The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 590: A Hot Summer of Fishing at the Shack

Episode Date: August 26, 2024

Steven Rinella talks with Danny Rinella, Jamie Fitzgerald, Andrew Radzialowski, and Seth Morris.  Topics discussed: Roommates; augering a hole through the butter; the first halibut Danny Rinella ever caught; making mac and cheese for hundreds of people; stocking super salmon; never forgiving your small town outdoor columnist for blowing up your fishing spot; the leader dog that kept destroying tomatoes; rotten tuna behind drywall; MeatEater Radio Live! Is live; fishing like Communists; how the cod disappeared for a decade; why Seth’s glad his A-frame was hit by a tree; how halibut can sit frozen for a few years and it’ll make no difference on the eating experience; octopus abundance after the sea star die off; my halibut substitute teacher; finding geocaches; not dating the meat you put in the freezer; scraping the slime off; the year of the cod; and more. Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt. The Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light.

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-L-I-T-E dot com. apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at FirstLight.com. F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. Before we get to the show, I've got to tell you about a special event. We're going to be hosting Meat Eater and First Light are going out on the road in physical form and doing the Meat Eater Tailgate Tour, which includes a stop in my home state of Michigan.

Good Lord! Yeah, we got four stops. September 7th, we'll be at Ann Arbor, Michigan. September 28th, we will be in Austin, Texas. October 19th, at Tuscaloosa. And then we will be at State College, Pennsylvania, November 2nd. Tell them who they're going to see there, Randall. So the first stop on the tour,

we'll be there for the Texas at Michigan game. Then we'll be, and Spencer and I will be at that game. And then we'll do Mississippi State at Texas. And we might have guys from the element. We might have Danielle Pruitt. Then we'll be doing Alabama at Tennessee with good old boys, Clay Newcomb and Brent Reeves. And then Ohio State at Penn State, Giannis Patelis will be there.

Ryan Callahan will be there. If we do one of these at a power slapping tournament, I want to be able to go. Not enough brain. Do they tailgate before power slapping? Probably harder than any other sport. Think about following that sport. I'm not entirely familiar

with the fan culture there, but I imagine it's a strange crowd. So there you have it. The Meat Eater Tailgate Tour. Meat Eater in first light going out on the road. Check the dates. How do they find info? TheMeatEater.com We're going to have some banner ads up there.

We'll make it real easy for you to figure out where we're going to be and when. We'll have good food, good time, and good football games. Yeah, when you see Randall come up and say, hey, I got a trivia thing that'll stump you, try that on him. And we'll be showcasing First Light's

whitetail gear and some of the hardest-hunting whitetail states in the country. Alright, man. showcasing First Light's whitetail gear and some of the hardest hunting whitetail states in the country. All right, man. All right, joined today by... I don't want anyone to take offense by this. Not you guys. Other people will be offended.

This is the greatest collection of my favorite people to ever be on the show. The highest aggregation of my favorite people to ever be here. It's high on it. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Pressure's on now.

Yeah. Keep that status. I'm going to run around how. So we're at our fish shack in Alaska. Jamie Fitzgerald is here. Jamie, I'm going to talk about how So we're at our fish shack in Alaska Jamie Fitzgerald is here I'm going to talk about how I know you guys Yep When in 1990

Lean back a little bit Seth So people can see Fitz there In 1990 Trying to think I did two years at community college I did a semester at lake state and i think it would have been winter of 95 somewhere around there yeah winter 95 i moved down to grand rapids michigan bounced around a little bit and then landed in a house with you two and some other people uh it was a it was such a house that

turnover was so high there that none of the people that lived there i remember someone realizing that no one that lived there was on the lease like other people other forgotten individuals had signed the lease and it was, or maybe Schmitty was on the lease. Schmitty was on the lease, but he was in Washington at that point by the time you got here. And that's how I met Fitzgerald and Andrew Radulowski, Jamie Fitzgerald,

Andrew Radulowski. How many years ago was that? I'd be, I was thinking about this almost 30 years. Yeah. Coming up on 30. One of my favorite sentences. Have I told you this sentence?

Probably the best sentence I ever heard was said in that house. Our other roommate who's not with us, Mark Schmidt, was from Sheboygan, Wisconsin. And he really liked Sheboygan, Wisconsin. And he really liked Sheboygan brats. Okay. He would periodically from his mother get a box of brats. Big box. Andy would boil those brats in, I think, beer. Beer, onions, and butter.

Butter. Okay. He'd boil these brats in beer, onions, and butter. Okay. All these brats and beer, onions, and butter. He was in culinary arts school. That's 101. That was the first week. He was in culinary arts school. So he knew this trick.

Okay. And the leftovers, I'm leading up to where the sentence came from. The leftovers would go into the fridge and the butter would solidify on the roof. On the top, you'd get like a half inch of butter, form a rock hard layer. And under that would be beer and brats. Hold that in mind. Okay. and under that would be beer and brats hold that in mind okay we were talking about those are in the fridge and we're talking about we're having a conversation about ice fishing in the middle of the night and andy then says my favorite sentence i've ever heard in reference to the in the pot and the fridge he says

if you want to talk about late night ice fishing why don't you go auger a hole through that butter and pull out one of them and we did oh that's great trophy brats yeah that was my best sentence ever seth's always on the show you know him yep my brother danny's on the show and to set the scene here um what year was it that what year was it that we bought this place? 06 and then explain to people how you

explain to people how you came out to the island yeah I was working for the University of Alaska at the time and we were starting a new project in southeast where we were starting a new project in southeast where we were doing some water quality mining or do water quality monitoring um mostly related to like timber harvest and mining and that sort of thing and we had a few meetings in different villages just letting people know what we were all about, what we were doing down here.

And when we went to Kassan, the village kind of threw a little get-together and invited folks to come meet us, and Ron Layton showed up with a bunch of shrimp. He's been on the show. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he was very interested in what we were working on and wanted to get involved and help out. So he invited us to come base out of his house here in South Recove for a while while we were doing some of the work and offered to motor us around in his boat. And you guys were going into streams sampling invertebrates.

Yeah, yep, yep. It was some water quality measurements, some stream habitat measurements, some invertebrate sampling. Yeah, we worked on it. Dan Bogan and I worked on that project for a number of years all over. We traveled all over southeast Alaska. It was a pretty neat project, taking the ferry around and chartering airplanes and really got to see the lay of the land quite a bit and

um the first year ron ron invited us down for the first year of the project and then i didn't this is before i really knew him um we got in some argument over the phone and i'm not used to getting in arguments with like grown men you know i can't even remember what we were arguing about and things got real testy and like he hung up the phone on me and i didn't really know what to make of it and we just didn't go you know we didn't come to the cove that first year i think that was probably like 2003 or 2002 because of the argument yeah i never heard the story oh yeah i just like wow that's not gonna work out you know like that guy is fucking crazy and you didn't at the time realize that he was just crazy yeah exactly exactly so when he calls me up like the next year in the springtime hey

you guys you guys coming down this year like nothing had happened no like okay let's try it again you know and um yeah we showed up and um he did everything he said he was gonna do and hung out with him and joan just i mean absolutely delightful people he took us all over the places we needed to go and then the evenings we were running shrimp pots and fishing halibut and um i never even caught a halibut before. Yeah, we'd anchored it outside the cove, and the first halibut I ever caught was with Ron. Oh, actually, no, the first halibut I ever caught was that time you came, Steve, which was maybe two years later.

That must have been like 2004 or 2005. Yep. Yeah, and Ron anchored up and caught me into a 170-pound halibut. That was the first one I ever caught. To this day, that's the biggest halibut I've seen come up on a rod and reel. Okay. Here.

Yeah. So, yeah, we based out of here for work for a couple years, and then Ron just kept inviting me back to fish and run pots, you know, for a week at a time every summer. And him and Joan would say, oh, come for two weeks next year, you know. And, well, you came down with me that one year, Steve. And then after just staying at Ron and Joan's for a couple years just fishing, you know, after that project was over, at one point he called and said, hey, that Jack's for sale next door.

You guys should think about buying it. So, yeah, the rest is history. And Matt Drolls, we've known each other for a million years. So we went to the same junior high and high school. Matt and I met in sixth grade camp. Yeah. That was at Pendulum?

Camp Pendulum, yeah. I think we shared the bunk beds okay yeah yeah it's because they put you at random people because you want different elementaries i went to that camp and we just got paired up and that's that's the first time yeah dan and i met that would have been sixth grade well a year later he was working there yeah yeah such a memorable experience where i made it relive it uh yeah so we grew up together in west michigan and um man i mean in addition to all the normal stuff every high school kids do like shooting bottle rockets at each other going out whooping it up and hanging out with friends. We did a ton of very generalist outdoor pursuits.

Everything. Yeah, if you had to make a list of all the things that we did, it'd be endless. I mean, we were riding around squirrel hunting and on up to squid jigging in Seattle. We kind of ran the gamut. Yep dipping smell dipping yeah fishing the channel walls for smallmouth stream fish and trout taking our prom dates to go smell dipping bust and brush set out for dinner bust and brush for uh cottontail rabbits yeah yeah hunting morels a little bit later um tons of bluegill fishing northern pike fishing

through the ice whitefish spearing through the ice oh yeah a whitefish fishing at the power plant river steelhead fishing yeah sure i could go on yeah a deep deep long list of activities and then you've been coming here for how long uh i came i might have been here the first or second year was the first time i was here and then it was a then i'm here for my bachelor party i think so yeah yeah yeah yeah and then uh a couple times there but i've been coming back here consistently since 2016 no yeah and fitzgerald you said the other day you've been here how many times i think this is my 15th time here. Is it 14th or 15th?

Fitz said the other day he's been to Alaska 15 times, but he's only been here. Never been anywhere else in Alaska. What else is there? And then, yeah, Andy, you were introduced by way of your bratwurst recipe. Yeah. So I was going, Fitz and I were introduced by way of your bratwurst recipe. Yeah. So I was going, Fitz and I were going to this regular Joe Blow College, and you were in culinary arts at the time. But I did a couple years at Grand Valley as well.

Oh, you did some regular college too. Yep. Yep. Yep. And then right at that whole junction when you moved in, that was when I transferred over to the culinary program downtown. And yeah, that house was quite the scene. Oh, it was the scene.

And you were making, when you took pastry class, I think it was you and pastry one or pastry two, and so you'd bring all the pastries home? Oh, you might be thinking of Mark was working at a bakery slash deli that he would bring a bunch of stuff. Oh, is that what that was? Oh yeah.

Yeah. There was always a fridge full of food for a bunch of broke college kids. We, we were doing, doing our, but I remember coming home from class and there'd be a couple of big old salmon from the river in the, or was it steelhead? Steelhead. Steelhead. couple big old salmon from the river in the or was it steelhead steelhead uh tell tell people about your what you went on to do for your career which is interesting you landed out in the san

juan islands eventually uh yeah after we left michigan kind of filtered my way out to the west coast and out to small island uh st. juan island out in northwest washington north of seattle there and kind of kicked around worked for the parks for a few years which was a pretty fun job uh but you're a lighthouse keeper yep but then uh for the last 16 years i've been working for the school district uh on the island which is a small small been working for the school district on the island, which is a small community. I mean, the whole district, K-12, is under 1,000 kids all the way through. But yeah, I built a food program there, kind of from the ground up.

And it's kind of progressive. Everything's from scratch. I source as much local practice as i can and then kind of go out from there you know i've got great people working for me and find really cool grants to bring in a lot of fresh produce from washington and oregon and surrounding areas um and when you came in they were going to scrap their lunch program. Yep. It was, it was failing because they were just doing the standard garbage, you know, food and just didn't have the participation to, to make it sustainable. So somebody got a hold, somebody got a hold of a little bit of grant money and my name got thrown in the ring. I had no idea.

I mean, I'd never set foot in the school before. And that first year was a lot of trial and error and i put a lot of hours in but i kind of got got the ship righted and kind of stuck with it and um yeah built pretty successful program over the years and how many kids you guys feed every day uh between breakfast and lunch about 500 500 plus so he was andy was explaining to my kids this morning when you guys do pizza well kids help cook yeah so i have five classes was so i the way we set it up that and that's another unique piece of the program that we have is the fact that i have like a work-based learning internship and that was kind of the early years there was very few electives in in the district there was you know the standard art and this and that and um we just had some kids that just had no place you know to land they

weren't doing very good in the classroom and some of the counselors kind of approached me and they said hey i've got these kids a couple of them that are just lost i said send them my way you know and i put knives in their hands yeah great idea here's a real sharp knife kid and it kind of took and from that we we introduced a an actual class and so i've got five classes full of kids that it's it's set up as a work-based learning internship so they get credit for basically coming in and and work it's like i treat it like they've left the building come into a job so each class kind of knows its role and through the course of the morning each class kind of has a different role but they know they come in they set up the station with

cutting board and knife and there's a big touch screen board that they hit the list every morning i read a fresh list every morning and they start knocking things down and they're yeah slicing dicing they're cleaning they're doing all kind of stuff whatever i come in and they just they come and i just start barking at them and so it's and like prepare the lunch yeah they help They help. They, yeah, they help. Do you make them call you chef? Oh yeah. Yeah. They call me chef for sure.

And when you guys do pizza day, you guys are making dough from scratch and rolling out pizza crust. Oh yeah. For 500, hundreds of people. Yeah. And when you guys make Mac and cheese, tell me the, give people the, just to get a sense, tell people how you make mac and cheese. Well,

I make the sauce from scratch. So that's about anywhere between 12 to 15 pounds of butter, 12 to 15 pounds of flour, about 15 gallons of milk, and then about 30 to 35 pounds of dried pasta, 30, 40 pounds of shredded cheese, but everything,

I mean, that's it. And that's all that's it make mac and cheese yeah this is the coolest thing in the world man it's a lot and with a lot of these kids it's not um a lot of them aren't necessarily going into the hospitality industry but it's a lot of kids i only deal with high school kids but for some of the younger ones ninth tenth grade they've never had a job before they don't know you know any kind of structure as far as the workforce goes so it's kind of their first taste of this is what it means to have a job and this is what it means to have people rely on

you every day because when they don't show up then i've got to do double the work or the other students in the class have to do so i i treat it as you know you're on your way to the workforce this is what it means no matter if you're in hospital or if you're in accounting or if you're whatever you decide to go do this is what it means to be accountable and have a job and you know get your head together and have you had some have you had some kids going to culinary arts oh yeah definitely i definitely. I've sold, said kids all over the place. The Art Institute in Seattle has a great program. I've sent quite a few kids down there.

I've sent one kid, my, actually the original kid that started the whole program because he was just a wreck. He ended up going all the way over to the New England Culinary Institute, NECI, yeah. Seriously? Yep. That's cool. And then went down and did an internship down in New Orleans and came back and started a family on the island, the whole work.

Yeah. This is one of my success stories for old Rowan. Yeah. That's cool. That's awesome. Yeah. Well, I passed up Matt. Matt, you teach high school?

Yeah. Andy and I have shared a lot of stories about this kind of stuff. And yeah, I can't, you know, not to make this an education podcast, but yeah, it's just amazing if you can get them in that right situation. Because I've had the same, not as pronounced as that, but, you know, running a greenhouse and a garden and an aquaponics facility and getting kids those jobs. And just seeing kids that are kind of lost in what would be traditional and finding something new for them to do is, is yeah, it's unbelievably rewarding and it's, it's cool to see it happen. And it transfers over. I've had so many kids that just didn't want to be at school and then all of

a sudden they want to come to be in, in the kitchen and then they're there for the day and the, you know, teachers come out and what are you doing down there? Because all of a sudden, you know, so-and-so's here every day and they're, they're actually kind of participating.

So it's, yeah, it transfers down the line. I've had kids excited about about stuff you say you're kind of a wreck being in the back of the classroom just eating raw lettuce thinking this is the best lettuce i've ever had as you grew it yeah you know uh we've plugged it a couple times to tell people about your business your side hustle oh side of the summertime side hustle is a mobile bar in northern michigan called roman nomi the nomi is northern Hustle is a mobile bar in northern Michigan called Roman Nomi. The Nomi is northern Michigan, kind of a shortened version of that.

Yeah, my wife and I and another couple run it, and we do a mobile bar. Usually it's weddings and other events, but we've done everything from baby showers to graduation parties. But yeah, I think it was a bartending service, but we show up with this cool renovated 1969 trailer. We turn it into a speakeasy looking vibe. We meet with the client. They decide what they want. We make the order for them. We'll pick it up. Then come to their event ready to go. It's a fun side hustle. Takes care of all that. You make specialty cocktails. We meet with the client and design the cocktail they want.

Yeah, it's fun. It's a lot of fun. And you and your wife man it. Yeah, and another couple. But, yeah. But everybody's happy to see you when you show up. Everybody's happy to see the bar roll in. Nice.

Matt Dross is good at a party, too. Yeah, I found my niche. Teacher by day. Party guy by day. I got to do a couple quick things. One, I got to run one by you. We get people that write in ethics questions. Okay.

Oh, first, Danny, you're going to speak to this because you know about fisheries. There's a couple of listener emails we've got to take care of. We recently had on people from Colossal Bioscience on about cloning, the sort of technical challenges and moral challenges of cloning woolly mammoths and on that show Callahan got to uh on that episode Ryan Callahan got to talk about what is the with all the new work in genetics in genetics what might be done um about invasives and a fisheries guy wrote in talking about uh talking about this work to remove non-native brook trout in the western u.s are you familiar with

this uh i'll tell you more why why super male yeah explain that explain that in layman's terms um well uh genetics and invasives are neither of those are my uh area of expertise but the gist of it is um i think if you were trying to eliminate uh invasive birch trout population you would um somehow coax uh hatchery brood stock to produce why why so homozygous male brook trout right that then you didn't swamp the system with these yy brook trout and so every so the male determines trout. And so every, so the male determines the sex, right? So every offspring they're going to have is going to be male. And so you're just eliminating females

from the population. It's kind of how it works. But I mean, I've never been involved with that sort of work. I don't really know the details of it, but that's the gist of it. So hay spur, here's in technical terminology.

Hay Spur Fish Hatchery, just south of Haley, Idaho. The staff spawns genotypic YY chromosome males with genotypic YY chromosome females. Their offspring are 100% YY chromosome males. You then stock them. They spawn with wild female brook trout and spin off 100% males that also have that same YY.

Or YY being male, right? After several years, the entire stream population becomes male. Or XY being male too so if you have wild type females you're gonna they're gonna have xy sex chromosomes right so you're you would have some yy males and some xy males i guess okay yeah he says yeah their offspring will then be one their offspring will then be 100 male yeah because each offspring will consist of one x chromosome from the mother and one y chromosome from the stocked super male

eventually they're all males yeah the males aren't eventually giving up any x's to make xx females right so yeah does this stand a reason that you'd want to be fishing that spot would those males all get real big? Or does it matter? Oh, you're thinking of that. Right before the crash, it'd be great birch top fishing. You know what you're thinking? You're thinking, remember when the state of Michigan was stocking?

Super salmon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what you're thinking of. So, the idea there, because they only spawn once, right once right so the thinking there was that these fish are never going to spawn and die they're just going to keep growing indefinitely um but um that wouldn't apply to you know a fish that spawns over and over again like a brook trout it wouldn't interfere yeah do you remember being kids and they would have the salmon derbies? Yeah. And they would go out and tag. They'd catch one salmon and tag it.

And it was like a million dollars. It was like a million dollar fish. And just everybody's go fishing thinking they're going to catch that son of a bitch over again to get all that money. Yeah. But you didn't know where in the lake it was. Okay. Are you guys ready for the.

Oh, here's one no there's no thing to say here but we were recently celebrating small town outdoor columnist who's who was ours growing up oh i don't know oh shit because we're talking about the chronicle. Yeah, the Chronicle had an undercard. Mark something. Yeah. Our friend Pat Durkin, he's sort of the last, the dying breed of small town outdoor columnist. And the guy wrote in to have a real gripe. He's got a real bone to pick with small town outdoor columnist. Because he says that his childhood swimming and fishing spot actually got blown up by an outdoor columnist. They were in a place under a bridge. They always assumed they weren't supposed to be there.

They'd swim there and catch a lot of nice brookies. One day a guy shows up and they assume he's there to yell at him, but it turns out he's some kind of journalist. Interviews all the kids there. Takes a picture of their big stringer of brookies. Runs a piece about how cute it is that these kids have this fishing hole under said such and such bridge, and he goes back there and it's full of people.

Yeah, that's a pretty easy spot to find. And he never forgave his small town outdoor college. What state was that in? Pennsylvania. Is it? So hold on a minute uh maybe i'm wrong oh no sorry washington dc suburbs huh rural area in virginia which has been consumed sorry rural virginia which is since he was a kid has been consumed, sorry, rural Virginia, which is since he was a kid, has been overtaken by D.C. suburbs and exurbs, which is a phrase I don't think I've ever said in this show. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians

whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there on X is now in Canada. The great features that you love in on X are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right, we're always talking about OnX

here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you, you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out

if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Here's the moral one. You ready? This guy lives in a neighborhood. The neighborhood has no HOA. All right?

Even though there's no HOA, his wife is the neighborhood president. I don't know what that means. He had seven chickens. Self-appointed? I don't know. Unless means he had seven chickens self-appointed i don't know unless he wrote less when he said we live in a neighborhood with no hoa he meant to say we live in a neighborhood with an echo with an hoa because then he says my wife is actually the president that makes sense is it comrade harris is this from the future? It's Kamala Harris.

The pollsters were wrong. So he's got seven chickens. All get killed. Okay. Puts out a trail cam. It's a fox. He gets himself a humane. He's calling it a humane trap, meaning he's got a live trap. Captures the fox. He gets himself a humane, he's calling it a humane trap, meaning he's got a live trap. Captures

the fox. In his mind, the thing to do now is to kill the fox. His wife and daughter have none of it. He drives the fox five miles down the road and lets it loose against his better judgment. The neighborhood is now in uproar

because it turns out they all like that fox. He's got a couple questions. Is the thing going to turn up back here anyway? Probably. Five miles. Who's right? People that want to see a fox or people that want to have chickens?

I think it's coming right back oh it's coming you ain't gonna get it go in that trap the second time i'm surprised i'm really surprised he got to go on that trap the first time he's probably used to eating people's dog food he was surprised he bathed it with tuna fish okay you're surprised he got out of the trap yeah five miles is not that's not gonna to do it. When I worked for the parks, we had a problem fox out there that was to the point where it was getting in everything. It was, it actually even pulled a bottle out of a baby stroller. It was that aggressive.

Are you serious? Yeah. Yeah. And we captured that thing. We just threw a blanket over it and threw it in the garbage can and drove it 13 miles to the south end of the island. And that thing was back the next day. No.

Yep. Beat you guys home. Yeah. Honest to God, he was right back. I mean, because it was very distinct. He knew where it was at, you know. Oh, we used to have a dog that our dad tried to give away a few times and would always come back.

You know what we named that dog? You remember that dog's name? Kayla. Oh, that's right. Yeah. It was some word for leader. And the dog liked to play fetch. I don't know if you remember these details.

That dog liked to play fetch so much, it would get green tomatoes out of the garden. It was like a never-ending supply of balls, which my dad hated it. Well, part of the reason we wanted to get rid of it is because it ate the ripe tomatoes. Just destroyed tomatoes. Yeah. If I remember this right, he wound up bringing it. You know when your dad normally brings a dog to a farm,

that means he killed it. And that happened with other pets, I'm sure. Oh, yeah. But he brought it to a farm, literally. Oh, yeah. And if I remember right, we were eating dinner one night and all of a sudden there's that dog comes by the tomato in his mouth if i remember right

and that's something that akayla the leader had come home uh well getting back to that box that fellow can tell his neighbors not to not to worry. They haven't seen the last of that box. But he should tell his other chickens to worry. He might just want to give himself a chicken hut. But what he said he likes about, he likes having them run around because it makes him feel like he lives on a farm.

And he also mentioned that they spend a lot of time in his neighbor's yard. So this might be a bad neighbor. Nothing more farmy than a fox eating your chicken. That's true. That's true. He was baiting with tuna fish. So here's the thing the guy wrote in. This guy says, hey guys, came across your podcast.

Started at episode one and I've worked my way up to episode 294. Damn. And wherever he's at right now, we're spending a lot of time on skunk essence, covering skunk essence. He's talking about a guy. Oh, I know what we're talking about. A couple people wrote in where they've used, I was saying one day that if I really wanted to get someone,

remember we were trying, me and Seth, we were trying to harvest skunk essence from skunks. I was saying if I really wanted to get someone, I would take that syringe. We were harvesting it with a syringe. And I would just reach into their car and inject their upholstery. Oh my god. Right? You'd never find it.

You'd never find it. You'd never find the. Total the vehicle. You'd never find it. You'd never find the culprit. You'd never realize what I had done. So he's listening to this. There's a guy he knows that went through this really bad divorce. Loses the house to the wife, loses his house to his wife,

pulled out all the receptacles, electrical receptacles in the house, the junction boxes, and put open cans of tuna in the holes, and then sealed them back up. Oh, Jesus. So, all the best, Monty. I'm dying to know what happened.

Nothing more than that. Well, so. Monty should write back in with the... Yeah, follow up. Yeah, follow up on that. Someone eventually tore out the drywall and found the rotten tuna. Hmm.

I wonder if they got in trouble. I'm guessing that the court would not look fondly on that. Which leads me to, and we're going to return to our current discussion uh so media radio live is live meaning our live show is live uh every thursday around 10 in the morning on our podcast network it'll be later available on youtube but there's a live show that we're doing, co-anchored by a lot of your favorite guests.

So Randall, Cal, Brody, Spencer, me, Yanni, different group each week. And we're doing, it'll be your picture of activities in the country. So the live show is field reports from hunters, anglers, biologists, weird people, whatever. A lot of funny segments and jokes. A live show of people calling in and reporting from their area what's going on. You get a live snapshot of the oddest and funnest activities and whatnot, stories going on from around the country. It'd be like a new show me eater radio live is live all right check it out with all that said i want to talk about what

like you guys come here every year but you've been here how many years? 15. Layout for me, how you come home with some fish. We call it a cut. You get a cut. We should talk about that first. We fish like communists. It's cold. It's rainy.

It's cold. It's rainy. There's vodka on the shelf shelf we're like communists where all the activities we engage in um everything gets pooled collectivized collectivized meaning if even if you're on a work detail if you gotta work like if you got if you if let's say for some day you had to do your normal job for a day like catch up on emails or you were like fixing something that broke or you like had to go get gas you had to make the dock so it wasn't a death trap put some tar paper down whatever so people can get a grip on a wet wooden slimy dock um that doesn't pull you out and different activities could be like doing shellfish,

going for shellfish. It could be different kind of fishing things, whatever. And everything gets pulled into a freezer. And then on breakup day, everything is categorized. There's now a suitcase that holds the piece of paper. What's the suitcase say on it? Official record of catch. Yeah, official record of catch. It's now a suitcase that holds the piece of paper. Official record of catch. Official record of catch. It's in a briefcase.

And there's a tally made. And the tally would be how many ever packages of whatever. And it gets divided out. And the way we kind of do it is adult angler. We haven't rolled kids. Kids don't get their own catch.

Kids take goes into the adult angler take. The adult angler. We haven't rolled kids. Kids don't get their own catch. Kids take goes into the adult angler take. The adult angler take is called a cut. And so that's how we divide out. How do you, walk me through your, we'll just go around the table here. We're going to skip Seth because he's a newcomer to the cove. And instead of answering this question,

Seth is going to give us an update on the a-frame which has had a dramatic yeah i mean a dramatic recovery looking good in there yeah ongoing ongoing recovering right now as we speak in recovery yeah what's your what how do you what's your take like what are the things you like to make with your cut like how do you think of your cut you give it all away do you slowly eat it what do you do we usually we usually so just me and my wife we don't have any kids um so we'll usually kind of stretch it out over the year usually host a host people cook for folks but a lot of it becomes kind of just like a protein staple in our house because my wife doesn't eat meat as you know red meat red meat

she eats fish eats fish and so it just we kind of stretch it out really through the year so the moose meat i gave you she's not eating that that's your own private stash i'm working my way through that 50 pounds no and that's your own private stash yeah but the fish she's into fish she's into and uh yeah it's made me a better it's made me a better cook in the kitchen you know i mean it helps being buddies with all you guys but it's uh it's it's made me i'm more creative than i than i used to be what are some of the the staples well some of the things that i've tried to emulate out of here i've i've done some of that seafood curry have you done the codgeladas i have not yeah i have done the i've done the seafood enchilada yep um and uh and what i want this year i want to do

i want to i want to dial in my chowder game my seafood chowder game you know i haven't really i haven't really dabbled too much in that yeah we just kind of stretch it out but also like a lot of hosting i mean people people love it when you know you cook cook a bunch of halibut that you caught or a part of catching from them right there's just a certain charm in that that people just really love so that's how we do it what was your uh what's your highlight from this year uh mechanically putting together that switch i need to explain this a little bit we have a pot puller and um there's a junction box for the switch and because it's the saltwater marine environment they assemble

the wiring and then they inject that box with silicon like fill it so when you open it up you're looking into what looks like a bar of soap yep yep and contained within that bar of soap when you get all that picked out of there is the junction and then we redid it and repacked it and used silicon and worked and it worked weacked it. And used it. And it worked. And it worked. We're pulling pots yesterday. Yeah, it worked great. It worked.

Yeah, so mechanically that. And then I guess fishing, you know, getting into the Pacific cod the last couple of days. That's the hottest ocean fishing I've ever been a part of. Yeah. the hottest ocean fishing i've ever been a part of yeah i was i was going to touch on that because yesterday when danny and i were out diving around i was telling the kids the boys about how the plains a lot of the plains tribes would have a thing called the a year oh they had their own word for it a year count or something like that and it would take a buffalo hide and the band would they would mark the most notable things from any year and i think if i'm not mistaken they would do it in a concentric circle a concentric circle and when you look at these annual counts like you'll you'll see um smallpox epidemics you'll'll also see a person with spots on them.

Some of these annual accounts have you'd be like, oh, this is an early encounter with people that had firearms. Early encounter with white people. Also, just weird things. I remember one of them had a year that someone

had, if I'm not mistaken, them was like a year that someone had i found a stake and it was like a year that it seemed like a year that a bunch of buffalo got struck by lightning was like a year that's what happened that year and i was saying i wish from the start we had made one of those on a big halibut hide that would have been uh an account yep right and if i was in it like the most notable thing every year i think it'd be um finding like one year would have been finding what turned into like a dramatic shrimp spot a profound shrimp spot this year i would perhaps put the death of that shrimp spot yeah but i would probably this year really what would win out my mind this year was to be a cod a big pea cod because the year we bought this we caught a giant remember

that we didn't know what the hell we're doing one of the first things we caught was a huge probably a nine pound cod i got a picture you're all glassy eyed standing by that old, not that sink, but the previous thing holding that big ass cod and your mechanic suit. Yeah. And, um, and you'd get them and then you just didn't. they're gone.

I mean, gone for what? Eight, 10 years. It was the 2014 Marine heat wave. They just disappeared. I mean, I think there's like complete reproductive failure and presumably a lot

of the older ones died off because yeah there was what until last nine years until last year we most years we didn't catch a cod you had three boats out there fishing every day and we would catch not a cod you know and then a few not it was three springs ago, started getting dinks. I'm sure there's fish moving and all that. Sure. But this year, man, it's just like cod galore. Yeah, and they're not, they seem big compared to what we've caught the last couple of years, but they're not big cod yet. No,

but they're keep like, yeah. Keeper fish. Yeah. Yeah. But no, they're not, they're not like 10 pounders.

Yeah. They're certainly worth playing, but I mean, they get bigger. Three, four or five pounds. Yeah. Um,

gorging on, uh, krill and herring. So I think there's herring eating krill. Yeah. Did you notice all that krill when we were diving yesterday? There's clouds of it. Matt, you caught

a herring. And then later he caught a cod that regurgitated a herring. Oh, you caught a cod that regurgitated a still alive herring. But just a ton of cod. And like I was saying earlier, it's just interesting

to get such a snapshot because cod and um and like i was saying earlier it's just interesting to get like such a snapshot because we'll come and fish the the same general area at the same general time over the course of a long time and you see these things come in things come out you know and be like like shrimp were fantastic and right now shrimp just sucks right crabs have highs and lows but the cod thing has been is is the the watching the cod be here be gone be back makes the shrimp thing less depressing because you picture well the you know you like normally in psychologically i'd be like oh it's over you know but you get a sense like probably something will happen

and all of a sudden it'll be great shrimping again maybe. And with those cod we're all catching, they're various sizes. It's not like there's one growth class that's taken over. We're catching small ones on up to... Yeah, we've got them all like 10 inches up to 28 inches. Yeah, like big ones. So it would seem that this would,

barring anything happening, this would last for a while. Seth told me yesterday that he's actually glad his house got hit by a large tree yeah believe it or not best thing ever happened to me yeah no it just exposed all the problems that needed fixed and if it didn't do that we'd be kind of chipping away at that slowly forever. We were observing yesterday that Seth bought his A-frame at a very important point in time for that A-frame. Yes. You know when you see a house that's just fallen down and it's just no, like, it's beyond repair? Yeah. If you had waited a year, your A-frame would have become a non-saleable item.

Yeah, no, it'd just be... Especially when that tree fell on it. Because he bought his A-frame, and then the porch, I bring this up all the time, the porch, how high is that porch off the ground? 13 feet?

No. Yeah, maybe 11, 12 feet off the ground. Well, I was sitting there last night, and I noticed how our porch basically is level with your roof over here and that porch one day actually fell off

that was the first phone call I got from you with bad news about the place there's been several then a tree fell on it and just stoveted it in. Yeah. And if you hadn't have bought it, you'd look over there and be like, it'd just be another rotten building in Alaska.

But you bought it just in time. It was like a heart attack victim. You know what I mean? Yeah. And right when you hit them with those electrocutors, whatever you call them. Zaps back to life. That was your purchase.

Defibrillators? Your purchase defibrillated that house. Now we got him back on a good diet. He's doing alright. Brand new porch. Fix the roof. The first thing that happened after we bought the place, the porch fell off. Then we had our buddy Dustin replace pilings.

And I think that's what really saved our ass when the tree hit the place. Oh, because it would have just flattened. Because it would have just, yeah. The pilings that were under it, which there's still a bunch that need replaced, but the main ones that were bad all got replaced and they're sitting on these giant creosote pilings now. No, that's what the porch is on too. So, but yeah, so we did that and then the tree hit and then we basically rebuilt Dustin,

our buddy Dustin Olson rebuilt and, and some other guys. He had some other guys help. But, yeah. Front and back wall on the A-frame. Replaced a bunch of, well, all the joists that got smashed up when the tree hit. Fixed that. And then we had some skylights in there that were leaking. It's like, never. skylights leak in Montana. Hot and dry.

Why would you put them in a place in Southeast Alaska? But yeah, replay got those replaced. And then, yeah. Man, when I, when I went in,

when that tree fell out, you know, I was here. Yeah. I went up well for starters i was cutting through your lot you know going up deer hunting and i looked and i'm like fuck that don't look right i don't remember that there yeah why would seth put a tree in his house and i'm like i better i better look into that on the way home you know so i went out and hunted for the morning and came back oh that is that is what i was thinking

it was you know yeah i sent you that text or maybe i sent steve i can't remember he sent it to me um but i went up when i went up in there you know you had that bed up in your loft yeah because you didn't see the tree when it was there no no i got it out of there yeah yeah there's that if somebody was in that bed they would have been fine but that fucking trunk i mean it was a big hemlock right yeah big diameter that i don't know two feet in diameter that trunk it was about a foot off of that bed. Really? Yeah. Dang. I asked Seth if it would have killed him if he was in bed. He said, well, it woke me up. Oh, my God.

I can't even imagine if you were laying in that bed. Oh, God. You couldn't have sat up. Yeah. You wouldn't have been touched. You'd have to lay there until someone chainsawed it out of the way. Can you at least bring me a coffee? But, yeah, no.

My brother-in-law, Bob, who owns the place with us he's over there right now putting up siding so you know the cutest thing i think about it is that your dad likes coming up so it's kind of like brings your family all nice and oh yeah yeah my dad loves coming up here it's all he talks about every time i talk to him on the phone he's like can't wait for a while literally like just like vince this is Alaska. When he leaves here or when we leave here whatever in a few weeks or whatever, I guarantee

the next phone call he'll be like, can't wait for Alaska next year. But yeah, he loves it. But yeah, it's when we leave, by the time we leave, it's going to be a fully functional rebuilt cabin with siding and everything. Nice.

Congratulations. Thanks. Feels good. Over the years, I've said, over the years, there's been a lot of people, a lot of people that talked about maybe buying that A-frame and they would go in there and that would usually end the conversation. You were tougher than they were. Yeah. You were tougher than they were. Yeah. You were tougher.

You had more vision and tougherness. Yep. More tougherness. Yeah, it was something I didn't want to pass up. No. Danny, you eat a hugely heavy seafood diet

because you live in Alaska. You get a lot of different... This isn't your only seafood run because you guys have all kinds of salmon. Yeah, I fish a lot of salmon around home. And then, yeah, I have a few friends with boats that I get out on the ocean waters up in South Central,

you know, out of Whittier, Homer, the LDs. So it takes the pressure off. Do you remember we used to like Cheech and Chong's next movie? Yeah. And somehow his cousin shows up. One of those guys' cousin shows up. Remember those army duffel bags? Yeah. His cousin shows up with

those giant army duffel bags full of bud. Yeah. Someone asks him what he's going to do with it all. And he says he's going to smoke some, party with some, and sell some. Because we used to joke that that was. So whenever we caught a lot of fish, remember we'd say we're going to smoke some, party with some, and sell some. And the selling not so much.

Selling not at all anymore. But you definitely smoke something, party with something. I thought it was smoke something, party with something, and give something to your friends. That's what it was. That works better for us. Smoke something, party with something, and give something to your friends.

What do you do with all your fish? You guys still dip net and stuff like that then? Yeah, yeah. I'm kind of missing that right now between being down here and just field work for my job and stuff. So, yeah, I don't have a salmon plan this year. I need to figure something out when I get back home to get some salmon in the freezer

because they're pretty scarce around here at this moment. But, yeah, I already did some halibut. I already got a bunch of halibut and cod in the freezer. How do you sequence it out? Because I find that salmon you got to get. There's certain stuff I just eat or give away right away. Like a salmon, you either got to do something with it. Like in a year year it's not fun

nope nope i like to have all that gone by next spring um oh and all this cod that we're getting i mean that's got to be gone in the next i don't know six months it's about this limit on that in your freezer it's all leathery freezer yeah yeah yeah but halibut man you can let that halibut sit for a couple years and hardly tell the difference. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join.

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OnX Club, y'all. You know, I don't know if you remember this story. You and me were up here and this is when I was staying in your guest house and we were up here and we were like bringing a bunch of

halibut home and we for some reason put it into a dry bag a rubberized dry bag and I don't know what the hell we did with it brought it home all of our frozen halibut in a rubber dry bag. In a cooler or something. Back to Anchorage?

To your house. Time goes by and your gear room just is so... You can't... It's one of those... know like when you hear uh um there's certain noises like when you hear a turkey going right or when you hear a uh blue grouse doing his noise um like you know it's there but you can't tell what direction it was the smell that it was like

it was a smell that was like a turkey drumming you know it's there but you can't it's there, but you can't tell what direction. It was a smell that was like a turkey drumming. You know it's there, but it's hard to pinpoint the direction. And you just come in the house, and you'd be like, what? Yeah. My gear room was also my boiler room, so it's really warm in here. If we narrow in on it, it's something in the gear room. Yeah. And we systematically emptied out.

I don't know if you remember this. We systematically emptied out the gear room yeah and we systematically emptied out i don't know if you remember this we systematically emptied out the gear room all right yeah no couldn't figure out what had died in there we thought something died in there we didn't know what emptied out the gear room put everything back the smell gets worse the second time we do do a more thorough examination, we realized that in that rubber dry bag, when someone emptied out the rubber dry bag, they left one pack of the halibut in that rubber dry bag. That was the culprit. When you're searching the room, you just pick up a dry bag,

and it doesn't weigh anything extra. That was a nasty pack of halibut, man. Speaking of noises where you can't tell where they're coming from, we were over here fishing salmon yesterday. There's salmon jumping all over the place closer to the bank or back over there, so we slowly putt over there, shut the engine off. You can hear a bear up in the woods snapping its jaws at us

oh just like pop them you know like the sound they make when they're popping their jaws just up there popping his jaws like crazy that's cool couldn't see it but you could hear it like that distinct sound yeah because otherwise i would say in my year count blanket another option here would be the year of no bears there's a sow with two cubs that's hanging out over here. Oh, okay. Because they're not like running around trying to. No, in the spring, when we were here in the spring bear hunting, they were everywhere.

Just because they come to the cove. Yeah, you couldn't avoid them. They know it's a safe place. Yeah. No one's going to get them. There's a story I always tell about my kids, you know, flipping rocks and just playing in the intertidal zone out here. And I came out on, well, yeah,

I think we were getting a little break from the bears the last couple of years. It just seemed to be less abundant. But yeah, when they used to always be hanging around on the beach, I remember walking out on this porch and my kids were young, man, like maybe three and five or something like that. And they're out there playing in the flats and i said hey guys um just letting you know there's a bear behind you and they didn't even turn around to look at it doing what they were doing like they're just so used to it i got a

picture of one of my kids on a rope swing oh that was i took that video yeah that was video like basically rope swinging like out over and i got another one of my older boy in his underwear shooting a slingshot at one it's like up in the like up by the table there you know oh yeah matt drost just just gave me a photo that i did not know existed of me hitting a bear with a rock that was causing us some troubles yeah um all right matt so uh you're cut well give me your most memorable danny got to your most memorable thing from this year how you'll remember the year um yeah i guess that would be yeah peacod coming back um oh and that great day uh link hot fishing with with and, Joe, did you run? I was not. No, Fitz, who was in the boat with us?

Oh, Rosemary. Rosemary, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was just, the link cod bite was just on. And maybe, I don't know if the tide was moving real good and we just timed it right. Got a bunch of duskies, a bunch of silver grays. Yeah, yeah. That was some pretty intense fishing, man.

That was great. It was. One of the things you learn over the years of going to fishing the same thing all the time is you learn some general trends and rules and stuff. We've accumulated a ton of knowledge. Oh, man, yeah. But you also learn that there's just things you can't explain. You remember one time, Seth, in the spring,

we were on a particular feature over by where we set shrimp pot sometimes and drop down it's like silver grays and duskies and stuff i've been back there three times since nothing happens it's like some current thing some food thing and you'll never replicate it yeah you know and you can go out and yeah i don't know the moodiness of fish man yeah another one of those changes was you know more long term was just the disappearance of those 20 arm starfish you know every shrimp pot used to have one or two of those in it and then that blight came through and all the star sea stars died off and i mean i haven't seen one of those things in years.

And I don't know if it's a coincidence or not, but then octopus got real abundant for a while, like right after the sea stars died off. And then, you know, yeah, we had a few years where it wouldn't, I mean, most years I would say, you know, in a week of hardcore shrimping, you might get an octopus. And then there was a year where we get like one or two a day or for a few years. You remember Ron Layton, you'd pull every shrimp pot and have a bunch of those on it, in it.

And Ron Layton would make you put them all in a bucket. Yeah. So he could move them out of his area. So you're going to somehow get. It's like that fox. You're somehow going to get them out of the area. It's like, I don't know, we saw 60 today. You think that's the only 60 down there? Yeah, those things aren't around anymore.

That's another big, huge change that's come over time. And then, yeah, I don't know. The octopus seem, at least from our trapping, less abundant in the last couple years than they were. Allie said he's getting octopus almost every day. Oh, really? Where he's shrimping. He cleans them or pitches them?

Pitches them. Wow. Does he do it because he thinks they're so smart or because he doesn't want to deal with them? Well, when I was talking to him, I was like, oh, I love eating those things. And he's like, really? And I was like, yeah. He's like, well, if I get one, I'll bring it bring it to you okay so not because they're so smart i think he just doesn't because a lot of people quit because they're smart yeah everybody got hot out of that

documentary about the octopus teacher whatever best thing never happened to octopuses but like i said i've said it before i don't know that everything else is that dumb yeah that's true yeah just yeah nobody's befriended the halibut yet if you went along the hell but you might wind up being not wanting to eat them either god that guy might be a substitute teacher my halibut sub teacher so matt uh get hit me with your most memorable for the year. I was just trying to think. There's been so many. I want to sum it up. It's just been a smooth year.

Yeah. Like weather-wise, unbelievable. We got one mystery. One mechanical mystery. One of the motors not charging its battery, and it's not the charging fuse. But other than that, it's minor. Yeah, but the COD is crazy. crazy i mean the three of us were out and there was a point where

we had triple headers numerous times you wouldn't put down without bringing up a fish and that's just you know yeah that's pretty amazing fishing just steady this year usually it's like you got one or two days that where you bring in% of the catch when it's just odd. This year, it was just kind of every day. We came in yesterday with, I don't know, three halibut and probably 10 cod. We're like, meh. Any other year, we'd have been, oh, man, look what we got. It was crazy.

There's a thing from up here we find is there's like a running joke that if someone's coming up Oh yeah. If you're coming up in a few days, the best thing you could hear is that the fishing sucks. Before I came up, I didn't want to text anybody. I did not want to hear

that the fishing was good. The joke is if the fishing's good, in a couple days it won't be. Right? And so you want to make sure that right before, like three days before you show up, you want to hear that it's a miserable bite. Because then you're like, well, mathematically that means it's going to be hot when I get there. Yeah. Because it comes in like days on, days off.

And it's not lunar. It's not a 30-day roll. It's like a smaller roll, and no one's been able to identify it. I think if we had over time been really meticulous about moon phase, moon phase slash tide swing, I don't know. I don't know. What all inputs would you put in there? Wind.

Barometer. Yeah, wind conditions. Whatever. I don't know. What, I don't know what, what all inputs would you put in there? Barometer conditions, conditions, whatever. If we had made some kind of chart, um, and it could be as simple as like you, you fill in five or six variables and then rate the days fishing on a one to 10 or something,

you might start putting together what it is, but it's not sun. not sun no it ain't raining and it's not high wind low wind it's not all those things that you remember the day by it's like it's like the things that you it's you know it's the things you don't remember well right well yesterday we had that day that we were fishing we had that that current was ripping and then for like five minutes it stopped and everything was

straight down and then I hooked into something huge it got off and then it started ripping again and it just changed

everything it was a little biothin could have been coming by yeah energy vortex yeah that's what that was no

it's so much mystery oh and then you guys for the first time another thing that we always know when I was around who saw the salmon shark? we did last year I've yet to lay eyes on one it was the classic kind of shark fin

and the tail tip of the tail just kind of going by like jaws it was probably what 50 yards we just kind of happened to turn around we all saw it just swimming by it was heading towards you guys. Your dog was in the water. We had our dogs swimming in the water.

She was all hot. That's right. Another thing about freak deals, seeing the salmon shark all that time and then you look at there was many, many years there was never a sea otter. 15 years

of no sea otters and then now there's the occasional sea otter sighting. The neighbor was out one day, and they have like a, what in the world is that? And it was, I mean, it looked like a several hundred pound oceanic sunfish. Yeah. Coming along the surface and just kind of went right under their boat. And he took a cell phone video, and that fish, he took a cell phone video as it's going under the boat, and that fish just keeps coming and coming and coming and coming as it goes by under the boat and then he took a cell phone video and that fish he took a cell phone video as it's going under the boat and that fish just keeps coming and coming and coming and coming as it goes by under the boat i think i've never seen another one i think that was 2014 marine heat wave

that was that summer yeah yeah um yeah just like the one-offs you know the one-off weird things that's what i love about this place it's like you'd never know what you're gonna see up here you never know you never know what you're going to see up here. You never know what you're never going to see again. Yeah. And every year it's like something different. You see her catch her. It's cool.

Andy, most memorable, whatever, commentary around? Oh, you know where this is going. Your new griddle? The year I had my new griddle. So if you were making a year count, your year count would be your giant griddle. Just pancakes. Before griddle, after griddle. Andy has assumed in our circle,

how many years you been here? 16 straight. 16 straight years. Because he deals not only in food of exceptional quality, but he deals in food of exceptional quantity. And every year his gift to our friend circle is that he makes the shopping list, comes in in the morning, turns on coffee at six, makes a breakfast, like a good breakfast, facilitates the making of lunch, and then at night cooks,

usually fresh seafood, sometimes stuff we bring from home, cooks everybody a huge high-quality dinner. They just run through the list of meals we had. Seafood, we had, because the first night here we hadn't caught nothing yet, so we had marinara and meatballs meatballs left over from my birthday party the meat the bag of meat was left over for my birthday party uh

chowder no you haven't done chowder yet not yet seafood enchiladas cod like fried cod with slaw curry seafood curry uh what do you what else king salmon oh we grilled some king salmon whole slabs of king salmon on his new thing you know did some tacos fish tacos anyways he normally has the work in a ton of little pans set on a little stove yeah but this year he bought a giant outdoor griddle and now can just like. Oh. My life, quality of life up here has just increased dramatically. Because I can do it all at once. Yeah.

And you can hang out while you're doing it. Yeah. You're not sequestered to the kitchen. A lot of times I'm in here as the kids are getting a fire going on a 70 degree day. And I'm over four burners in an oven and it's just dripping sweat. Now I can be outside hanging out. Yeah. Yeah.

You should have a picture of Andy standing over there and he's got that kind of wide eye looking at his face, just wiping his brow. It's so nice. I was going to tell you guys, it has nothing to do with anything we're talking about, but you know how I keep wanting to tell people about this. You guys know what geocaches are you know what everybody that does a geocache uses an ammo can yeah because like real comedy is the army ammo can for geocache so my kids have just found not even using gps they somehow have found two geocaches. They found one near, when we hunt spring turkey in Wisconsin, we always go, Bubbly Doug always takes us to this cheese place down the road

and makes cheese, Car Valley cheese. We go down there to get curds. And they're like running around the woods there and they find an ammo can. And they open it up and it's full of all the garbage that's in a geocache thing, including a notepad. There's another spot where we can't. They just that's in a geocache thing including a notepad. There's another spot where we can't they just happen to find a geocache can. And they always

putting junk in there and taking it out. So my boy, my little boy has only ever seen an army can in context of a geocache. Two times I have heard him accuse people of having stole a geocache box because they have in their possession an army animal can.

He took the geocache box. I'm like, no, no, man. Those have always been around. No, it's a geocache box. I got 100% certainty. And then how do you handle your fish, Andy, when you go home? Do you make the same things there? You know, the day-to-day, pull out fish and make them for myself.

But, you know, I tend to find myself in social situations with a lot of people looking to have a good time. And much like this place i uh tend to find myself cooking a bunch so i party with it you know smoke some oh i just smoke some party with some um no i share it around for sure i give i give a fair bit away too you know because i do catch a little bit of fish where i'm at as well so my first when i go home yeah one of my first things when i go home is um i give fish to my neighbors meaning like the houses by my house yeah so anytime there's there's a big get together yeah pretty fun to be able to show up with a lot of fresh fish or fresh caught fish and share it around that's kind of the best part and tell

the stories as you go you know um but yeah it lasts me the whole you know especially being up here for a couple weeks you can come home with a fair bit it it'll it'll last the whole year i think i got a few packs left from last year that i'm just gonna get through right as i get home and maybe change the date and pass those out. Let me tell you a hot tip. I don't date anything anymore. Because when you date it, people start being prejudiced against it. Even when I'm out of town.

So if I'm out of town and someone at home, they're like, once you put the dates on there they're wondering about it you're locked in yeah they're like oh that's from i don't put any data on anything man i when i look i know when it's from because i just be like oh that's from i know but no one needs to know sure and when i give someone a packet of something i don't need them wondering about it yeah you know i mean because like a piece of deer meat i mean this is a controversial statement a piece of deer meat that's been saran wrapped in freezer paper wrapped and kept in a deep freeze for two years ain't no different than a piece of deer meat for three months it just isn't yeah i agree it's not different now we're not saying the same thing about a salmon i did find the limit on red meat

though i came across uh i came across the uh roast that had been in my freezer. I don't know how I missed it, man, because I'm really diligent about managing my freezer. But I found a piece of meat that was five years old. Something had happened? Yeah, I just lost track of it, you know? No, I mean something had happened to it. Oh, oh, yeah, man. So, yeah, I did a foolproof um roast recipe you know i just put i put some rub on it and i seared it in

a pan and popped it in the oven until it was like 120 in the middle and pulled it out and let it cool and slice it up and it looked great but it like the muscle structure it just like was mushy it just didn't it was gross five years. So what you should do is go in and label them five years later. Now. Label them from the future. One thing I do too. Yeah, eat by the best that's

consumed by and mark it out five years. Four years. Yeah, because when you look at some old ass can that you found at your cabin, it doesn't say when they made it. It says when you should eat it by. Yeah. That's a new way to date.

One thing I do when I'm unpacking, too, is any of the seals that have popped, I go back and reseal. And I'll tell you, when you reseal a frozen piece of fish, it gets tight. Yeah, that's a good tip. When I get home, invariably you got bags that... I have a bunch of different theories. My latest theory is something about being in the cargo hold.

Oh, for sure. In the airplane. The cargo hold in the airplane does something to... It ruins a lot of seals on back bags. I just cut it open. I cut the top off and stick the bag right into a bag and re-zap it. I don't even get rid of the bag. Same here.

So you re-seal it in the bag. Let's say this was a bag bag. I would just go with a pair of scissors and slide it into a bag. A lot of times the label shows right. You don't even need to re-label it. But you don't label it. No, I'd label what it is.

I want to know what it is. I still want to know when it's from. Names but not dates. This year with my cut, I'm going to do something that I tried a long time ago, but I tried it with some fish that had gotten skanky. Like I had some cod, a big cod from a million years ago. I had a big cod that got to the point where I was like,

eh, you know when you open it up. You know when you open it up. Long, million years ago. I had a big cod that got to the point where I was like, eh. You know when you open it up. Oh, yeah. You know when you open it up. Oh, another thing about long-term fish freezing, get the skin off. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We've been pretty good about that.

If you're not going to eat it mega fresh, skin it. Except for salmon. Then you got to scrape it and wash it. Yep. You got to get the slime off. Yep. Like yesterday, I was playing a king that Luisa caught, and you were saying, scrape. Oh, yeah. Because I kind of forgot.

Helps a ton. And you just scrape all that slime off. Then once you said it, I scraped it and took my rubber glove and a hose and just washed him until he was like sand. You know what I mean? Almost kind of a lot of the scales came off. I was cleaning it so good to get all that slime off because we used to skin we used to freeze hell but skin on not good not scraped well that's the way we've gotten a lot better yeah it even

turns brown like the meat yeah it's not good skank yeah that too link cod oh yeah i had some link cod get skanky last year it Get some weird orange slimy stuff on it. Yeah, it got real bad. It all starts here. You really have to scrape and wash those things because it transfers down the line. Another long-term freezing thing is on your shrimp. When you head them, you got to clean that. You got to clean that little junction.

Because I think when you tear it it it gets some kind of digestive fluid from the shrimp body a little orangey you gotta wash that if not you pull that shrimp out and that turns brown that face but the more you remember how long ron layton to make you wash them for oh my god yeah he's like he'd be out there like an hour washing shrimp yeah clockwise clockwise that's the wrong way don't swirl it counterclockwise a lot of people that freeze them in water sure we don't have that luxury here because you don't want to lug all that weight back but actually vacuum seal them in so they're just in a block of ice i can picture that and they hold up pretty good but tsa don't like that either no kind of frozen

water uh anyway i tried this before. What I was trying to get to is salt cod. So I tried to make salt cod with a piece of cod that was already of questionable date. This year, I'm going to go home immediately and make some. I'm going to go home immediately and take my cod and make a bunch of salt cod. So that I can then re, you know, do like the french salt cod preparation yeah that's an old old before refrigeration yeah yeah and then you and i but i used to order that like in restaurants in new york i used to order the salt cod brun brun dot or like a yeah it's kind of what is it like

mix it with mashed potatoes yeah it was an old you bring it back yeah you kind of bring it back to life and we had a song now that it's the year of the cod i'm gonna um yeah try some salt cod i was gonna point out because i was gonna how i what i end up doing usually my catch just how important like this whole process and trip is to like friends and everybody like i'm getting texts while i'm here like how's the shrimp this year it's like yeah i got bad news i know that's a bad one you like caught but yeah just the idea like it's definitely like we host a ton of parties and just it's all stuff from here no it's known in the northern northern mission community how off the fishing southeast is yeah exactly they know they know because of this trip so yeah it's

a we do a lot of just hosting parties. Yeah. So it'll be good. Well, I want to thank you guys for doing this, man. It goes without saying, and that's generally how in our circle, I think everything goes without saying, just how much I have appreciated over all these years the way that you guys have been so faithful about coming up and hanging out thanks for sharing it man yeah it's a special place an honor to be here every year one of the

smartest things uh one of the smartest dumb things we ever did was to uh buy a place and have like a little hangout but it means so much you guys come up all the time oh man and you know it's corny but true man the best part about this place is just the fellowship, is being with you all. Oh, yeah. It's the best thing about it. We make a joke about watching that float plane leave after we get here, like, oh, okay, now the year starts.

Here we are. Yeah. Yep. And we had a conversation yesterday about just how so many people on the outside, you know, friends at home, always kind of try to describe this place, but there's never a conversation that you can really express what happens up here. You know what I mean? Yeah.

The day-to-day, the nightly. No one fully understands it. Sitting down at dinner and all three boats are sharing stories about, yeah, the one-offs and we saw this. And just, yeah, the camaraderie, you cannot explain this to people that have never experienced it. It just doesn't transfer to, you know, relate that kind of information. And the amount of work too. Yeah. Yeah.

The highs and lows of, you know, when we first got here, we're all right, first day out and like three boats leave and we didn't get out of the cove. One boat's not spitting. Two boats died before we got out. It's like, all right. Oh, like highs and highs and lows to the max somebody's back in the shack cleaning up mink shit yeah we get uh we get instead of a mouse infestation we get an annual mink infestation

they're getting crafty too well i think i think we got it figured out. What's going on? I cleaned up some stuff in here in the spring from that guy. I think, yeah. He went around the mink barrier. It's a whole long story. It might be a pine. I think it's a pine martin. Well, we've had pine martin, too, come in. Yeah.

All right. Well, thank you, guys. Thank you. Thanks for sharing this place. Thanks, everybody. See you next time it was October early morning an old square with an acorn

Worried for me and you It was a red oak I watched him the whole time He clutched it through the branches As I sat there in my blind All we see is what time has brought We're locked in but he is not The tree doesn't worry while it grows The tyranny pours to a mighty yoke

What we need is open eyes To trust the story and get on with life My mind it wonders how much can it take Teeth and rod and feet and frost until it germinates But it'll happen, all it takes is time To trim her for my fire, make a barrel for my wine All we see is what time has brought

We're locked in but it is not The tree doesn't worry while it pulls The tiny The tree doesn't worry while it pulls Tiny paws to a mighty old What we need is open eyes To trust the story and get on with life guitar solo She lends her fragrance as I cut into her rings

They're telling me a story that the cardinals all sing Thank you.