservative. And that's how that community was a very conservative community. And then the kids, they pretty much, everybody just took them in. So there were a couple of kids there

that went to the same school. Most of them were on the older side. And then a lot of them helped me out too by basically just showing me some of the ropes. Do you, this has nothing to do with tying flies or fishing

but do you feel when you were growing up and and and you were young and vietnam was still fresh for people what did you encounter like a feeling did you encounter among americans a like like a guilt for withdrawing from vietnam like when people met your dad okay people meet your dad and your dad served in the south vietnamese army was was there sort of a an implied like oh man i'm sorry no that wasn't a thing no not maybe if i had grown up somewhere else but like i said the area i grew up in was very conservative people kept their opinions to themselves they pretty much left you alone unless you know they you got involved in their business so if people had opinions they kept it themselves so i didn't really experience any of that if my parents did they shielded us

from it yeah so going up growing up going through I mean, I really never saw any of that. Got it. But you were the only Vietnamese kid around. Yeah. Yeah. And were you raised around people who weren't

Mennonite too? Oh yeah. Okay. Like this, they're actually the very small minority there. There's Mennonites, there's Amish,

and then there's obviously all the other Christian non-denominations and whatnot. So the school I went to, I mean, I think there was maybe 10, obviously all the other Christian non-denominations and whatnot. So, um, the school I went to, I mean, I think there was maybe 10, 12 minorities altogether with a class of about a thousand.

So it was predominantly Caucasian, um, area. And, um, I really didn't have any friends growing up that were other minorities. It was all the kids that I ran around with were all the Caucasian kids. And they,

these were kids that grew up hunting and fishing. Yeah yeah it's probably one of the reasons why i listen to country music also i'm very confused did your uh did your folks have any sense of um did your folks have any sense of of fishing as a as a sort of recreational pastime no they didn't care as long as i was bringing fish home. Oh, so they liked the fish? Yeah, like my culture, we don't waste anything. I catch a fish, they ate it. So I didn't know the difference between what was a good-eating fish

and what was a horrible mudfish. If I caught it, I brought it home. I mean, like a lot of fishermen out there, they keep everything they catch. Conservation and all that shit was really in the back of my mind as a kid. I mean, I brought carp home. And then it was finally my mom's like don't bring this shit on anymore because it's she got picky she got picky because it's so hard to clean because there's so many bones in it all i saw was just a big fat fish feed everybody so let's say you brought a carp home what how would she prepared it uh when you were a kid what were you eating

i think it was basically drowned in a lot of fish sauce and other seasonings to actually get rid of some of the bud taste out of it from my recollection. I only recall eating it a handful of times, and then she complained about it, and I never kept the carp again. So what if you brought a bluegill back or a smallmouth bass back? The way we prepare it is a little bit different, where generally American culture, they'll fillet the fish, you just eat the fillets.

And then with a lot of the Asian cultures, they'll gut it, take the gills out and whatnot, cut the fins off, and then they'll either broil or deep fry the entire fish. Yeah. After the scales are obviously removed, and then like probably one of the tastiest part is the crispy skin.

Yeah. You were getting introduced to American style food though. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, at home, almost everything was still Vietnamese food, but we were getting the slow introductions because like as a poor kid, I got

food, uh, the meal tickets. Yeah. So all my lunches were the basically cafeteria food and that's vast majority of the introduction I had to American food where I thought that slop was like great. Yeah. You salisbury steak turkey gravy what what'd your mom do with the or mom and or dad do with like the squirrels and deer and other stuff because he was hunting a lot you were hunting small game too yeah i mean uh it was very very different being

49 years old when i grew up where I was riding my little bike with a shotgun on my shoulder, five miles next down to go hunt and nobody would think any different. And, uh, I mean, there were times where I rode my bike by the sheriff. Like we had one sheriff in the town and waved him.

Good luck. Were you, uh, were you self-taught on the hunting thing too? Or do you have buddies you ran around with or? I started basically, uh, just squirrels were Were you self-taught on the hunting thing too? Or did you have buddies you ran around with or? I started basically just squirrels were the first thing that we shot. Yep. And I didn't have a weapon at that point, like a rifle or a shotgun.

So neighbors lent me one. Yep. That's how it went back then. Yeah. And she didn't teach me how to use it. So I kind of figured out how to use it on my own. I mean, I took it out to the back of a farm. They had given me some 22 rounds and figured out how to use a rifle. Common sense was a big thing too. Like, you know, this thing's going to fire a bullet, might want to aim it in a place where I'm not going to kill myself. So I figured out how to

use it. And then as time went by and some of the other caliber weapons and whatnot, then I was taught by either the friends or their dads and whatnot. But my first, my first rifle I shot was the 22 and that was self-taught. And the same deal with a shotgun. They handed me a shotgun. It was 20 gauge shotgun. I don't remember what brand and just put the round in here and pull this trigger.

Did your siblings get into it? No, they're like one 80 of me. I mean, if you picture, you were just like, you were, you were just obsessed from as a kid,

but it wasn't universal in the family. Yeah. If you met me and my siblings, you would think I was adopted. Because what they're into. Yeah. They're total opposites. I mean,

they're your, your typical nine to five professional CPAs and finance. And even when I, I mean, I started off down that route when I finished college and then went and worked for RCA owned by Thompson Multimedia when I was an engineer. And, but in the back of my mind, I was always just looking forward to getting off work. So I could go fishing or go hunting. It was a means to doing what i wanted to do where both my brother and sister you know that's that's their career and that's what they enjoy to me working has always been a means until until i joined the military that was yeah what uh you went to college

first yeah i went to college first and then uh those years where they're kind of boring was more less just focuses on study and then where. Where'd you go to school? Lehigh. And then from there, we just went to work. And then it provided an astronomical amount of money for a kid that my age that had nothing before. So. Did you have a lot of pressure from your folks to go to school? Oh God.

Yeah. Like if we didn't get like. They were into the whole American dream thing and all that. Yeah. I mean, the stereotype for most Asian families, if you're not a doctor, you're not a lawyer, you're not my kid. It's very, very true. So there's always been a lot of pressure. They always guilt us with the fact that, you know, we gave up everything to give you guys a better life and they would guilt trip the shit out of us. Master fly tire doesn't fall into that category.

No, but it does play a big part into turning me into who I am today because of the upbringing I had and the rules and the strictness that my parents had and whatnot. Give me an example of a rule, the strictness. Basically, eat everything you have on your plate. So I was raised never to waste food. Down to the last rice grain. Cause you guys knew starvation, man. And so even to this day, even I do not like what is before, what's in front of me, I will force myself to finish it. And sometimes it gets pretty difficult.

Like during my travels going through, uh, Europe or some of these, trying some of these local cuisines that that was just like, I would still force myself to eat it. And then, so that's basically appreciate what you have is another one because you never know when it's gonna be all taken away. So basically I try not to take anything for granted. Just like always just live in that moment per se. My first time coming here to Montana several years ago, I always like envisioned what Montana

was like. And it was that way because my first experience with Montana wasn't Bozeman. It was going up the Twin Bridges and then float the Smith River and then saw the beauty that Lewis and Clark National Forest had. Yeah. Being surrounded by nature and the river and you're just with that

small group of people, not massive crowds. So what I had pictured Montana was going to be like was what I experienced. Now, years later, I realized Montana isn't always like that going through Yellowstone or the Madison River. And then you got people everywhere. And it's one of the most popular tourist destinations. But it never changed the fact that I know what Montana

has to offer. And then each time I come here, I try not to take it for granted. I just appreciate each day here. And again, that comes from the upbringing that I had from my parents. So how, what was your decision like to get in the military?

Well, 9-11 happened. I was working, I think I had just gotten back from Paris. The, like I said, the company's owned by Thompson. So I would spend several months out of the year traveling to France, to Poland, to Mexico, where they had their factories. So anytime that we completed something with R&D, we would go out there and implement that technology into the factories and the assembly lines and troubleshoot. You were an engineer.

Yeah. We're, the applications engineering department where we basically would took the, pretty much the final products of everything that the physics labs and everybody else put together. And then we made the final product what it is. Um, so 9-11 happened. Um, it was like a lot of people, you know, waking up, turning on the news and I was like, what the hell? And, uh, I literally didn't, I mean, I don't think anybody went to work that day and I was like what the hell and uh i literally didn't i mean i don't

think anybody went to work that day and i was just sat there glued to the tv so like most other people uh i felt bad i wanted to do something i went gave blood i mean there was a line out the door to give blood so i gave blood and i felt that still wasn't enough and then i was thinking about uh things i could possibly do to to help like basically america and then i got that phone call from also my dad and he's like hey you you really need to do something join the military or something to pay back our you know our family's debt to the us because where was he calling from uh well at that point my parents were divorced because all the years that they spent working all these long hours their relationship kind of like just like uh disappeared and at that point you know the kids are all grown up so they were divorced um but i don't know exactly where he was calling from but he just told me that i had to do something because i was the

oldest and oh really yeah i'm the oldest and i don't know if I should say this, but my brother's two-week and my sister's a girl. So it was really up to me. And then I had already thought about it a little bit, but that kind of like pushed me over the edge. And then literally the very next week, I was down at the Army Recruiting Station and submitted my two-week notice to the company. Everybody thought that I was nuts because it was one of those companies that you got there and people left when they died because it was a really good company to work for. They gave you like 30 days vacation a year and another 30 days of sick days. So literally you have 60 days a year where you didn't have to shut the work and still

got paid. It was hourly, very, very good wages where like the average median income in Pennsylvania back then or Lancaster then was about $24,000 and I was making way more than that so um I was able to go do all these great things that I absolutely love and not ever have to worry about the cause like musky fishing I mean I wasn't fly fishing back then but going up to Canada or going to the coves to shoot wild game and hunting wherever I wanted because I really didn't have any school loans or anything and uh it was a tough decision because I knew I had to give all that up I was another part was the fishing and I fished a lot in the Chesapeake literally like when it was a hunt season after work I would drive an hour and a half down to the Chesapeake Bay and go after uh striped bass

they call them rock fish out there at the east coast or go flounder or go and crabbing with some of my friends and I knew all that was going to go away because, uh, I mean, I wasn't an idiot. I looked up the salary difference and I knew that going from over 60,000 a year down to basically making like $1,200 a month was going to be a drastic change in lifestyle. But it was, the plan was only going to be three years. And so, and then you would, but you went in as a trained engineer, but you didn't go and become a, you didn't be like, I want to be in the Corps. No, I, the way I looked at it was, well, the Corps was a different story.

So they were actually. I mean, the Army Corps of Engineers, sorry. But the Marine Corps was the first one to actually call. That Corps, yeah. But the recruiter was a, was a lazy son of a bitch. And he wanted me to run the background check, get my fingerprints. He was actually having me do all this stuff. And I was, I thought that was what you're supposed to do

so i was actually coming back to marine corps recruit station with all these documents and whatnot and then i found out i was missing something and i had to go again and then the army guy was out there puffing a cigarette and he's like hey what are you doing and he told me i'll take care of all that for you like oh what do you guys have to offer and like well there's college loan repayment and all this other stuff and i've some went in there talked to him for a little bit he sold sold to me this guy was willing to cater everything and take care of all the paperwork and i literally just had to show up i was like this is totally different the marines this these guys really wanted me so i was like i knew the marines had the the grunts armies also had the grunts i

was like all right i'll go army Because everybody that pictures, you know, the fighting force, they always think Marine Corps first. And that was, that was the same way. And then he told me all the different things that the Army had to offer. And I ended up signing with the military. Now, everybody blames their recruiter for their

miserable life in the military. They do. They could have lied to me. Yeah. But the, uh, the difference was my recruiter actually was a really good guy. He was actually trying to talk me out of going into the infantry because I had maxed out my ASVAB. My scores were off the charts and I could have done anything.

They were offering me all these military intelligence, MOSs, the job, along with civil affairs, all the stuff that requires high test scores. And I was like, no, if I'm going to give up three years of my life to make a difference, put me where the fight's at, put a rifle in my head. And I chose to join the infantry. With the mindset, it was only going to be just three years. And because if I was going to join, I wanted to deploy. And the MOS that was the highest rate deploy was 11 Bravo as an infantryman. And that's what I selected.

Hmm. Hindsight's 20-20. You got what you asked for? I got what I asked for and for. But to all the young kids out there that might be thinking about the military, really consider your life choices. Infantry is very rewarding. You're going to have a brotherhood of people in, in, uh, combat of arms that you will never experience anywhere else.

Do a lot of cool shit. And you're going to do a lot of stuff that's really going to test your psych and your, your body. However, there's going to be sacrifices that you're going to give up. And that number one sacrifice is going to be your body and your brain.

If you're willing to give up that sacrifice is the best. Hold on, the body, you got to give up the body and the brain. It's, you're going to give up both. Those are two. The body, you got to give up the body and the brain. You're going to give up both. Those are two big parts. What was left? Because I got, after 22 years of service, I've already had 11 surgeries to fix all sorts of different ailments by me. I have, I might look very young for a 49 year old,

but I probably have a body of a 60 year old. And then your brain will also start failing you too, because you're going to go through some really troubling times when you're going to have to have some mental fortitude or intestinal fortitude along with some mental strength to overcome a lot of the shit that you deal with in the adventure. But it's a very rewarding MOS. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew, our northern brothers get irritated.

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I want to keep on the chronology, but let me ask you this. At this point, 9-11, you going into the infantry, are you just eating and sleeping, fly tying? I wasn't even touching that yet. I literally- But what's your awareness of it at this point, right? Nothing. Okay. I mean-

But you know there is such a thing as a fly rod. For like 10 years, my first 10 years, I was gone a lot. So when I got back, I, I spent more or less. Where all did you get sent to? Iraq, Afghanistan, Southern Philippines, uh, Kuwait. So Middle East. Yeah. Um, when I got back, my, my first duty station was Korea.

I was really upset because they weren't deploying. All they do is. But that's really common though, right? Yeah. It's really common. A lot of first assignments are to places that you actually don't deploy out of and then your next one now the fortunate thing for me and my mindset back then was it was only a year and then i was able to pick whatever assignment i want so uh i knew that hawaii was getting ready to go because did you get bumped up in rank because of your

education yeah i came in as a specialist okay e4 on an e1 the e9 scale um i got another totally off the off subject not off subject but out of chronology um when you were in so when you're stationed in korea and you had time off we drank no but but can you with your background and your family would it be inadvisable for you to go to Vietnam? Actually, that's a really sour subject because my grandfather was dying and I was out in the field training. And my family, my mom called the unit to give them a Red Cross message to let them know that my grandfather was dying. And a flight from Korea to Vietnam is really short and very inexpensive. And it was, I could have literally gone just like that on a whim and they never notified me.

So my grandfather passed away. I was within like a really short hop of getting there to be by his bedside and they never told me. So yes, I could have gone to Vietnam to answer your question, but that happened while I was over there in Korea. Yeah. And then, and your family would not have been pissed about it. No. No.

No, my family pretty much has allowed me to make my own life choices and do whatever I want is just live with the repercussions of my choices. And that's how they pretty much have treated. I mean, yeah, there was always those pressures of doing well and whatnot, but at the end of the day, all my parents wanted us to be was just happy. Yeah. So you spent time in, in, when you spent time in Iraq, Afghanistan, these are long stints of time or short in and outs or. They were all varied. The longest I was there for was 15 months. Straight.

Yep. 15 months straight. Oh, wow. was 15 months. Straight? Yep. 15 months straight. And then the shortest I was gone for was six months. And then you had nine, 12, 14, all mixed in there.

And you were there in what role? Combat operations for the most part. Yeah. As an officer? As a non-commissioned officer? As a non-commissioned officer.

Okay. Because by the time I went on my first deployment with my second duty assignment there which was hawaii i was already a sergeant and e-5 then so that's the difference with the the military versus the civilian side you could be like a 20 year old you rank a sergeant or a corporal and you're already gonna have three to four people that you control their lives and then with how many people uh usually as a fire team leader,

you would have three to four people that fall underneath you and you're their immediate supervisor. And eventually when you make squad leader in a typical infantry unit, you'll have anywhere from nine to 11, if it depends on whether it's, you know, it's a light infantry or a striker infantry.

And then as a platoon sergeant, once you get up, which is generally about 12 to 14 years in, then you have 36 to 44. And then as an infantry company first sergeant, you would have anywhere from 136 to over 200. And then that was my role for the last five years was as a first sergeant. And you're retiring now. Next year. Yep.

20 years. 22 years. 22 years. Army's changed quite a bit um there's a lot of things that i absolutely love and i wouldn't looking back on it i wouldn't change anything i i done um but at the same time the way it's headed right now with me coming up through basically the entire duration of my time in through all these wars and conflict and having certain expectations of how people should be and how soldiers should be has changed quite a bit now that we're considered like a

peacetime military got it and that's not what i signed up for and now that i've i've done my time it's time for me to move on you just don't mean you don't want to you don't feel the need to be there during peacetime. Yeah. The drive isn't the same anymore, along with, you know, other factors like my body is starting to give out. And I've always been one of those that you can't tell people to do something. You can't do it themselves. You do it yourself.

Got it. And I'm now at the point where I cannot be as physically fit as I used to be, where I always pride myself that my fitness was higher than most. I got it. Can run out with the best of it with 17, 18 year olds and can't really do that anymore with like basically all the injuries that I've had. So when you talk about surgeries, you had, you had, you had injuries within the military. Yeah.

I got you. I got you. And then within the, from doing certain things and then also just the wear and tear. Yeah. Where we would do certain, certain things as an infantryman where you have to be able to carry a 35 pound ruck, a pack on your back, along with your weapon, your pro-mass. I mean, all in all, you end up carrying probably close to 65 pounds worth of gear. And you have to do that foot march 12 miles in under three hours, which you either can walk really fast or you have to jog some of it. Short legs like me, I had to run a lot of it because there's no way in hell I maintain a 15 minute pace with all that gear on with my short legs. So I had to jog and run. And you would do

that every year along with all the other conditioning foot marches where it might be six miles, might be nine miles. And then when you go to the field, we do all these different infantry battle drills for training aspects of it. Some of them are like, for example, movement to contact or movement to daylight. Movement daylight is exactly what it sounds like. You start off walking at night and you keep walking until daylight. And if you don't find the enemy, then you basically you halt. Or if you do movement to contact, you keep walking until you find the damn enemy. And then you take the fight to them.

Or you're doing a reconnaissance. I mean, there's a lot of different aspects of it it and then there's no such thing as we can't walk there because of the terrain you may do like in korea that would really test you that would break your freaking body because of the elevation and then the mountains that you're walking up and down so you find all the different draws the different cuts and you make your path and you would sometimes walk 14 18 30 hours we had one combat operation and after we had a soldier kill that we were hunting for specific people where it was a 96 hour operation we're up four days straight and fatigue and everything starts kicking in and that's where the fitness has to come in because if you're not fit you're tired you're gonna fall asleep and

somebody's gonna die so those are the things that start stressing your body and really start stressing your brain um you know one incident like or one event like that is is not so bad but you multiply that over the course of numerous combat deployments 20 plus years of service and it has its toll when after afghanistan had gone on for 20 years and people started to draw parallels between Afghanistan and Vietnam, and then we pull out of Afghanistan in a way that seemed reminiscent at a minimum, right? Of our withdrawal from Vietnam. What that looked like after having spent time there?

What was that like emotionally for you? It was disheartening. And I'm going to leave it at that because I'm still an active duty member. Oh, yeah. And I might actually say something I might regret. We'll talk to you in a year. Yeah, talk to me in a year.

I'll tell you very passionate feelings about that. But it was very disheartening. Yeah. Because there me in a year and I'll tell you a very passionate feelings about that, but it was very disheartening because there were, there were, there were good men and women that lost their lives on how it was handled. Yeah. I got it. Um, still not tying flies. Did you start tying flies in the- Seven years ago is when I started. Okay. So what happened seven years ago? So, um, I was getting ready to leave leave Hawaii I was still recovering from some of the injuries that I was getting medical help for and at that point right there I was

really not doing platoon sergeant work anymore where I was just getting ready to PCS permanent change the station and leave Hawaii packed up all the stuff they shipped it off. We're living out of the hotel room until our flight. So I had a couple of weeks left and I was hitting the drink pretty hard. In Hawaii. In Hawaii. Because the one thing, I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, but one of the things

that like with non-commissioned officer or leaders in general in the military is when you have soldiers that you're responsible for, you will put on a facade in order to present that appearance to those soldiers. So you put it on up a wall and you always have to show because they're going to mimic everything you do. So even if I wanted to be pissed or piss ass drunk every day, I really couldn't because I had soldiers that were responsible for. But the minute that you take those leaders and you have them no longer in charge of anything, then that wall comes crumbling down real fast and that was happening to me where all the things i kept bottled up inside for years and years you know soldiers that were lost over in combat people that i knew that were very close to

no longer around injuries that i i felt and then just a sheer amount of horror that you see over the Middle East where, you know, they'll strap, like one of the soldiers that we had pass away died from a suicide vest. And it was like basically a little mental, handicapped child, girl, that they strapped the vest to. So she walked in there, you know, selling cigarettes and whatnot to all the soldiers to get accustomed to seeing, seeing these local national kids. And they strapped the vest her and they blew her up. Soldiers wearing 40 mic bike rounds on his vest because he was a grenadier. Those rounds exploded and basically just tore his inside out. So those are the things that you'll deal with that you basically just have to pack away. There's some people that can't, and then they're the ones that will have like those mental breakdowns and they'll, they're the vocal about PTSD, et cetera, et cetera. Well, I couldn't have that luxury because I had, you know, I had soldiers that I was responsible for.

I had 36 other men that if I broke down, then what, what were they going to do? So I bottle a lot of that crap up. So the minute that I no longer was in charge of anything, I had all this free time in my hands as I was getting ready to leave Hawaii. You know, I was drinking pretty heavily. Just trying to drown out some of that shit. And, uh, the time where I first started getting

into the fly fishing aspect of it, uh, I was at a bar and there was an old guy that kept on trying to talk to me and I was kind of like brushing him off. And then he brought up the subject of fishing. So keep in mind, I absolutely loved fishing as a kid, but I didn't really dangle in it at all because I was so busy with the military for so long that it kind of like took a backseat to everything I was doing in the military. But that sparked, you know, my interest right away. It was brought back, you know, some of those fun memories and that's how he got me to open up. And he took me out to Kanehowa Bay

and I don't even know what size fly rod or whatnot. It was just some huge rod and he was showing me how to do some basic casts and, uh, uh, handed me this. Who was this guy? Was he military? A Korean war vet. Oh, okay. Yeah. It was just another vet. Uh, caught my first fish and it was the most

exhilarating feeling. It was totally different than anything I had caught, I had done with, uh, conventional gear because that rod was so long and you feel like every head shake, every movement, the runs, the whole nine yards. I had no idea that it was a trophy size bonefish as my first fish that I caught.

In Hawaii. In Hawaii. Yeah, yeah. It was a huge bonefish, man. A 12 pound bonefish. It was my first fish on a fly rod. To me, it was just a fish. But you caught it on a flat in Hawaii.

Yeah. Huh. And so, uh, unfortunately, um, soon after that, we, uh, we left Hawaii and, uh, moved to my next assignment and again, got all caught up in, uh, in the military and didn't fly fishing again for, for almost like six, seven months. And, um. But were you like. No, not at all. You weren't thinking about fishing you know how my mindset is when i get

a focus on a very on specific tasks i get like obsessed with making sure it gets done right and the task i had on hand was we were certified national guard guardsmen before they deployed overseas and we wanted to make sure they knew what the hell they were doing uh otherwise you know they could suffer casualties. So that was my main focus. I was traveling to places like Grand Lake, Michigan, to Fort Drum, New York, all over the place. And we would get these battalions and brigades of National Guardsmen and we ran them through the gauntlet.

And so that's what I was doing for a long time. And then the time that I got rekindled with the fishing aspect of it was I was actually driving home. I lived about 68 miles or so from work one way because a big part of my life is my kids. And I wanted to find the best schools I could put them in. So the area around post generally, most military posts, not exactly the greatest where you got a lot of strip bars, pawn shops and- Oh, I got you.

Yeah. So it was, the best schools was up in, about 16 miles away in Northeast Indianapolis in a town called Fishers. And I made that commute every day. So long drive home,

listened to a lot of radios, a lot of audible and whatnot. And this one time I had the radio on and there was a commercial for the Indianapolis Sports and Outdoors show. And I was like, maybe I'll check this out. It's only 15 minute diversion from getting home. So I was still in uniform. Drove there, went, started walking. Just went there right then.

Just went there right then. And I was walking around, checking out all the boats and the hunting lodges and I mean, man. God, radio ads work, man. And so, when I got over to the fishing area. You should have gone and visited the guy that did the ad by. The guy wants you to know, man. I literally came here because of that radio ad.

When you said exit now, you had me. Yeah. He was very similar to the guy that does those four-wheeling ads where they're yelling and screaming, come check this out right now. You got four wheels. You got a deer. Damn it, I will. And so I went, and then when I made it over to the fishing area, they had a very little small corner there just for the fly fishing.

I was checking out the whole show, and eventually I made it over to the fishing area. They had a very little small corner there just for the fly fishing. I was checking out the whole show. Eventually, I made it over to the fly fishing area. Then I was hearing, hey, soldier, come here. Who the hell is calling me? Realized I was still in uniform. There's this organization called Project Healing Waters

Fly Fishing. They had a chapter there out of Indianapolis. They had a little booth there they're trying to shit me because you had your uniform on that's how i had a big target on my bags like yeah there's a soldier so went over there and they start telling me about themselves and what they do and how they help veterans overcome uh disabilities whether it's mental or physical you're like i happen to know a guy. And how they heal through fly fishing and whatnot. And I was like, oh, fly fishing is pretty cool.

I did that once. And they're like, oh, we'll show you everything else you need to know. So sign up with their email list. And next thing you know, I got this notification. God's like divine intervention, dude. It's like God was like talking to you through your car radio. It's wild. I was left, though, on my first outing that

they had. So being, being a soldier, you kind of feel like you're almost an outsider to civilians at times because you change over the years. And one of the things that changed about me was I didn't like being around strangers. I didn't like being around crowds. I didn't like being around an environment I

couldn't control. Yeah. So it's that fight or flight mentality. And I was getting that, like that first day I was at that outing, even though there were other vets there, I didn't know who was a vet, who was a volunteer, who was what. And it was just completely, I'm the only one there that didn't know anybody. So, man, I don't know if that's particular to that, because that might be your age shining through too,

because I got that problem bad. And I haven't done shit could be that too and you compound that with the military then you exemplified it even more so i was actually getting ready to leave and i was walking back to my car and i was about to drive off and this older gentleman my name i'm sorry you're getting ready to leave that first fishing outing so they host you on a fishing outing, and you get there, and it was too much. There was too much going on. So you almost said, never mind, this isn't for me. Yeah, I literally walked to my car, was hopping in, and then this- Unannounced, you were just leaving.

I was just leaving. I was just bailing. Irish goodbye. And the gentleman- Like in a way that was weird. No, to me it was normal. But I mean, in a way they would be like, wow, that guy just left. Yeah. I'm sure they deal with that quite a bit. No, to me it was normal. But I mean, in a way they would be like, wow, that guy just left. Yeah.

I'm sure they deal with that quite a bit. Yeah, okay. Because they deal with a lot of soldiers and veterans that are going through quite a bit.

But this guy named Joe Smith, he's, find out, he's the program coordinator there. He's like, hey, where are you going? And then he kind of talked me out of it and partnered me up

with somebody because I didn't realize that once you go there and then he kind of like talked me out of it and, uh, partnered me up with somebody because I didn't realize that once you go there and then you sign up and then they, they put a volunteer with you to be like your buddy for the day type of deal. And. Another veteran. Uh, sometimes, sometimes it's just a civilian

that just wants to help out. Yeah. I used to do that and I was, I just teach people how to cast and take them out on the river and the drift boat and stuff. And I had no idea. For that same organization? No. Warriors on quiet water.

Got it. And so, um, they partnered me up with somebody and then, um, took me out to the area where there was a bunch of crappies and with a fly rod and they showed me some basic gas and whatnot, started catching some fish. And then kind of like slowly forgot about everything else, all the anxiety that I was

dealing with and all that melted away again. And when they, you hear that cliche quite a bit where, you know, healing through fishing, healing through being on the water. It's very true because the reason why fly fishing works so well compared to conventional fishing or archery versus conventional hunting is the amount of concentration and attention to the

details that's required in order to achieve your end state. If you don't pay attention to what you're doing, you're going to get hung up with a fly rod. You don't pay attention to what you're doing with a bow, you're not going to hit your target.

Yeah. And so all. Meaning if you got a, if you got a sucker rod out with a bell on the end, you can still be pounding some drinks and thinking about the war. Let the circle hook do the job. But you're constantly so busy with a fly rod that you kind of like start tuning everything else out. And that's why that it really helps with the mental healing aspect of it because you tune out all that noise. Yeah.

And that's what tying was also. So. When you guys were fishing crappies, what were you, do you remember what you were throwing? I think it was a little pheasant tail. Okay. It was whatever he tied on there.

But did you take any particular interest in it at that time? The fly? Sort of, because of the engineering background, I was more intrigued on the how ism to everything. Okay. So I, uh, even to this day, like the first time I looked at a fly, I was deconstructed on my brain.

Like, how is this thing put together? Got it. So you just looked at the world that way. I look at the world, I look at a camera system and I think of the same way. It's like, how, how is this lens put together? How's the glass? How's the magnification, et cetera. Everything I look at, I deconstruct.

You've been eyeballing that old Triumph trap right there. I mean, if you think about it, it's probably why the Japanese and the Chinese are so far advanced in technology because they, they steal all American ideas, deconstruct everything through their engineers. But yeah, so I look at stuff and I started deconstructing.

It was the same way with flies. It was the same way with a cast. It was the same way with how the fly rods built, the physics behind it. So coming from the engineering background, I looked at it a little bit differently where I, like in the casting and using the line, the rod on basically catching that fish versus the reel

is like the engineering behind it on applied pressure and whatnot and using basically motion or the cast and i mean at the end of the day some of the the best casters in the world fly rack and cast further than anybody with a bait cast or a spinning rod because they know they understand physics so when i was looking at those flies i was already starting to think that now i really didn't know exactly you know how you would do it all i knew was the material type of materials but i didn't know all the materials and so that even piqued my interest more because then on another trip home i was like uh i was like you know those flies i kept on thinking about it it was like stuck in my brain and i googled fly as a thing yeah yeah and i googled fly shops in indiana and then there was a shop there called

fly masters of indianapolis and it was literally the exit that I take home. I passed by it almost every day and had never paid attention to it. Really? It was a small little corner shop that you would just, you wouldn't. Dude, it's like a screenplay. Yeah, it's almost like this entire script

that I was going through. But it was like there, right there, that exit. And then I pulled in that parking lot and came in and super friendly guys in there. Derek, he's the store manager there. He still works there to this day. Big shout out to Derek, huh? Big shout out to Derek.

He's a great guy. What's the name of the shop again? Fly Masters of Indianapolis. Okay. So I went in there. Now, the stigma behind most fly shops is, if you don't look like you can spend money, they kind of ignore you because the stuff in a fly shops is like if you don't look like you're you can spend money they kind of like ignore you because the stuff in a fly shop is expensive as heck there's

no going around that you think that's true it is not the not the price but you think that the you think that you know it is too like the one time a year i go in to buy a few liters and stuff i've you know i don't know as someone who managed to fly shop for a few years, you know who's coming in to buy a spool of tippet and who's coming in to buy a rod. Got it. You know what, Yanni? And you're going to spend more time on the guys buying a rod. It depends on where you're at, too. Yeah.

I mean, you've got locals that are coming in that you're seeing every couple of days and they become your buddies. For sure. You can also go to remember the vast majority of the fly shop owners are still the old school, older guy mentality where it was like a, a, um, a gentleman's type sport. And there's a big difference in $900, $1,000 ride versus somebody that's going to go to Walmart and buy, you know, a $50 kit. And the ones that look like they would shop at Walmart, a lot of those guys kind of like tend to ignore quite a bit because they don't think they're going to spend the money. Yeah. Unfortunately, that's the case with some fly shops, not all. And unfortunately for me, that wasn't the case with Flymasters.

When I went in there, they were really cool and answer a lot of questions. Okay. So if you're a dirtbag in Indianapolis and you want to be treated with respect at your local fly shop. Well, not all fly shops sell tying stuff either. Yeah. Because it's a million different SKUs that cost $3.

They went through this big change. I can't pinpoint the time, but it used to be like every fly shop in order to be a fly shop had materials. Oh yeah. And then all of a sudden like. I can picture the shop in order to be a fly shop had materials. Oh yeah. And then all of a sudden like they just went away. I can picture the wall in my mind's eye, right? Yeah.

It's actually a dying art. Over in the East coast, if you go to any of these fly fishing clubs, the average age in there is probably close to 65, 70. Now it's different out here in the West because it's still popular with the young folks because it's, it's activities at most of the colleges. You go to Colorado, it's, popular with the young folks because it's, it's, uh, activities at most of the colleges. You go to Colorado, it's, it's the vast majority

you'll see on the people in the river are, you know, 19 to 30 year olds. You go out East, most people you see on the water with a fly rod are late fifties, seventies. Huge disparity between the East coast and the West coast when it comes down. It's trend, it's trendy here. Yeah.

You know, it's like a. Well, it's been that way for decades. Yeah. So it's not even, it's trend it's trendy here you know it's like a well it's been that way for decades yeah it's not even it's not even trendy about since the time i moved out here yeah but i would even say it's like at a point it's just the reality yeah but it's not even trendy it's just like it's it's a it's a discipline or a pursuit that remains alive and well in a part of the world yes but unfortunately a lot of those older customer bays are starting to pass away. And along with them, the drive to tie flies.

And there aren't enough replacements coming in to basically take up the helm of all these guys. There's more guys that tie flies and fly fish that are passing away than there are guys that are taking up the sport in parts of the US. I want to just pause for one minute because I want to make sure I'm clear on something. Going into a fly shop and having the big wall

of all the hackles and, you know, the dubbing. That's becoming not a thing. I didn't, I didn't know this. A lot of. Less of a thing. Yeah, a lot of fly shops have gotten rid of that because like what Brody said is it takes up a lot of retail space

and your return on that retail space is, is way lower than like your soft goods or your hard goods. And so like your clothing, your waiters, stuff like that, you have better margins as a retailer on that. Yeah. You get someone like Son coming in, messing up

all the materials and then you spend an hour putting the stuff. Trying to touch everything. They ring it all up, and he's got like 13 bucks worth of stuff. Brody's got to get the ladder out to get enough there. There is a big however to that, because depending on the market

in the region of the U.S., some shops will survive solely on tying materials because the return on the tying materials is actually far superior than it is on hardware because you can go on there with $500 and you might walk out with a small little brown bag worth of materials. It adds up.

Yeah. $5, $7. You think about that, that hackle, that whites. Whiting. Whiting hackle, like that stuff is not cheap no like just to buy a basic entry grade cape is 45 bucks just for one color of a specific hackle and that's where a lot of people when they jump into that rabbit hole is they look at books they'll see all the materials and they think they have to follow exactly that material list and those guys there

will run into every fly shop and they'll they want to tie this fly or that fly and they they will have a list and they'll buy this hackle because this one fly calls for it they'll buy this and next you know you have boxes of shit that you only have used once ever for one particular pattern and then after you get into it for a couple of years, you realize you could substitute a lot of stuff that you don't have, but a lot of beginner tires don't know that. And those guys there will, will keep a fly shop in business because they will spend thousands of dollars just buying materials for stuff that they might not even ever catch a fish. It's very addictive. Do you know the editor and fly tire and writer Jay Nichols? You know him at all?

I know the name. I've never met him though. We live together. Okay. Yeah. And I remember going out and shooting pine squirrels. Their tails are awesome. Yeah.

Him taking that hair and putting it in his coffee grinder, you know, making, making. Because he used to tie for the shops. Yeah. Right here. This is the claws on this cray used to tie for the shops. Yeah, right here. This is the claws on this crayfish or pine squirrel. Okay, yeah. He used to have like, he'd just sit there just like, I guess what you're calling guide flies. Yeah.

You know, not all the time, but he had a lot of times would spend time just tying and tying and tying and tying to go sell them at, you know, Grizzly Hackle or whatever the hell it was. Yeah, but like fly shops are awesome. And for anybody that hasn't gotten into fly fishing, that's looking into it, develop a relationship with your local fly shop.

Because they're the ones that if you don't, one, they're probably going to go out of business because all the big box store competitors is going to price them out. But if you go in there, you develop that relationship, you're going to learn where to fish, where, what's biting, you know, what type of flies are actually working the time of year you're going to learn all these things and you'll never find out in a book because it's a local expert that's helping out and at the same time you're also supporting your local economy and that will help you throughout the entire journey on whether it's time flies or picking the right gear going to the right places to fish at certain times of year.

There's just certain things that local guides know, local fly shops know that you can't ever find from Google or from online. A lot of them do like tying seminars and classes and stuff. Did you, did you do any of that at, at that shop in Indianapolis? I did it with Healing Waters and eventually going full circle, I came back to Flymaster, and I did some demos for them for customers. Oh, you did? Yeah.

So how do you become, once you got into it, I guess 90-whatever, I don't know, 99% of the people that start tying flies sit down and tie what they use. Okay? And it's just functional right you're just tying them because you want to tie the flies that you use uh how did it what is the jump where it becomes artistry well i mean because you're no you're not known now it's just a dude that can whip out a shitload of pheasant tails before he goes out fishing i wouldn't say 99 i would probably say close to the 50

nowadays with the uh the influx of the the younger generation getting into tying i mean people are into the artistry yeah so more like your bread and butter fishermen are buying flies yes and tying has become like like is it is tying retro now tying Tying for many, like especially with guides, is a means to an end. Okay. Where they're supplying their own fly boxes versus having to buy from.

Out of financial considerations. Okay. So that's still a thing. That's still a thing. For others, it's the flies that they tie with their patterns, they know it's going to work

better than anything they can buy. Got it. So again, it's still a means to an end. Yep. And then for that other 50%, it's either for the mental health or just for the artistry. I mean, at the end of the day, if you look at it, it's adult arts and crafts.

That's all it is. Arts and crafts. So what was the first fly you tied that had some sort of merit beyond just being a thing that someone would go and snag in the bush behind them and write it off as another lost fly, right? Probably, again, this here will be the obsessive compulsory nature of me. When I started learning, it was through books. Okay.

Healing Waters helped refine all that, but I had some books. I was looking through there. Flymasters of Indianapolis, I, I was, I had some books. I was looking through their fly masters of Indianapolis. Again, they gave me my first vice at no cost because they have, like I was telling you on the East coast there and even the Midwest, you have a lot of people dying off. So these widows don't know what, what to do with their husbands or their grandparents stuff. So they end up just giving it to charities or fly shops or whatever. And the fly shop there runs a lot of classes and

whatnot on Saturdays. So they had widows up bringing stuff all the time. So they had advice that they gave me along with the tools, some materials and whatnot. And, you know, as I'm paging through this book. They gave it to you. That's bad business.

Bad business. Short term. First hits free. Long term, it was good business. Oh, is that right? They knew what they were doing? They had a repeat customer. Yeah, gotcha.

And so I was reading this book and reading about the history about the flies and how we got to start over there in the UK and then how the early pioneers, Theodore Gordon in the early 1900s, took some of those British patterns and fashioned them to flies that would work in the fast moving waters up there in the Catskill Mountains up in New York. Okay. And turn them into, you know, our modern dry flies today.

So that really perked my interest because I'm such a history nerd that I wanted to know the why's into everything. Yeah. And I read about it and I looked at this one fly and I was like, man, this fly is just gorgeous. It's a pattern called the ginger quill developed

in the early 1900s. The ginger quill. Ginger quill made out with mallard flank wings and a stripped peacock quill body, hackle, no non-yards. So I'm looking at this fly. I was like, I got to tie this thing. So looked through the materials, didn't have it,

went back to Flymasters, bought what I needed. Came back home, start tying this fly. It looked like something that fell out of a bull's nose but with the military background and the engineering background it was like fur feathers threat ain't gonna best me i'm gonna tie this damn fly yeah when it was all said i tied about 120 of these flies until i got to look like wow until it looked like that fly in the book having no idea that's not how you should start When it was all said and done, I tied about 120 of these flies until I got what they look like. Wow. Until it looked like that fly in the book. Having no idea, that's not how you should start tying flies because there's very simple patterns. You start off with the wooly buggers and all this.

I'm tying one of the most difficult flies there because in order to get those mallard flank feathers to sit right, they split real easily. And if you don't put the right amount of thread pressure on there, the feather, the strands between each of those feathers will just start fraying. So it took over a hundred of these flies and a lot of trips. That's why you're so good. A lot of trips to Flymasters.

I literally bought them out of Malmau Flankle Feathers until I got the fly to look right. Yeah. If you just started with a San Juan worm, things could have gone a lot different for you. The funny part though was I was so proud of myself. Like, I tied this ginger quill.

Tell me the name of it. Ginger quill. Ginger quill. I never heard that word before. Just like the one in the book. And then I discovered Google, and I typed in ginger quill. And the modern version, look, nothing like the ones that are in the book.

Oh, it had been corrupted over time it looks so much prettier the modern versions because we have better materials nowadays and the modern version look better because of the better quality hackle in the materials the feathers you get genetic hackles where the and you're all you're working off some old ass book from the 70s or something i'm talking about i'm talking about working off a picture that was taken probably like 1905 got it and my fly looked nothing like the modern version, so I started all over again. Until I got it looking like the ones that I was selling on Google.

Meanwhile, are you at least fishing this thing too? No. I was going to say, what else did Google tell you about that fly? Dude, if you just saved those 100 and we could make a big display case. The progression. Top to bottom. The 100 flies lined out. That'd be a nice little thing for the auction house of oddities so that fly right there was was the first it was a fly that really right there oh let me see this fly

was huh the one that really got me going down the rabbit hole i was picturing i when you when chester just showed me the picture i was picturing something like, when Chester just showed me the picture, I was picturing something that looked like those old crazy Scottish, like Atlantic salmon flies. Oh, like this right here. Yeah. Like, like, like Chester's crazy, not crazy. Chester's tattoo. So, uh, when it got to, uh, I was tied for about 11 months now at that point. And a lot of it was just me dabbling, figuring things out on my own and having no idea whether I was doing anything right or not.

But no tying those flies onto the end of the leader. Oh yeah. Or you were. I was fishing a lot of midges, pheasant tails, hare's ear. So you're fishing meanwhile. Yeah. I literally tied every fly that was in that book.

The founding flies written by this gentleman by the name of Mike Vallow from New York. So he's still around. I actually met him years later at a fly fishing You tied every fly in this book. You tied every fly in his book. I tied every fly in his book. And that included deer hair patterns, the streamers. These were all, it's called like basically 43 masters.

Guys from the 1900 to the 60s that were showing their famous patterns there. And I tied like each of the ones that I saw in there. So I was figuring out how to do stuff. I was probably doing it very wrong. But I was spinning deer hair at that point because i wanted to mimic these irresistible atoms and whatnot and it was through a lot of trial and error uh stacking deer hair wrapping hackle a lot of it was self-taught a lot of it was asking questions over at the local fly shops and um some of the guys over uh project healing waters knew some of the answers some didn't and then so at 11 months they uh they project healing waters

told me there's a national fly tying competition that they wanted me to enter and i was like what the heck what is it they're like well just submit you know five of the same patterns and if you you win it you know it's good for the the program etc etc and i'm like all right sure so i am i tied five family you're not aware that these competitions exist at this point no i had no idea how big this was because to me i thought it was just like like a local chap this is so much like a movie this is like the part in karate kid when he finds out about the karate contest yeah so i tied five of these fan wing um fan wing um um quill gordons and five of the stimulators which is very popular was created out of here out west and i said were you you weren't you didn't happen to be like in a romantic rivalry with another tire were you nobody even knew who i was okay so there's not like you're not trying to win a woman's favor i'm just thinking about the movie here you're not trying to win a woman's

favor through fly time well it's like a real asshole who's like good at time well there's somebody at the fly shop and you guys will reach for the same hackle at the same time and he may have said something discriminatory or... And then you reunite. Turns out he's at the vice next to you at the competition. He's dating this girl. Well, actually, there's a little truth to that. Yes. Alright. So, my buddy, his name is Joe

Jackson. He's from Indiana also. He was also that got out from disabilities. There's another Joe Jackson from Indiana. Oh, sure. Who's Joe? The Jackson family. Oh!

Never mind. He ended up entering the competition, too. The one time Phil says something. I had no idea that he was... Totally derails the conversation. Nobody gets it. Continue. He submitted flies, also, and I didn't know that he had submitted flies. It nobody gets it continue he submitted flies also and i didn't i didn't know that he had submitted flies it was several people from that same program and

so they invited all the finalists i was notified you know i was one of the top five finalists for this competition and then there was this international fly tying symposium in lancaster pennsylvania and they paid my way to get out there put me up in the hotel and then come check out the show it was tied the booth so you have to tie them there no you submitted them and then there was a panel of all these like renowned uh expert tires from across the the u.s that analyze the work that analyze the work so just seems ripe for fraud could be when they do when they do analyze them are they deconstructing them are they just looking at they're looking at them to see if they all look the same.

Okay. The proportions are correct. I'm surprised you don't need to tie it in front of them. Well, you eventually do that if you had them. Oh, I see. I mean, they have like the little booth there where you get an hour block and you sit there. Had you worked your way up to like a real nice souped up rotary Renzetti vice yet? Or were you just working on that same one that they gave to you?

That was the vice they gave me. It was a Renzetti. Oh, yeah, that was my first vice. they gave you a good one then. I had no idea. Tell me this vice again.

I never heard of it. Renzetti. It's kind of like the Ferrari of vices. I gave you a. My daughter's is a Renzetti? Yeah. Old one. I hate to tell you,

the only thing we tie on there is lead head. Well, either way. Lead head wall, I jigs. That's like the. Yeah. There's some other good companies that make them. Thank you, Brody. What's with all the rubber bands and whatnot on there?

Well, cause there's a little piece on there that keeps the flex on the jaws and that rubber, you know what I'm talking about? Goes around the jaws. That broke. So I just put a rubber band on there. It's a Ron Zeddy. It's a rubber Zeddy. I don't know. No, no. Ren Zeddy. Ren Zeddy. Oh, okay on there. It's a Ronzetti. It's a Rubberzetti. I don't know. No, no.

Renzetti. Renzetti. Oh, okay. Yeah, they're based out of Florida. And that's the cat's ass for, cat's meow for vices. No, I have, I think probably 11 vices at home. What's your favorite? I really don't have one particular one.

I use them all because they all serve a different purpose. There's a couple that I bought them because they're, they were cool to look at, but functionally wise, they weren't as good as some of the other ones, but like Norvice is one of the ones I use quite a bit. Renzetti, uh, Regal was another good one. There, there's a lot of different companies.

Who makes the most kick-ass pair of little scissors? Uh, company would call me Renome because they're, they're based off of a German scissors a German scissors and they're sharpest scissors by far. I mean, the, the engineering behind them is phenomenal. Now, what could have, what could have fellow, uh, put into a pair of scissors? A good pair of scissors, 40 bucks. Oh, I thought you were going to say something crazy.

No, it's 40 bucks. Okay. You can put more money into a vice. I'm a scissors, like a scissors enthusiast yeah you want to get a pair of renown scissors they're really good scissors and so uh going back on to that time competition when i was there they started announcing all these winners off fifth place fourth place etc and then finally it was me and joe left and then they announced joe as this you know the first runner up i'm like sitting there like it didn't really

even dawn on me i was like everybody else is gone and I'm still sitting there at the table by myself. Waiting to find out what you are. Yeah, and that's when the guys around me are like, hey, congratulations son. And I'm like, oh shit, I won. So they called off my name and then they gave me the Regal

Vice as one of the prizes along with certificates and all this stuff. Were you like, suck it Joe. Yeah, first runner up was confusing. I remember entering an essay contest and getting the letter when i was in high school getting the letter that i was first runner up i thought it meant i won and then someone had to be like no that's not what that means you're like it's despite despite the word first it's like you're second it's a more flattering way of saying second. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. So first and second place ended up being two guys from the same program. It was me and Joe. But out of people from around the whole country. Yes.

It was pretty cool. Did you guys have the same mentor? He was there quite a few years longer than I was. I was still relatively new there. So I really don't know how he was taught. I know he was self-taught a lot of stuff he does a lot of deer hair stuff also but he was very involved with the program at that point i was like the new guy coming in and so what was the average these guys that are tying in this

in this competition were you guys were you guys relatively young uh i was always relatively old compared to other tires yeah uh that are in the program most of these guys are either veterans that that did you know three years got out some disability or got injured in their seventh year so you had the vast majority of them are probably i mean it's going to vary between programs um mid 30s to mid 40s no um but i guess that's great and that's an interesting thing and i could appreciate that because you stayed in for so long but what i meant was the fly tying the competitive fly tying community in general tens old yeah okay yeah so um gotta know if the eyesight thing eventually bombs you out or.

It does, but they, they make cheaters and everything you can wear for them. Like I said, I have really good eyesight. I mean, I've only seen about 2015 or so. Um, so I had, I have that advantage with my eyesight, but the other part to it was like, uh, back then it was one huge competition where first place was against everybody, whether you've been tying for six months or you've been tying for six years, there was no difference. Nowadays, they break it down by beginner, intermediate, advanced. So it was pretty cool to have basically won that competition and that opened up a can of worms from there because they started announcing it i i started my my first social media page because

i was still using like mass emails to attach pictures of flies that i'll send to my buddies it's like hey look at this one look at this one they're like dude why don't we just open up a social media account so everybody just look at it without having to open up emails and whatnot that's how i ended up starting the instagram account was just so that people will look at these. And what is the Instagram account? It's a son underscore towel. And so they, they started looking at these flies and next, you know, like I get these notifications and so-and-so is following you. I'm like, what the hell is this person doing? I didn't know what it was.

And I started getting these messages and I had no idea what a DM was. And then it was my cousin that that told me hey somebody just likes what you're posting up on there and eventually i had a question if somebody could ask me if i could demonstrate like don't worry you don't have to go kick their ass yeah like they're just like what you're doing i thought it was just my friends that were following this account i didn't realize that strangers that could just follow your account so um somebody had asked me to post a like a detail how i i tie in a specific technique. It was like hackle wrapper or something like that.

So I tried to explain it, but it was taking too long. So I just recorded the video and I posted it up there. And then the next, you know, like this video had like over a thousand likes. And I was on social media at that point for like three months or something like that. So I was like, wow, a thousand people like this. And so I started posting more of these videos and these flies. And the, I guess the algorithm loved these little videos or whatever. like this and so i started posting more of these videos and these these flies and uh the i guess the algorithm loved these little videos or whatever and the account just like like really blew up and

then um in span of like six years it you know went up to somewhere in 80 000 some range now and then in the fly fishing or in the grand scheme you think it's not a whole lot but for the fly fishing industry itself it's equivalent probably having like a million followers in like a bass industry because fly fishing is so small. Yeah. And so. But this is like the fly tying world. Tying and fishing because the one difference

with my account is I try to mix in the fish that I catch along with the flies that I tie. Got it. And then it's flies that, that are proven patterns that work. It's just, I show the techniques and it's basically 60 second video is what they boil down to on how to do the major portions of these. I'll speed up the mundane stuff with the wraps and then I'll slow it down on the more intricate parts. that has a general idea how to tie, they could basically capture how to tie this fly in a span of like 60 seconds versus having to sit through you know 15, 20, 30 minute YouTube videos on a tutorial. So somebody just wants the basic idea of how to do something, they were looking at these videos. And over the course of that

time I got to meet quite a few cool people in the industry, like I met that author, he knew who I was and it was his book that got sold. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Oh, that's cool. Same deal with like. God, that's a good part of the movie too, right? Manufacturers of most of these vices.

Like when I went to Sims with Warriors and Quiet Waters Foundation. I mean, I'd be remiss if I didn't bring them up. And we talked about that a little more in a minute. But when I first came here for my first outing with Warriors and Quiet Waters, they took us to the Sims factory to outfit us with Sims gear and give us, you know, fly rods and whatnot, taking vets. At that point, I was already fishing for a

little bit, but a lot of vets come here and they never done it before. So when I went there, a lot of the guys that were working at Sims knew who I was from the social media aspect and that was really cool yeah yeah so one of the guys uh he doesn't work there anymore his name is brent but he came over he's like man do you have any flies with you i was like yeah i got my flight box out here in my my pack and he said can i check them out so i was like yeah sure brought him in there and he's looking through all these flies like you can have him when he, and he still has them on his mantle.

He lives here in Bozeman. And, but he never fished them. He kept them. So I didn't realize that, you know, tying flies can have that much of an impact for some people. And there are people that really love the artistry and the, uh, the work that's behind in concept of fly.

The longest time there for me, it was just basically a way to relax and a way to catch fish. I don't have a single fly that's framed do you uh will you fish with a fly tied by someone else or is that oh i have no problems doing that okay i won't fish with flies that are tied uh overseas in the sweatshops right because they're they're garbage i'm sorry i didn't know that that was a thing till, till a couple of years ago that that had become a, that, that, that there's a couple of countries that, where is it? Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka. And then somewhere in Africa, right?

Yeah. Kenya. Now there's some companies that are very good and they take very good care of those workers and some aren't. What percentage of flies in these fly shops do you think are tied overseas 90 i bet i would say probably close to 95 much lower in some of the local shops here for example like a huge fly fishing community like like montana and bozeman a lot of the fly shops here probably maybe 50 maybe a little bit more. So the really good ones will support local tires.

And then there are some people that tie commercially and that's all they do. Eight hours a day is just tie flies for shops. I mean, I'd rather stick a spoon in my eye than do that for eight hours. But there's people that do that for a living. There's got to be like a carpal tunnel component to that shit. That too.

And then just the, for me, I would get bored doing the same. Yeah. When you get an order for 20 dozen Prince nymphs and you just got to do the same. I got a lot of people that ask me the Thai flies, how much do I sell them for? And I don't sell flies for that. So you don't make any jingle off fly tying? No, I don't sell anything, make any money off of it. I just do it basically i enjoy it you know so

you don't you don't make like you don't just sell where i could just buy this as a person that collected flies no now there are times where i will put together like a shadow box or something like that or tie like two or three dozen flies for silent auctions and charities and then because i don't sell flies then those those shadow boxes those flies that are meant for fishing and whatnot they go for an astronomical amount that helps those organizations out so maybe one the two times a year I'll offer flies for sale to help out cause like I did one here for Warriors and Quiet Waters Foundation several years ago and then they they paired it up with you know nine and all

nine rounds of golf with Jordan Spieth and so they pair they do that with alumni where we'll some guides will take other people on a trip i i donated flies and then i do some for uh healing waters like i still stay active with them and then donate flies for uh the fly fishing film tour in indianapolis and they have a silent auction there. And generally one of those shadow boxes go for as much as like $500, $600 because people want some of these flies and I don't have them for sale. So you just live off your army money. Not totally.

I mean, I would be lying if I said that because like on Facebook and on TikTok for videos, I get paid for some of the views. Oh, I see. Okay. Yeah.

So there's some secondary income that comes off of that. I mean, it's not, you can make a living off of it per se, because I don't have like the millions of followers on YouTube or whatever, but it, it's enough to, to pay for a fishing trip here and there. So now that you're retiring from, now that

you're retiring from the army, what's your plan? Well, uh, a lot of it's going to be boiled down So now that you're retiring from the Army, what's your plan? Well, a lot of it's going to be boiled down to what my wife wants to do because for 22 years, she, well, her and the kids have followed me around the country. And then pretty much had really no say in the matter other than where we're going to live once we got there. So they're going to play a big part of it. I know they're more tempted to go back up to the Northeast to be close to the family because my mom's starting to get up there in years. My sister, my brother lives there. But there are some opportunities.

I do want to get into the outdoor industry. I cannot go back into the engineering world anymore. There's no way I could sit in a freaking cubicle for eight hours a day after spending the last 20 years in the military so there are some offers that i've had for most of it's for guides uh some of the working fly shops for services stuff like that i mean there's one offer here in montana working with healing waters lodge uh basically mike gary offered me to be one of the guides on his expeditions through the Smith River. He gets a large portion of the permits that go through there. And so he's always looking for vets to hire and other ones to help a buddy that runs a

guide business in Wyoming up there in the Northwest and the Tetons doing some of those cutthroat type trips. So right now it's still very fresh because the decision was you know finally made uh that we're going to retire next year and so uh at this point right now i'm just trying to figure out all the different options before i finally decide on which one i want to do retirement make you nervous it does because after doing it's almost like prison, the military. You've had a structured lifestyle for 20 years and now suddenly all that's going to go away and you're going into that civilian force and you're on your own. So yeah, anybody that says otherwise that wasn't the service, they're lying.

All my buddies say it's hard. It's hard. I mean, for years, right, after. So yeah, I mean, it's a challenge, right? The other challenge is basically because I've always been in charge of large groups of people for so long now that everybody had to listen to, you know, orders that I gave. And going to the civilian workforce, it ain't going to be like that. I might have to work for an idiot that is no better than somebody that should be sitting by a dumpster somewhere, but...

Yeah, Bill, you should be licking my boots, buddy. And I might end up being a subordinate to them and have to bite my tongue. So those are things that, you know, I am concerned about because somebody didn't like something or I didn't like the way somebody's doing something, I'd give them an earful

and then they would fix their shit. and that's how the military works that's where the discipline comes in and I realize I'm not an idiot and I realize you can't do that in the civilian workforce but that does scare the shit out of me too having to work for people potentially that have no business being in charge of others. I got a friend. I tell this story all the time. I don't know if I've ever mentioned it on the show here, but I have a friend who retired from the Army, and then one of his teammates retired from the Army, and right away his teammate killed himself.

And I texted him. I said, we were texting about this, and I'll always remember the text. It was kind of one of the most compelling sentences I've ever received in a text message is I said, I don't understand, like, what is that? Why does that happen like that? And his reply was, it was the wild west during those war years. And then it's over in an instant. And that was all that's in his mind sufficed as an explanation.

It's a really difficult subject to talk about because it's such a huge problem with veterans. I mean, there's all sorts of different stats. I'm not going to bore anybody with these different stats. But on average, you know, you have veterans that are over 50% likelier than their civilian counterparts that ever served to commit suicide. And the early parts of the war, he's very correct. They threw you into the wild, wild west. You come back and there was no support system. For example, my first deployment,

we were the theater QRF in Iraq. They had no, basically, area of operations assigned for us specifically. So every time there was a major engagement going on somewhere or things were about to flare up, they would move my entire battalion to that engagement, not realizing that all these different engagements, firefights that we were getting to would have a toll. And so those were things that people never thought about back then. Like my battalion there probably got into more campaigns

than any other unit there in the history of the Iraq war because we were just like the theater crew for everything, bouncing around. We didn't stay anywhere for longer than 35 days. And so you have a bunch of young men and women that, you know, some of them 17 years old, 18 years old. And they're seeing firefights and deaths for the first time. IEDs going off the whole nine yards, local civilians getting blown up, all sorts of shit. And, uh, so we did that for 14 months. If things weren't bad

enough, they had initially told the unit we were going to be home by Christmas because it was going to be 12 months at that mark. Which is kind of a big deal for people. Yeah. It was something to look forward to. So we were all looking forward to it. We're going to be home by Christmas. We're telling our loved ones, et cetera. And then the first elections happened in Iraq in 2005 and they extended us for an additional

couple, three months. And they moved us to another area up there in Mosul to help oversee the security for these first elections. So Christmas went out the window and we ended up being there for 14 months before the 15 month deployments were even a thing. They were extending unit. There was like a unit up in Alaska that were on

their way home and got rerouted back. Yeah. So they had family members that were waiting at the airport. Talk about some phone calls, man. Oh yeah. I mean. Holy shit.

There was zero shits given about the repercussions of some of these actions because the war had to be fought. As soldiers, you know, it sucked, but we did what we were told.

So we went through all that. We get back and you basically start taking 30 days of leave right away. Now, the military is like a mountain pod of all different cultures, upbringings, backgrounds, and whatnot.

You have some kids that never had a friend in their life. And now suddenly they're surrounded by people that are watching their six all the time. And they have a support system there. They're going through all this crap, getting into these engagements, getting into these firefights, seeing all sorts of

stuff but they had buddies there that were dealing with the same stuff and that's why it makes the military is very unique the only other agencies that are very similar that is like some of the the uh hrts uh swat because they go through a lot of crap too. And so any organization that goes through a lot of heartache and a lot of suck fest, in essence, the people get closer because you're enduring that same pain and all the horrible things that go with it. And so that's why the infantry is very unique, like special forces community and all the branches,

whether it's the SEALs, the Air Force, whatever. It's a very close-knit group because all the branches, whether it's the SEALs, the Air Force, whatever. It's a very close-knit group because all the things that you're dealing with, somebody else is dealing with too. So you have these young kids that had fellow buddies that were dealing with all that,

so they never felt like they were alone. We get back from these deployments and then everybody's scattered to the four winds. And now suddenly you have these kids that never had a friend in their life until they joined the military are by themselves for 30 freaking days after just going through all that crap overseas. And then those, those demons start coming and they start getting those nightmares.

They start hitting the bottle. They start taking drugs and there's, there's a major problem with basically, uh, suicide because the initial part of it was the PTSD from combat soldiers. Nowadays, the vast majority of soldiers that are committing suicide and activity have never been deployed. Veterans that have gotten out, some deployed, some don't, the vast majority have, they have PTSD or from deployments. But there was never really a good support system in place for that entire global war of terror

on how to deal with soldiers, come back from wars. We didn't learn a damn thing from the Vietnam War because those Vietnam vets came back with the same shit. They were dealing with the same issues. Soldiers from World War I, World War II. So you're talking about the entire history of America's wars, and we didn't learn a thing. Basically, soldiers were just, once you were done with you

and they spit you out, you're off on your own. And society didn't really know how to deal with soldiers and having all these different issues and demons. And for the soldiers, when we have a tendency to do something, we don't have to hazard. We just go full bore. There's no difference with suicide. There's a difference between crying out for help and if you actually want to commit suicide, soldiers will do it. And a lot of times there are some that have warning signs that you can tell there's something wrong.

And then just be a buddy and ask direct. Are you going to hurt yourself is some is everything okay just be direct but there are other ones that will hide all those demons and have no idea that you have no idea that they're contemplating suicide in the side that brings because they would put on that facade and um i ran across that multiple times my last unit over in colorado we had five suicides in our battalion alone in one year. And none of those kids deployed. What's the battalion size?

Battalion size was roughly about 900. Five suicides. In one year. I think it was close to 11 in three years. And most of these kids were 19 and 25. Never deployed. So there's trauma that soldiers that deployed have, and there's also trauma that soldiers never deployed have because the lifestyle sometimes is enough

for soldiers to push them one way or another. And a lot of vast majority, and I think this also applies probably to all civilians too, where you start mixing alcohol, drugs, financial, marital issues. Those are usually the big ones right there that will push people towards suicide. And you combine those things together and you're talking about a recipe for disaster. And unfortunately, the stigma with seeking help is still strong and prevalent to this day. For the longest time for my vast majority of my military career, if you told somebody you had to go see a behavioral health specialist for some mental health stuff, you were labeled and then you were basically like an

outcast. And then the military eventually realized that was wrong. And then they start encouraging people to go seek help to deal with all these issues without having any repercussions. But for a while there, there were repercussions if you sought medical assistance for mental health. But even though people say, no, nobody's going to judge you for that, there's still that strong stigma and people are afraid of being labeled or having that stigma. And I think it's military and civilian side. But I'm telling you, it's like, no matter how bad it is, it's never that bad where your life is not that important. And there's a lot of different agencies out there that can help you.

The most important ones, like I said, are the ones that are available 24 hours a day, regardless of where you're at. And you can talk to them and nobody will know. 988 is a really good one. Say that one again. 988. You can text, call, or chat, and it's completely anonymous. And they're available. 988.

Yeah. Short corn will publish. I mean, it's like 911, but different. Just text 988. Yep. And then. Can you explain a little bit about that one? And I'll put a list of organizations and resources in the show notes. But if we can

verbalize some of that on air, it'd be helpful. They're available to military and civilians. It's to everybody. And if you ever are feeling down and you think that you may possibly hurt yourself, you could text, call, or chat with somebody, and then they will get you professional help at no cost to you. And it's available 24 hours a day. The other one, Stop Soldier Suicide, they have the 1-800 number. That's also 24 hours a day where you get professional help for active duty, military, regardless of branch. And then those that are transitioning within are 365, basically one year from the time of your separation and under. You could also utilize militaryonesource.com. I know a lot of my fellow brothers and sisters don't like that stigma of seeking behavioral health.

So if you go to militaryonesource.com, you will get five counseling sessions with a professional that's completely anonymous that never gets reported to your chain of command. So that way you can get that help. Uh, but there, the VA also has a hotline that you can call. There's, there's multiple agencies like, uh, Corinne said she'll, she'll publish a list, but your life is important because the minute you're gone, you leave a void in somebody's life. I mean, it's a difficult subject to talk about, but it's, it's a reality. And then the problem is there's a lot of leaders that don't know how to deal with it. So they either brush it off, turn a blind eye to it. And then leaders also fail to change with the times. So like this current generation, like I label,

I know people hate label, but I call them the me generation because everything's instantaneous with the push of a button. You want something tomorrow, Amazon one day delivery. Within two days, you're gonna have something else everything is instantaneous at the touch of the phone so social media and smartphones are have been great to the network and reach out to others but also it's been a curse because you could hide behind being an anonymous person behind that and show a different facade and then uh the

same deal with when you start suffering it through all these mental pains or life issues you're dealing with, just like ordering something instantaneously, you just not deal with it instantaneously. And it needs to stop. And the only way it can stop is to educate people that it's okay to have issues and to seek out that help. Because everybody, regardless of what we may joke about, has an important role to play because there's people that care about and that's military and civilians alike well man i appreciate the you being so open about it it's it's tough and there's some things you know i'll be blunt i don't like talking about it because it brings back bad memories it brings back uh people that i've cared about

but i feel it's important because there's so many people that are taking away their lives way too soon not realizing there's more to come um i've gone through my fair share of heartache too and try to utilize different means to drown out that pain and i still get nightmares nowadays but at the same time you have to find um basically an outlet like a a useful outlet i don't know what the right word is but something constructive and for me it was fly fishing uh for me it's being outdoors whether it's taking photographs, because I love photography also, or hiking or whatever the case may be. And then my kids are another big part of that. For you, it might be something else, but you have to find something that is constructive

means if you're so focused, because for so long I was focused on just military, military, military, combat, combat, combat. And then I was destroying my own self if you go down that route that that route then you're you're going to be in a dark place so regardless of whether you're in your service for the first year or you're in your 15th 20th year service find a constructive outlet because you have to do something that will take your mind off of all the crap that you deal with on a day-to-day basis. And if you're not in the service, same deal. It's no different. It's anybody out there, you can have some type of constructive hobby.

That's why hunting and fishing is so great for that. And there are organizations like Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, Armed Forces Initiative, others that are in the outdoor industry that, uh, are vet support. I know that you, um, work with, uh, Warriors and Quiet Waters a lot too. So feel free to share about that. Yeah. So, um, I came here, gosh, it was like, I think 2017 or 2018. And the program was a little bit different then they brought, I think it was six of us veterans. There were three Navy SEALs guys, two other guys that were out of the service altogether because of injuries they had sustained. And then you had volunteers.

Some were prior militaries. Some had kids that were in the military. My buddy that was partnering with me was a Gold Star family member where he had a son that died in combat but to honor his son he wanted to give back still so he was a volunteer there over the quiet waters ranch and they brought us in together and then they um they basically immersed us into fishing teaching us how to fish and then it's just like most most veterans like the first day nobody's really talking because you don't know who's who day two they start chatting a little

bit and by day three they're talking to their buddies the volunteers and then by day four Like the first day, nobody's really talking because you don't know who's who. Day two, they start chatting a little bit. And by day three, they're talking to their buddies, the volunteers. And then by day four, everybody's hugging and laughing. By day five, people are sharing their experiences. And it gets to be pretty emotional because you think that you're going through some shit and you hear some of these stories of what people are dealing with. Like the one guy there that was at that ranch during my first encounter with Quiet Waters, he had his entire insides like blown out backwards.

And he was in pain all the time. The scars that he had there because like missing parts of his intestines and whatnot. Sal, he was a vet that lost both legs from California. He came back here and now he's one of the program leads that are over there at Quiet Waters Ranch. They do a lot for veterans, and they immerse them here in Montana and show them that there's ways to heal through the outdoors. But the great thing about those organizations like Quiet Waters is, like, when you're done with the program, you're not done. They don't just, like, check you off.

Like, I still stay in contact with Jesse, who I met, you know, 2008. I'm going fishing with him tomorrow. And you're part of that outreach or that reach, their outreach to you is all year long. And you're, just because you went through there, you're not forgotten. You're always going to be alumni.

And I've came back again a couple of years later. It was last year. I floated the Smith River with them and then coincide in this podcast here to go to Warrior Taste Fest this Friday to reconnect with a lot of the members there, the volunteers. And there's 16 alumni that are coming back. So they're one of the great organizations out there. There's a lot of them. We don't have time to show the mention of all these different veterans organizations, but there's a lot of organizations out there that will help.

And regardless of your level of expertise, you can have no idea what you're doing and they'll teach you everything you need to know. And the same deal with, if you don't have any interest in fishing, there's hunt for a purpose. They'll teach you how to hunt. They'll teach you how to fire a rifle. They'll teach you how to use a bow.

Warriors for Quiet Waters, I went and gave a talk there because they're doing some stuff on hunting right now. Yeah. They have like basically, I think it's a six month hunting program. Yep.

Where you, they teach you the fundamentals of hunting from, you know, selecting equipment to all the way to the end result to stalking and firing that bow. A lot of those guys probably know their way around a rifle pretty well already though, huh? Oh yeah. Yeah.

Let me hit you with one last question. 22, you've been married 22 years? No, no, I've been married 18 years. 18 years. Yep. I met her after being in service for about four years. Hit us with some marriage, hit me with your best marriage advice.

You're never the boss. That's the God honest truth. This goes out to men and women? Men and women, but mainly to the men because most of the men think they wear the family, uh, the pants in the family.

Um, how I kept my marriage together compared to most other soldiers is every time I deploy, I came back like a different person. And then while I'm gone, despite my, what you may think, life goes on.

There's still bills that have to be paid. There's still kids that need to goes on. There's still bills that have to be paid. There's still kids that need to be fed. There's still diapers that got to be changed. And your significant other is the one that's doing all that while you're going out there fighting for your country. So when you come back and you try to basically take over all those same responsibilities again, you're about to get into a boxing match because they also changed. They got used to you being on, They got used to handling all that shit that you used to do. So you have to ease yourself back into it.

Yeah. Can't come in pissing on your post. Nope. And that's how, like, that was the success to my marriage is coming back and then allowing her to still do whatever she wanted to do while I was gone.

And then if she wanted me to take over something, she would vocalize it. I never pretended like I was in charge. I knew after my first deployment there, I was gone. And then if she wanted me to take over something, she would vocalize it. I never pretended like I was in charge. I knew after my first deployment there, I was no longer in charge because she was strong enough to handle an entire household with kids while I was gone. Um, cause I travel a lot for work and have the

whole time I've, you know, known my wife, uh, she, a while ago came up with a thing where she said, if it's not going to be a big deal when you leave, it's not going to be a big deal when you come home. There's a lot to that. I also had one thing before we end it. With fly fishing, regardless of your level of expertise when it comes to it there's uh these shows that float around all over the u.s if you ever want to dip your fingers into it just check

what it's like to see some tying or see people demonstrate casting there uh the fly fishing show has shows all across u.s from california all the way massachusetts down to georgia and during my first exposure with this show, I met a lot of really, really great people all across the industry. I met several people from Montana, California, all over. Like you get tires that come over from Europe that come there and these different authors. And then one of the great organizations

that I met while over there is Uncharted Outdoors Women. They're based out of Colorado and they're also trying to break the stigma of having women in the outdoor industry where there's a, they, they take it upon themselves to take women fly fishing, taking them on hunts, whether it's duck, geese, uh, animal calls. So, uh, my friend, Aaron spearheads all that. And she basically, uh, takes, takes the role of like the lead for Colorado, Montana, Oregon, Wyoming. She just does all this stuff here to get more women out there.

So there's a huge stigma that this is a male-dominated industry. It is so far from the truth. Yeah, you have some idiots out there that may say that, but we welcome all genders, regardless of whether you're male or female. Pick up a bow, pick up a rifle, pick up a fly rod. You're welcome in this industry. And I just had to give that shout out to Aaron and them. Thanks, man.

Good luck fishing tomorrow. Hopefully. It should be a good time of year with a hopper season here in September. This is like literally probably the best month to fish here in Montana. Got some cooler taps. Yeah.

And then, so here's a little unknown fact, useless fact that I'm really good at, is these hoppers, grasshoppers, crickets or whatever, they have a parasite called a horsehair worm that they ingest when they eat grass. Okay. You're throwing a hot tip at us right now. Hot tip is coming back. into this parasite inside the grasshopper, the crickets or whatever. And then when it's time for those parasites to breed, they take over those hoppers' brains

and they make them jump into the water and commit kamikaze suicide so that they can basically expel themselves out of the hopper and then find a mate, lay eggs in the grass

and the cycle starts all over again because when the water level drops, grasshoppers eat the grass, they get infected again. So that's why grasshoppers jump in the water at this time of year and dry dropper rigs i thought it was all accident i thought he meant to land somewhere else but landed in the water they all land in the water for that reason because those horsehair

worms need the water in order to find a meat so that's why september and early my kids must be infected with that parasite. They're always laying in the water, no matter what they're doing. All right, man. Thanks for coming on, man. It's been a great conversation. I really appreciate it. And I appreciate all the, I don't want to call it advice, but the guidance for people who might be in a bad state of affairs, but fear that stigma or fear reaching out.

So I think it's great for you to speak to it from that position of having been there. So thank you. Yeah, if I'd reach one vet that's listening to this podcast or watching YouTube, then I don't care how much it hurts to talk, it was worth it. All right, thank you. Thank you. Oh, ride on Ride on, let it fly on I wanna see your gray hair

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