WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Fishing and Conservation: Interview with Michael Angelbeck

Episode Date: December 13, 2023

Emma Church interviews freshman Michael Angelbeck on his passion for fishing as well as the environmental conservation efforts of fishermen.

This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm in a church and with me today is Michael Englebeck here today to talk about his great passion for fishing and the environmental and conservation efforts of fishermen. Thank you so much for being here today, Michael. But do you mind just giving us a little background information on who you are, what year you are and what you're majoring in? Sure, yeah. I'm a sophomore here at Hillsdale College. I'm from Lincoln, Nebraska. I'm thinking of studying accounting. So when did you start fishing? And when was it that? that you found this hobby to be one of your newfound passions. Yeah, so I started fishing when I was real little.

I have pictures of my dad and I out in the dock trying to catch a fish when I was about two years old. So my dad took me out ever since I was real little, but we didn't do it very much. It was more like a couple times of summer, something like that. It was about three or four years ago, right around COVID is when I started like doing it more. We had a pond just behind our backyard. And so I'd go down there every once in a while. I started doing that a lot more right around 2020. And then I had a couple of friends that I had met and they enjoyed just being outside.

And we went fishing a couple times together and we all really enjoyed it. And so we kind of made this little group and we would go fishing like all the time. So over the past like three years, there's about six, seven, eight of us, depending on how you categorize the group. And we'd go out and we try to catch catfish and walleye. We've even got on trips up to South Dakota and Kansas and Minnesota. and it's just a really fun social activity. But also I just love being outside,

and I love the challenge and the skill involved with fishing. So you'd say it's more recent passion? You said like the last three years? Not something that you've been doing. Well, yeah, you've been doing it since you were young, but not. I always enjoyed it, but it wasn't necessarily like a passion of mine up until about three years ago. And that's when I started doing it a lot more. Okay.

So kind of going off of that, could you give us a rough estimate of how much you fish during the summer? I'm assuming this summer is the best time for fishing. Yeah. I don't fish every day, but I fish pretty close to every day. Really? Yeah. Probably five days a week on average. Wow.

And how long do you spend outside? Is it like all day? It depends. So if I had my way, like every weekend, I would just go on a fishing trip. I love camping. That's kind of a fun thing. I do along with fishing. I like to go to fishing destinations.

And so a lot of times I did this about four times a summer. leave on Friday right after work or I'd take the day off and go first thing in the morning, drive with a buddy or two out to our spot, set up tent, and then we literally fish until it got dark and sometimes after dark and sleep and do it the same thing the next day and just spend the weekend that way. But honestly, a lot of times I just go for like two hours after work just to a local creek or to my pond behind my house. So usually probably like two hours on average at a time. And then sometimes when I go catfish and I like going out at night. And so I'll go a little bit before dark and then stay to like one or two depending on how good the bite is.

So I know you kind of touched on this already, but like to summarize, why would you say that you love to fish? I love being outside and fishing is like an excuse to just relax and be outside. It's so peaceful when you're just sitting there waiting for a catfish rod to go off or trying to catch bass and just casting. You can just see the water and the sky and the sunset. I just love being outside and it's just something I can do to relax. And also I just enjoy this, the challenge of it. When you get really into it and get addicted like I do, you always have to try to become a better fisherman, catch the bigger fish. And there's a lot of strategy that goes along with that. And so I love like the strategy and like planning and skill part of it. And especially once you start catching

the bigger fish or catch a new kind of fish, it's super rewarding. Nice. Yeah. Okay. So what's the strategy you're talking about? Give us some insight on what that means. Sure, yeah. So I'll take catfishing for an example. Yeah. So there's a kind of catfish in Nebraska called the flathead catfish. It gets really big up to like 70 or 80 pounds, but they're really, really, really hard to catch. I've never caught one in my life. And so it's not like they're not around.

Like they're in the creeks and they're in a couple of the lakes, but they're an apex predator. And so they are not, there's not very many of them. They're very territorial. And so you can only have about two to three flathead catfish per acre of water. So what that means is you can like cast your line out into like a patch of water and there might be like two flatheads within like a 750 yard area. And so it's kind of like trying to find a needle in a haystack. But when you, so I would go out and try to catch a flathead like nights and nights and nights in a row and I just never catch one. And my friend Grayson went with me.

He had never caught one either. But over the winter while the fish weren't biting it gets a little bit too cold in the winter. And so he was just doing all of this research. And he started finding out that flathead catfish are ambush predators. So what that means is they like to have structure. So if there's like a tree or a big rock or something that they can kind of hide in, they'll go like right behind that and just kind of camp out there. And then wait for a fish to come by.

And then obviously since the structure is there, the little fish won't see them. And so then they'll eat the fish that way. They're not necessarily going out wasting all this energy. It's covering a lot of water. So what that means is if you're just casting where there's no structure, there's probably not going to be a flathead. But if you know where the structure is, there's a lot higher chance that you're going to catch one.

So what Grayson did took all of this research and then started looking at lake maps and started talking to people. And pretty much for like three months, he was just strategizing. So as soon as all the ice melted off the lakes and it got to be about May and the water temperature warmed up

to about like 55, 60 degrees, that's when the flathead start biting. He started going out every single night. He went out for about a week. And then right around my graduation party, he came to my graduation. party and was like, hey Michael, you come over here for a second. So he took me aside, pulled up pictures on his phone. And they were of two different flathead catfish that he had caught two nights in a row.

There was a 30 and a 35 pound flathead catfish. He had been going out for probably 30 days in a row, like most every single night trying to catch them. And finally he caught them. So I was like, Grayson, like, how did you do this? And so then he explained to me, like, I did all this research and talked to all these people and looked at all these lake maps. And there were, some man-made rock jetties that came to a point at this part of the lake and i heard some people who had gone there and caught them so i went out to those rock jetties and just put my baits like right next to that and it was within like two or three days that he had moved to that spot that he got the flathead so like that's the kind of strategy i'm talking about yeah it would be really really hard to catch one it's just kind

of dumb luck if you're just going out without any kind of strategy um but once you like find out a little bit about like fish patterns and how different kind of fish like to live and how they eat Wow. Then you increase your chance of catching it by like a thousand percent. That's just one example. And there's all sorts of different discussions about like what kinds of baits you're using. So there's live bait or fake bait. And if it's like plastic baits, like what the color it is, how heavy it is, how like what kind of presentation you're doing.

Like if you're jigging it off the bottom, if you're like just reeling it in super fast. If it's flashy, if it's just kind of like bouncing off the bottom. Like there's all sorts of like things you can learn about in that sense. So it's very strategic. And the thing I like about it, though, is you can always go out to a pond with a bobber and a worm and just like cast out and just forget about like anything. It's just like completely clear your mind. So you don't have to always be super strategic or anything about it. You'll still catch fish just the same.

But like when you get into it and really want to catch the big fish or like the really hard kind of fish to catch, you can really get super deep in this strategy. This is Radio Free Hillstow, 101.7 FM. I'm Emma Church talking with Michael Englebeck all about his love for fishing and the environment. and conservation efforts of fishermen. So now that we have established that fishing is something you truly do love, what are your thoughts on people that protest fishing, potentially advocating for animal rights or environmental concerns, believing that fishing is deterring the environment to improve?

Sure. So I think what a lot of people have done is on social media or in magazines, and they'll see people with like a five-gallon bucket just full of dead fish. or they'll see a pickup truck with like a dead deer on the back of it. And they see this and they see it as being wasteful. They see these people just wanting to go out and kill animals just for the fun of it. I have a lot of fun fishing. I have a lot of fun keeping fish and eating fish.

But I'm not doing it just for the fun of killing the animal. There's a lot more too than that. And so there's a couple of things I'd say to that. Number one, animals will die in the wild no matter what. Like all the animals are going to die. And probably the kind of death they're going to get is like if, if you're an animal and you're out in the woods, like you're probably going to get old and you're going to starve

or you're going to get eaten by a predator. That's pretty brutal death. And if you're a fish, like eventually probably another fish is going to eat you if you're small. And it's just kind of luck if you get big and then just kind of have a natural death. So number one, all of them are going to die anyway. But number two,

most fishermen are not the kind of people who are just going out and catching like hundreds of fish and just like killing them and not doing anything with them. either number one they're like eating them and feeding their family with them or or number two um they're just going out and not actually literally keeping every single thing they catch so for a long time especially like about 30 years ago there wasn't a whole lot of awareness for like catch and release fishing when you thought about fishing it was just like going out and like trying to catch dinner the fishing landscape has changed dramatically especially over the past like 10 or 15 years there's been a lot

bigger push for catch and release fishing um and this is simply for the reason so many more people have gotten into fishing, especially during COVID, like fishing sales went up dramatically. So there's a lot more people. And if everybody's out there catching like 100 fish and keeping them, it does really hurt the environment. So I'm like very, being of someone who likes to catch fish, and if there's more fish in the lake, that's a better chance to be catching them. I'm very concerned about what people are doing with fish and how they're catching them, how many they're killing and everything like that. And so that's why I think it's amazing that there's so much awareness for catching really fishing nowadays. And so another thing I'd say is,

selective harvest. I have nothing against people who keep fish. I keep fish from time to time as well. And there's actually a lot of science behind that. And actually keeping fish selectively can actually really help the environment. So I'll give an example of like a kind of fish where you don't necessarily need to be as worried about like what fish you're keeping. It's a cropy. Cropies like populate insanely quickly and they'll actually overpopulate a lake super quickly. So if there's if there's some croppy in the lake after like a couple cycles of spawning in the spring, that will become like 80 to 90% of all of the fish in the lake will be croppy. And so Cropi is one fish where if you just want to go out and catch a mess of fish to cook up for your family for dinner,

a Cropi's a great one to keep because it's almost impossible to harvest too many of them. I'd say another thing you have to keep in mind is like the Bluegill. The way Bluegill spawn is they like burrow in these little like crevices. They'll like kind of dig out these little like cut out holes in the ground and then lay their eggs there. and the male, the bull bluegill, will be the one, like, kind of sitting on the nest and guarding it. These males are generally the biggest bluegill out there. And so when you're out fishing and you're catching big male bluegills,

that is actually super harmful to keep the big male ones because what will happen if you keep that male, then there's nothing to guard the nest, and then those eggs are probably going to get eaten. And so that's an instance of where selective harvest is really important. If nobody knows to do that and they just keep all the big bluegill that they catch, then all those eggs are going to get eaten, and then there's not going to be a good year class of Bluegill for the next year,

and that's going to hurt the population. So, like, knowing what kind of fish you're trying to catch is super important, and then, like, knowing, like, how they spawn and what the populations are like is super important. Also, like, some people are just really big into trophy fishing, and that basically means, like, just trying to catch the biggest of a certain kind of fish. So, like, a walleye, for example, takes about seven to eight years to get the trophy size, like 26 to 28 inches. and so if people are just keeping like every single walleye none of those

those fish are going to get big enough but at the same time walleye are generally a fish that are like stocked super heavily and so if you're like keeping the limit of fish that's a limit's basically when the government or the wildlife agency will put a limit on how many you can keep I think limits are super good for fishing especially like for wallace um that way you're stock the government agency is stocking so many fish um that you don't necessarily have to worry about the people catching all the fish and there's not going to be any walleye left. But at the same time, they're stocking so many. It's okay if people just keep a few of them. And so I think there are some really helpful laws and regulations in place in most states and most lakes to help curb people

just keeping as many fish as you would. So I think a fisherman can do a better job about not just posting hundreds of fish on their Instagram or just like advertising they're out there killing fish. I feel like that gives a really bad look to fishermen when for the most part, like 75% percent of the fishermen are really caring about keeping that and capacity it on and letting other people catch fish too. And so they're not just keeping everything that they catch. I think you touched on this a little bit, but to be a little more specific, what are fishing communities doing to improve and maintain the health of the environment? Sure. So about 75, 80 years ago, the United States started basically what was called. This is actually closer like 100 years ago, the North

American model of conservation. So what that means is if you go out and enjoy animal like hunting and fishing, you're the ones paying for that. And so they started the licensing system. And so in order to go fish or to go hunt, you have to buy a license. That money goes directly into supporting research and maintaining stable populations and environments. And so over the course of last 50, 75 years, billions of dollars have been raised just to the sale of fishing licenses. So before you even like can get into fish and you have to buy the fishing license, it's generally not very much like $20, $30 a person. But when everybody does that, then it's pouring all this money back into research and sustaining healthy populations. So just by the fact of buying licenses, you're actually

helping like create a more sustainable future for the environment and for these animals themselves. On top of that, there's been some certain taxes that have been imposed like basically by us by the outdoors community. So basically anything you buy that related to outdoors, whether it's fishing rods, fishing tackle, there's a certain percentage of that that goes back into that same fund along with the fishing licenses. So every time you're spending

money or going out to fish, you're actually just helping the environment and helping the animals in the future. Also, I think just keeping people educated, like when fishermen tell others about selective harvest and not keeping everything that you catch,

that goes a long way because then it helps everybody enjoy the resource lot matter. So that's what it is. It's a resource and it can run out and so we have to be really careful with that. But I think for the most part outdoorsmen do a really good job of raising awareness for that and then just through our money

in the way we hunt and fish it really helps with that. So with these fishing licenses, so you would say you find that to be really helpful and things like that, the regulations and laws, do you have any critiques of what you think could improve? Yeah, so in some states, unfortunately there's been a lot of like politics involved and there's been either ballot initiatives

or just like individual legislatures who are going in and trying to change um basically hunting and fishing laws um from a politics standpoint every state has um some kind of either natural resource department game fish and parks um game and parks those are all different names that different states have for um government agencies that kind of regulate and control all of this kind of stuff um those are the people who hire professional biologists who actually know what they're talking about when it comes to what's healthy for a population, what's good for the environment. So I think it's really dangerous when some of these states are having these politicians or activist groups try to change the laws for everybody else. When in reality we already have a really good system in place

and there's a board of directors that involve all the science, all of the biologists from these natural resource departments who actually know how hunting and fishing actually impacts the environment. So I would say in some states, especially where they're passing laws, to limit how easy it is to utilize hunting and fishing opportunities in that state, I'd say we need to be really careful and make sure that we're not allowed in politics or activist groups who don't actually have all the information or just flat out wrong about certain things and how hunting and fishing affects the environment. I think we need to leave that up to the processes we already have in place with the scientists and the science that goes into

making decisions and regulations. This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.1.1.7 FM. I'm a matured talking with Michael Englebeck on his passion for fishing and how this has shaped his view on the effects fishing has on the environment. So Michael, just to wrap everything up,

what would you say to someone maybe who wants to dive into this hobby but doesn't know where to start? Absolutely, do it. It's not that hard. If you go to Walmart, you can buy a rod for like 20 bucks, get a box of worms, go out to your local lake, throw a bobber out in the water and just see what happens.

And it's so much fun. There's nothing like the thrill of feeling a fish on the other end of your line and reeling it in. It's so fun. And it's such a good family activity. It's such a good social activity. And just get outside. Like there's, there's,

there's, you're never going to regret going outside more. I think more people need, need to do that. So don't be afraid by all the technical terms. It's really not that hard. Licenses are generally pretty cheap and you don't have to get super fancy gear.

You can, you can get started for, for not very much at all. And find people who enjoy fishing. I guarantee you every single one of them will be happy to take you out and go with you if you want to learn more about it. So just get into it. Just try it. Nice.

And just one more thing I think most people would want to know. Just describe to us the best fish that you've ever caught. Ooh. So let's see. I'd say I was up on the river in South Dakota one time on the Missouri River right underneath a dam. And I caught a paddlefish. And that was about 40 pounds. It was super big.

It kind of looks like a dinosaur. It's got a big paddle on the end of its nose. Kind of looks like almost like a swordfish, but it's right in the middle of the country, and that was super awesome. Nice. Would you say that's like your greatest memory fishing, maybe? I'd say it's definitely up there.

Honestly, some of my best memory is fishing are just when I'm out with my friends, and we're laughing and making jokes and catching fish for hours at a time. So a lot of times it doesn't even involve the fish itself, but the fishing is just kind of a medium to be able to be outside and enjoy time with my friends. But catching that big fish was super memorable and it was super fun to fight. It was so big.

Yeah. Yeah, do you have any parting words that you'd like to say? Yeah, I'd say just, like I said earlier, just get outside, try fishing. And who knows, maybe you might get hooked. They'll be careful. It's addicting for me. I definitely probably go out way too much. But I love every day of it and I can't wait for summer.

so I can get back out and fishing again. Well, Michael, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. Our guest today has been Michael Englebeck talking with us today, all about his love for fishing and how this great hobby has shaped his views on the environmental and conservation concerns for fishing.