Hey, we know your fishy people here at Bend, but we're betting quite a few of you are also pumped that hunting season is here and so are new episodes of The Meat Eater on Netflix, Meat Eater, season nine. Part one is officially live for your viewing pleasure.

The new season has some bad ass adventures. Steven the crew head to Colorado, Texas and Wyoming, three states where the possibilities are nearly endless. So check it out and please do let us know what you think of the new season. We always love hearing from you.

Even the fishermen head over to Netflix to check out season nine, Part one. And don't worry, more episodes are coming. So they tell us Season nine, Part two will arrive in early twenty twenty one. And we will fill you in on those launch details as we get closer.

Good news for those of you who like fishing and meat eater, which is hopefully all of you are original fishing series is back. Season two of Doszpot or as Steve likes to call it, Doszpot is now live on the Meat Eater YouTube channel.

Season two brings with it a new boat. They're not really a new boat. Another old used beat up boat that we found. And we head to Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Follow along to see some of your favorite people return, as well as get to know some new faces, including mine. And, Miles, we guarantee you some good fish, along with a few bad ideas and a hell of a great time.

New episodes, lunch every Sunday at 11 o'clock Mountain Standard Time until we run out of them. Make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don't miss out on this show or any of the other great stuff we have coming this fall.

Slaying fish, drinking vodka, Big Ferhat, imagine a toddler's crayon drawing of a caterpillar with a hook hanging out of the ass. And generally speaking, when you're fishing alone, do you shake it hard or medium or just a little bit?

Depends on the day, certainly. Good morning, degenerate anglers, and welcome back to the fishing podcast for people who are sick of listening to fishing podcast that lie to you by telling you they will actually help you catch more fish. I'm Joe Smelly. I'm Miles Nulty.

And thankfully, I've actually given up all hope of anything helping me catch more fish except, you know, spending more time fishing.

That's what I that's what I recommend.

All this stuff we write and read about helping people catch more fish, isn't that like the key to the city? Answer whatever your question is, how do I catch 10 pound bass, spend more time fishing? You'll eventually. Yeah, how do I catch a giant brown trout? Get out there more than once a month. Anyway, the fall season is coming and that's the time when the beaches and shores return back to their rightful steward, striper fishermen and duck hunters.

We're getting into September, which is crazy. I can't believe it. September already.

But that means that the frat boys have had to abandon the covid orgies on their parents Bolinas and get back to doing whatever the hell it is that entitled college kids are doing these days.

What is that? It's a zooming into class.

I assume that's what the kids are doing, which is like, if you think about it, zooming into class is the actual literal definition of phoning it in.

Oh, they don't even know you're right and they don't even think about it, that they don't even have to pretend anymore.

And speaking of phoning it in, that's where on that topic, I think it's time for a regional fishing report diamon and I'm pumped on this one.

This is a special one. It comes to us from none other than internationally renowned fly fishing guide, influencer podcast host and celebrity Hank freakin Patterson.

Yeah, and I got to say, man, I am I am flabbergasted that you arranged this.

Good for you. All those years of sitting in your car like a creeper in the parking lot at Orvis headquarters hoping to awkwardly flag him down, have finally paid off.

Good on you, Miles.

Check one, check one, Mike is hot, hot, mike, check one, two to check, to check to. Hey, Terry, how does that sound?

One check, one check one. Terry listening to that, how does that sound? I don't want to sound like one of those freaking low rent bass fishing guys calling in their fishing report from a payphone outside a backwood gas station toilet or something. Right. You want to make this sound real pro.

All right, listen up.

Check, check, check, check. That good. That good. Good. OK, and three to one. Hey, I'm Hank Patterson, pro staffer, world renowned fly fishing expert and guide. Hey, I'm here today with a fishing report for anybody planning a trip in the next week or so to Alfonz Island in the Seychelles. I'm heading to the Seychelles. I'm sure you're all pretty excited about that.

But before I get into all that, I just wanted to brag that I just tell you about the fact that I was in Russia last week on the Kamchatka Cam Chewey, cam butcher of the Cambodia River Fish and Giant Rainbow Sleigh and fish drinking vodka. Big Ferhat, amazing trip. Let me tell you, if you are ever planning a trip to Russia, give me a shout. I'll put together a hosted trip. And so that way I can go on the trip for free.

I mean, well, it's not not not free for you. You understand. It's just what a hosted trip is, is. I basically make a couple of phone calls and then I moved off of you paying full price so that I get to go to Russia without paying any money. It's a win win, trust me. Anyway, this week I'm going to be in the Seychelles. And well, before I get to that, next week, I'm going to be in Iceland.

And I know what you're thinking. Oh, my God, Iceland. Hank, would you please post a collection of hero shots of yourself with big fish in Iceland, hash tagged, busy day at the office. And would you OK, and would you please post pictures of all the helicopters that you ride in while in Iceland and hashtag those Iceland, Uber or hashtag make everyday count?

Anyway, if you're headed to the Seychelles, I should say, remember, take some flies and A-Rod or whatever, make sure to get yourself on a on a pro staff or whatever. Anyway, bring seven go pros for drones, six gay black magic video camera on a gamble and a smartphone so that you can keep up on all of your social ills while you're there. And hey, if you're planning a trip to Cuba in the fall, I'll see you there.

You know, not to sound like a dick, but I didn't even realize Hank was still around, man, I kind of thought he he faded away like with tounkara and fly fishing, fly fishing for carp.

But I must just be out of the Hank loop or something.

No, he never went anywhere. I think I think there's a little more to the story. Actually, I'm I'm pretty sure, at least from the sources I've got, I'm pretty sure Hank has to stay in international waters so he can avoid extradition or something.

Anyway, if any of you out there want to get on one of Hank's hosted trips and get the honor of paying for him to stay out of prison while fishing for free in the Seychelles, check him out at Hank Patterson Dotcom.

Just make sure to watch out for spyware before before you go and do that. We've reached the part of the show where we beg, implore and guilt trip you into putting down your phones and your computers and reading an actual book once in a while. Listen up, you frickin Philistines.

I got a book recommendation for you to Folkston to a guy doesn't care about books or interesting films and things that I'm in.

Time On the Water by Bill Gardner chronicles a 200 day muskies season that alone makes it worthy of a read. I mean, how many recreational anglers do you know who put in that kind of time?

Very few, very few casual anglers have the drive or discipline to fish virtually every day from May 3rd to November 30th. And Gardner is most definitely a casual angler. Part of the appeal of this story is Gardner's willingness to expose his own ignorance. He doesn't pretend to be an expert. He's a musky fanboy with an obsessive personality who had an epiphany while sitting in gridlock L.A. traffic one day and decided to move his family to northern Wisconsin and spent seven months trying to catch one of the top ten biggest muskies of the year in violence county.

Spoiler alert, he doesn't actually, that's not much of a spoiler. It's pretty clear from page one that this guy isn't going to crack the top 10 list. But that's not why you read the book. You read the book because it captures the beautiful futility of a fishing obsession. Time on the water also shows how much better musky fishing is now than it was 40 years ago, although published in 1982, all the action took place in the season of 1980.

We follow Gardner as he digs it out day after day after day, casting ducktails and dirt beats, trolling crank baits, soaking suckers and hardly catching any fish. At one point, he goes nearly two months straight without landing a single muskie. And his big goal for the entire season is to catch one fish approaching 50 inches.

These days, 50 inches are almost expected in certain places, and a real trophy goes 50 pounds. We really are living in the golden age of musky fishing. This book is not great literature. It's a folksy account of a long and mostly unproductive fishing season, more a fishing diary than an actual narrative. Here's a taste.

Trying a very shallow bay with thick weeds keep getting my Buchtel fouled with weed, so I'm going to try a big serve as bait. For some reason, most musky fishermen don't use surface lures. I love them. Sometimes these big surface lures just drive muskies nuts. Shesh here comes one like a locomotive 10 feet behind the lunar five feet smash. Hey, this is a fish. Set that hook. Give him line. He's a brute. No, not under the boat.

Get back out here. Hold it right there while I get my glove on. OK, into the boat. Nice fish measures about thirty nine inches. Well I don't feel like quitting so I guess you're going back in bigeye two years and you'll be a clunker. I can't believe it. I just released the biggest fish I ever caught. Makes me feel like a real pro. How did you do today? Oh all right. I got a thirty nine incher but turned him loose.

A lot of emphasis on releasing muskies these days, but it's one of those things easier said than done. I mean, Christ, how many days have I spent on the water trying to get a decent musky and now he's back in the water. So, yeah, some turns of phrase are painfully cheesy, and the term lunger appears far too often, but still I have a soft spot for this book and it turns out I'm not alone.

It's developed a bit of a cult following. The book was never reprinted after 1982. And while the original paperback say 895 on the cover, they now go for over a hundred bucks online. Luckily, Gardner sold the digital rights to Musky Hunter magazine in 2003 and they rereleased it. So you can still get the ebook for cheap. You know, I am not like a crazed, musky angler, but I do like fishing books and I have no idea how I missed that.

Wadman that book sounds like it's squarely in my lane. It's like it's like a fishing book version of the band The Descendents. You know, it's rough. Yes.

Geeky, underappreciated and mostly mostly forgotten.

That's that's spot on, Joe, because both The Descendants and that book reached the height of whatever their popularity was in the early 80s. So it's a good call. Good call on that one. And they're both classics. Since we're on the subject of classics, I think I think we should switch over to. That's my bar. I remember. Yeah, I remember all of you out there.

We actually really need your help to make this segment work. We want to shout out all the best dirty, dingy and dive fishing bars out there. So shoot us an email. Tell us about your favorite place to drink after a day of fishing.

Best God damn bartender from Timbuctoo to Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon. And for that matter. At first, I was embarrassed, I must admit, listener Glenn Crane felt offered up St George's Pub in Brigantine, New Jersey, for That's My Bar. And as a pure bred Jersey boy, I read Glenn's pitch and thought, how the hell do I not know about this bar? I practically grew up in Brigantine. Our family boat was docked down there for years.

But it turns out, at least according to the inner webs, St George's wasn't established until the early 2000s, which would have been a few years after I stopped hanging out down there and the old family boat was sold.

So that explains that.

Nor would I have been of legal drinking age during those years anyway.

But listen to this. Glen writes, When you pull off the beach after a night on the jetty, there is nothing better than the biscuits and codfish gravy at St George's to warm you up. That and a little Irish whiskey in your coffee. The place is open and serving 24 seven. It also has amount of the world record. Highbridge Striper caught in saltwater hanging on the wall.

Glen says the bar's owner caught that hybrid off the dock where his big sport fishing boat is parked. And a little research confirm that to be true anyway.

Holy shit, man. Biscuits and codfish gravy opened twenty four seven mounted stripers. Glen, it's time for me to get back to my roots. Man, I guess I need to start fishing and hanging out in Brigantine again just to eat and drink at St George's because that all sounds magical.

Sidenote I did spend a lot of time in the Rodden Real Tavern in Brigantine in my youth. My dad loved eating at that joint. You remember that one, Glen, right.

That may have been the most bad ass blue collar fishing bar the Jersey Shore has ever known, but sadly, Hurricane Sandy took it from you and me and all the other bunco junkies on our coast.

Godspeed, Rod and Reel Tavern. Remember, we need you to make us hip to the coolest, dirtiest, nastiest, most fun fishing bars on the planet. So e-mail us at Bent at the Meat Eater Dotcom and make us believers in your favorite saloon.

Tell us everything that makes it awesome. So it and you, of course, can possibly get shouted out in the next installment of That's My Bar.

Thank you, Glenn, for adding to the rapidly filling reservoir of great fishing bars keep coming, everyone, but enough with the distractions. Let's get serious. It's time for Fish News.

That escalated quickly now we'll get to the fish news here, where we tell you the real news about fishing related and fish related things. And as a reminder, this is a competition, Miles, and I do not know which stories the other dude is bringing to the table. And this little new thing we're doing, our our engineer, the mighty Phil, Phil Taylor, he now gets to weigh in at the end of this dog and pony show and decide who who brought the pain more proper.

Me or Miles. Pay attention, Phil.. So listen up. So it's always a benefit to be the lead off man. That is that is me this week. And Miles, it's finally happened. I knew this day would come. Switzerland based food giant Nestle, which we mostly know for their chocolate here in the States, has launched sensational Vuna, a plant based tuna.

Oh, no. Where's Ben O'Brien? We need to bring Ben in on this story. Kardinia So.

So this comes to us from Fox Business. Nestlé, the world's largest food company, announced the launch of its plant based tuna, becoming the latest company to dive into the growing seafood alternatives market.

The fish free tuna is made from six plant based ingredients, including protein and sweet wheat gluten, and contains amino acids way this gets much better.

The company said the plant based tuna will join Nestle's portfolio of plant based alternatives to burgers, meatballs, chicken nuggets and other items. Now, here's where it gets interesting.

Apparently, there's like a like this fake fish race is somewhat like like the space race kind of because it goes on to say Nestle joins a number of startups launching more animal free products in the plant based seafood space, for instance, good catch sells fo tuna, a faux tuna version of albacore using legumes, beans and algae in addition to plant based crab cakes, which they sound just like the old bay on that.

You're also a lot of old heavy on the lot, a lot heavy on the old bay. But and then it says and others have swum, swum into sushi grade alternative tuna territory.

The brand, the brand ocean hugger says it has, quote, the world's first plant based alternative to raw tuna, while San Francisco based startup Colleano rolled out a raw tuna with ion algae, oil and various proteins using a proprietary process, said to recreate the taste and texture of raw fish.

Now, I looked up this ocean hugger raw tuna alternative, and I got to say, based on the photos alone, it looks it looks pretty convincing. It's a nice piece of sushi there on the rice with little with a little wrap, though it is more the color of salmon than tuna. And per the company, all it consists of is tomatoes, gluten free soy sauce, sugar water and sesame oil. Now, before we comment here to get back to the original story, I'll close with this factoid.

It says, With the rapid growth of alternative meat startups, there's certainly a market for sustainable seafood, particularly in the covid-19 era.

I mean, now it's a whole era, not just like a few months. This is the era, which is awful. Retail sales for plant based foods in the US have increased by 11 percent compared to last year, according to the latest data from plant based Food Association and the nonprofit. Good Food Institute, so the Vuna looks like tuna salad, but it's the raw tuna deals that are wigging me out, man. I mean, look, I'm not going to dive into the whole fake meat argument discussion thing like that.

We've already covered that elsewhere in other media programs and we don't have time to get into it here. And I'll just say this.

My personal perspective is I'm all for people eating seafood responsibly and trying not to get into bad situations where we're over harvesting fish stocks, like be thoughtful about what you choose to consume, but maybe you eat your vegetables as vegetables and eat your fish as fish.

And I know that's a crazy thought, but that's personally how I'm going to go about doing it and and avoid processing one thing and trying to, like, transmogrified into a whole different species or critter.

That just doesn't make sense to me.

Well, I like where you went here because I think same thing I did. If you're a vegetarian, you're vegan, do your thing. You have no problem with that. That's that's totally fine. But I mean, I even have some friends or like the wives of friends who are vegetarians, like, OK, you have a barbecue, they bring their own veggie burger. I get it. Cool, fine. Whatever. Rock and roll.

It's the raw tuna, the sushi that gets me because to me that's like something I might order out or back in the land before time when you could eat in a restaurant.

Like, I would go to a nice sushi restaurant for sushi.

So it's just such a niche food to begin with, like a special treat. It's not something you eat as readily as a burger or a vegan hot dog or whatever it is you need to have.

So like who is buying that for when? Like, are you buying fake raw tuna to make sushi platters at home? Are you having that on hand so that when all your friends want to order sushi out like you feel like part of the team?

Because if if the shit's tomato based and you're a vegetarian, why not make something out of some delicious slices of fresh tomato?

Yeah, I would be off.

I would far prefer to have fresh tomatoes, sushi than fake fish sushi. Personally, that's I mean, I know that.

I mean, I know the mayo doesn't jive and I'm certainly not a vegetarian, but I eat fresh tomato sandwiches like every day in the summer.

Yes. Good tomatoes. They're amazing bread, tomato, mayo, salt and pepper done.

But here's what I will say to to get back to the point. I'll say one other thing. I would probably eat the fake veggie sushi over a gas station, sushi roll. That's that is the place where I think I would take the veggie one over the fish one. I mean, that's that's a place where I just will not get my sushi is from a gas station. All right. It's a personal.

I did I had a few I've had a few crunchy tuna rolls from the Circle K dude, and they were fine. I'm here. I'm here. I live to talk about it. Here I am.

I'm not judging. I'm just saying, like, personal opinion. That's that's where I might that is the one situation where I might pick the fake option.

Is that check the date. Yeah. You just got to check the date, that's all. All right. So this is kind of nice. You set me up pretty well to transition from one questionable seafood product to another. And and I learned something this week, Joe, have you ever heard of a loser fish? No, no, no. Now I've never. Now I'm just trying so hard to win.

I don't know. Maybe. Oh, man, I'm just not witty enough in this moment and I'm like mad at myself, no, I don't know what a loser face.

I didn't either. But it's an actual industry term that salmon farms use to describe up to a quarter of the fish that they produce.

Losers I call all farm raised salmon losers like I don't.

Yeah, farm raised. Well, we're going to get there. Sure. Yeah. So the loser fish are the salmon that, although technically healthy and sluggish, have stunted growth and displayed little interest in food. And a 2016 study from the Royal Society of Open Science looked at farmed Atlantic salmon brains and found that these loser fish have constant elevated levels of cortisol, which is a hormone that vertebrates release when they're under stress. Cortisol is a good thing in the right circumstances, right?

Cortisol helps trigger the fight or flight response, which is important for wild salmon because, you know, they got to outrun orcas and seals and sea lions and sharks and all the other sharks.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. The cortisol response also helps them make the upstream migrations that salmon are famous for. Like, you know, all those those those nature videos of salmon majestically leaping up over waterfalls and getting away from bears. Yeah, the waterfall. Yeah, that helps them fly.

But a constant bombardment of stress hormones. It's just not good. It's not good for the brain.

It's not good for the body. Many of us are experiencing that right now. The constant level of stress apparently turns normal farmed salmon into depressed losers.

They're they're so wigged out all the time that they don't even respond to the standard stress test for freaking out of fish, which I learned is to just pick one up and drop it into a bucket of water. That's the scientific industry standard for stress out of fish. Researchers theorize that these smaller, weaker fish forced to live in overcrowded pens with bigger, aggressive fish without the possibility of escape.

They just can't they just can't handle that level of negativity, man. They give up on life. They stop eating and wait to die, which they do. In addition to depression, farmed salmon are also prone to deafness, scoliosis, obesity and lice infestations.

And. All right, listen, even if you don't give a shit about salmon welfare and frankly, I can't talk because I've personally killed thousands of salmon as part of my job. But salmon farms are a bad deal. Those massive sea lice infestations that they create spread to wild fish populations, as do the plumes of antibiotics salmon farms have to use to keep their fish from dying of infections. Salmon escape from net pens and can wreak havoc on wild fish and mess up delicate ecosystems like that time in twenty seventeen when two hundred sixty three thousand Atlantic salmon got free in Puget Sound, Washington, you know the Pacific Ocean where Atlantic salmon aren't supposed to live.

So bottom line, I'm going to steal a line that Grundon used to use back in the day, quote, Friends don't let friends eat farmed fish. All right, eat all the wild fish you want. But our salmon stocks have enough issues without being contaminated by pens full of losers. So the loser fish, are they?

Maybe I missed this, but are they deemed, like, not fit for consumption and then and then pulled out and wasted or they don't even grow like they won't grow.

They're so depressed. They don't eat. They don't grow. They just die. They die of depression. And that's twenty five percent of all farmed salmon. Oh, man.

It's like it's like some of the dudes used to play in bands with like they're still just sitting around wishing, wishing we'd stuck it out on the hardcore scene, you know what I'm saying?

Yeah. Yeah. I think all a lot of us have have some high school friends that wound up in the loser fish population, you know, but I don't want to eat them.

Yeah, well, hey, look, I won't come down if you if you if you buy the huge pack of frozen salmon filets at Sam's Club, I mean, it is what it is. It's not my jam. Once you taste, in my opinion, a salmon out of saltwater from Alaska specifically, like before it ever hit the rivers.

You will never you'll never look back. Yep. You will just you know. But yeah, I'm not a big trout guy anyway, but, you know. OK, so, man, I'm trying to think of a good, good Segway here. I don't have one because I'm going in a different direction. Bring it.

Farmed salmon.

So here's here's one of those stories where I think we we stretched the parameters of fishing, which we're allowed to do here, because this is our show and we can do whatever we want.

This one is about magnet fishing.

You know what that is? What is mine? I have no idea what this is. What is just what magnets. What is it? No, no, no.

That's that's something they do over in Europe. I think over here you just tie a big magnet off to a rope and throw it in water and drag it around, try and find stuff.

So it's exactly what. Sounds like it's like the subsurface version of those people with the metal detectors on the beach. It's like I've moved out into the water. Yeah, well, yeah.

Or these are people who can't afford a metal detector, but they can buy a magnet.

And quick aside, before I dive into this, I dabble, though, very lightly in magnet fishing, which you may not have known, and now you do.

And just to save face, because it's kind of a dorky hobby, this is purely a covid quarantine related thing. OK, it started with extra time to sit around and watch YouTube. And I got sucked in by this dude that goes by the fisher and he's this spastic cat from somewhere in the Midwest and he just goes nuts every time. He's always on bridges and he's he's finding all kinds of weird stuff.

And every time he finds something, it's like, what the heck is this guy's? What is that thing? Right.

And I got sucked in by this stuff on on YouTube.

And then if you factor in what felt like licensed to buy anything you wanted on Amazon during quarantine to make yourself feel better, like eating ice cream after you just got dumped. Right.

That that is why I now own some magnet fishing equipment.

OK, so they're like this was this was like cathartic almost. OK, I thought, like, I'm not really traveling. I can't go junking because of covid. So this makes sense. And so far a hundred and thirty dollar investment has found me to screws five nuts in a bicycle chain.

Hmm.

That is what I've gotten out of this really Paiano I kind of lost, I kind of lost the fire for it and realized that if I have free time to magnet fish I should probably just fish fish, which is also safer because this story comes to us from Fox six Milwaukie Headline Person Magnet Fishing in Beaver Dam recovers grenade. That was probably live. What.

So yeah. Did you or did you just say grenade like an explosive device that make it throw in war. Yes. That you would throw in war hopefully at the people fighting you.

It wasn't like a weird, you know, foxhole accident or something. Yeah. Yeah. But Beaver Dam police say a person who was magnet fishing near a dam on Madison Street, it might have been this dude.

He's always like out in public in the middle of a city, recovered a grenade that was later determined to be real and potentially potentially, quote, live.

A Facebook post from the Beaver Dam Department said contact was made with the Dane County bomb squad to discuss the proper procedure to dispose of the grenade. After seeing photos of the grenade and speaking with the Beaver Dam Police Department supervisors, they determined that they would send a team out to assist in the disposal of the grenade due to the degradation of the grenade from being in the water for quite some time. The bomb squad was unable to confirm if it was actually live without further testing, but they felt it was necessary.

I would hope so to take precautions for everyone's safety. And they closed the bridge down for two hours while they got rid of this grenade in Wisconsin.

Now, I have a few thoughts on this.

OK, I'm kind of speechless other than trying to put myself in the shoes of this magnet fisherman bringing up like, holy shit, that's a grenade.

Well, this is this is the thing. And this is why, like, I'm a loser fish in the magnet fishing world, because you realize later that you watch these magnet fishing things and they're only showing you when they find cool shit. They don't show you the nine hours in four days where they found two screws, five knots and one bicycle chain like that.

But I do I do have a couple of thoughts on this. Right. So to start, this is frightening. And while they don't know, they haven't said whether it was or was not a live grenade.

But if it was, where did that come from?

So that's mystery number one. How is there a live grenade? But I do have another theory because I, like you, are a child of the late 80s and early 90s. So hear me out on this.

When I was growing up, there was an Army Navy surplus store in the Franklin Mills Mall in Philadelphia called I Goldbergs. And you could buy all the grenades you wanted in there. There were literally bins full of grenades. Now, of course, they weren't live, the holes were drilled out, so they were disabled and could never be made live.

But they were real Vietnam era grenades with the clip and the pin and the whole works. And they were like three bucks a pop. And I could still see them in the huge crates in that store. And I had at least half a dozen guarantee. There are still some kicking around at my mom's house.

My dad had one of those. I used to play with it all the time. So I know exactly what you're talking about, but it was clearly not live.

No, no, no, no. But so those grenades would be drilled out, right. And they have a hole of the center.

But you figure if this thing sitting there for years and it's all full of sludge and muck and that hole is filled in, you wouldn't know. So, I mean, I don't know, man. Of course, that was back in like like what I consider the last days of when, like, kids were men, you know what I mean? Like, we'd be at the mall. We'd be at the mall. My mom would be like, oh, honey, didn't you tell me you needed more grenades?

You know, if you're good this year, maybe Santa will put a few more grenades in your stocking, you know, because back in the day when Toys R US had the sign pointing to the Arsenal aisle, you know, you remember that?

Yeah, I do.

I want the mountain with the Cobras on the grips, not the dragon's, you know. Yeah, like, yeah. OK, if you're going to have a big gun war only one pump and close your eyes when they're shooting at your face could jump.

Could one pump my ass your fifteen at least break a little skin.

But those, those were good times so that's what popped into my head. Maybe it's maybe it wasn't a live grenade. Maybe it's just a relic from an era. That's not the covid era when kids still went outside and played army. And for the record, once I get my magnet fishing game dialed in, I'm going to find a whole grenade launcher like the one poncho used in Predator Mark.

My words come on out. We'll do it. We'll magnet fish together. It'll be fun. Oh, it sounds terrible. I'd rather go real fishing, but I'll say this. If anybody out there finds out like before we do it, you know, to determine if it was live or not, let us know. Give us an update because we want to know I'm going to kind of stick with with lawlessness on the water for for the last piece here.

I like it last last week, two Louisiana men, one a local bass fishing tournament, but their glory was quickly tarnished after they were arrested for fishing contest fraud.

All right. No cheating in bass tournaments is nothing new. We've covered a meteor just like every other fishing media outlet. So the cheating part is not what caught my eye.

That's just standard protocol. It's the arrest part.

These guys are facing up to three thousand dollars in fines and a year in jail because they fished outside of the tournament boundaries. They didn't even leave the lake. They just left the boundaries. And this is not like one of those big National Baths elite series tournaments. We're talking about a local club tournament.

They they take their fishing tournaments seriously down there.

And so they got me wondering about penal codes related to fishing tournaments. And apparently, Louisiana is not the only state where cheating in a fishing tournament can get you locked up with.

So this is like one of those weird old laws thing you didn't know existed anymore, like riding a horse through town on Sunday.

It's not old, right?

Like this is actually relatively recent. Getting caught breaking tournament rules like fishing tournament rules in Texas is considered either a class A misdemeanor or a third degree felony, depending on the size of the prize at stake. And no, it's not one of those old like laws. It just takes up space in the penal code nobody knows about. This has been enforced several times just in the last couple of years in the Lone Star State. And side note, but weird one, Texas tournament anglers seem to be cutters.

They have a habit of tail chopping. In one case, a guy named Terry Keith Long was fishing a tournament on Lake Fork and on Lake Fork. Fish between 16 and 24 inches must be immediately released back in the lake and they don't count four points. So, Terry, he catches himself like a sixteen and a half inches and he decides, you know, maybe I'll just trim a little way.

I'll just take a half inch off with some scissors and call it good. Say this. No one's going to notice, but hold on, wait. Yeah, yeah, it gets weirder. Another case involved a kayak tournament. And since kayaks don't have live wells, competitors take pictures of their fish, unapproved measuring boards and then let them go. Will this guy, Brent Taylor, he must feel like he needed a couple extra inches to stay competitive. So what do you decide to do?

Was he cut the whole tail off of a bass, moved it a few inches down the ruler and put his hand over the missing section as if you were just kind of holding the fish in place so it didn't flop around on the measuring board, Mr. Sneaky Man.

OK, but he's kind of sneaky, but just where he screwed up, he kept the tail. They found the tail in his kayak and that was busted. Oh, man, that's a little Darwin.

It's a little Darwin Award.

Yeah, and all these guys were arrested and charged under the fraud in fishing tournaments, legal code. So from what I could dig up, only Texas and Louisiana have actual laws about fishing tournament fraud. But to be to be clear here, I couldn't, like, find a database about laws pertaining to fishing tournaments. So any of you out there, if you know of other states that have actual statutes on the books about cheating and fishing tournaments, please let us know, because I'm genuinely interested in how common those are.

Like I want to know how many states had to write laws about fishing tournament cheaters. So I had no idea, man.

I mean, it kind of kind of fits like with the good ol boys in the South, like, you know, you don't you don't mess with a fishing tournament down there.

But I don't I I fished won two tournaments in my entire life. One was pure fun and bragging rights. One had money on the line. I regretted it. So I'm not really into tournament fishing, so I wouldn't have known these things.

But I mean, so the guys who they were trying to who got arrested, were they being jerks about that or was it like, oh, hey, man, sorry, I didn't know that we were crossing the line. Like, what is it like driving? Yeah. Is it like drunk driving where it's like no questions asked, like you did this and you're going down?

You know, I couldn't find that kind of in-depth coverage. No one interviewed them about their their intentions. But I'm going to guess that they clearly knew the rules. They clearly broke them and they won the tournament. People were pissed. So I think I think they knew what they weren't supposed to do and they did it knowingly. Otherwise, you know, it was an honest mistake. They would stripped out. I assume they would have stripped him of the win, but that would be in the end.

But no, they called authorities and these guys might go to jail for a year, say, and you're going you're going to you could end up in jail over a green bars.

This is why I say fish for snakeheads people.

There's no there's no one cares. No laws in snakeheads. You can do whatever you want. Yeah. Don't you? You killed ten snakeheads wherever you want. They'll throw you a parade around here. All right.

It's time for Phil to weigh in and crown this week's champion. Phil, come on, man. You know, he brought the goods. Give it up.

Yeah, well, and and and then we're going straight from the front page news to the classifieds as we dig into the sale bin Miles.

I thought about making a loser fish joke here, but that would have been too obvious. I'm sorry, but you could not compete with Joe's tomato tuna and possibly but probably not live grenades.

Our winner this week, again, is Joe Smelly Miles. That makes you over two.

I'm so sorry. I do not make the rules. Actually, I do.

But just remember, there are no small fish news stories, only small Fish News podcast hosts, which you are not because you are a rather tall man.

Please don't beat me up. Why did you put the head to pay? You don't know what I'm getting at. What, you didn't have to be so hurtful with me, so angry. Seems like people love to buy and sell used crap on the Internet. And, you know, fishing gear is no exception. In this segment, we profile some fishing related items we found for sale online. And just like in all, Craigslist crawling. Ninety nine percent of it is only interesting because it's terrible.

Today is no exception. OK, this one comes to us from let go. Twenty four dollars. And the title of the post is Just Fishing Weights.

Now, the magic of this better be those batteries are good fish, good for twenty four bucks.

The the long description is the clincher here. But before we get to that, we just have to describe what we're looking at. So we have a case here, a long, skinny case with a handle and a hang tag for a pegboard on one end.

And this was obviously repurposed. I don't I can't put my finger on exactly what this case was originally made for. I don't know if you have any thoughts there.

I'm going to guess that it was originally made for fasteners of some kind. Bolts and nuts.

Yeah, something like a really, really cheap, tiny toolbox. OK, all right.

I like that. And it is absolutely beat to shit, OK?

And in it, in the few compartments we have a bunch of clearly used like premade steel liter saltwater hook rigs all coiled up. Yeah. That looked like they would take you at least an hour to disentangle them all.

Correct.

There are exactly five clearly used eight ounce bang sinkers, one of which has a little piece of what looks like four pound test, like a little bit schlichtmann just got a little little pigtail and there's one there's one completely empty container.

And then there's also two croppy sized micro clearly use curly tail grubs, one chartreuse one we'll call rootbeer. And this is twenty four dollars. That's what this will cost you. But here's the description. I'm going to read it verbatim. But before you get there, Joe, I have to, I just have to jump in.

I'm sorry to cut you off, but I'm not out doing what's for me. What's such a head scratcher on this is I want to know who's fishing kit this was and what they were fishing for. In what circumstance do you need? Steel leaders atonce banquet's croppy, curly tail jig's and no hooks.

Yeah, none of these none of these things really so incongruous. How did these things wind up in a box together? None of it makes any sense to me.

Well, I don't have the answer to that, though. We did correspond with this seller. We'll get to that in a minute, OK? Because this description.

OK, so five pieces of eight ounce weights equals sine seventy five dollars through one hundred bucks.

That's right. Out of the gate is that's the new math. I don't think you called out new math.

I don't know where we're getting that two hooks and fishing line and two fake worms for fishing. Now here we go.

Come with the case to you. Hang it, lay it down or stand it up for you.

Own convenience. Enjoy your summer with this kid. Come and get it before someone beat you to it.

That is the description. Of this product, enjoy your summer with this kit, you won't have any hooks, but boy can get those croppy jigs to the bottom fast. So I did the jerky thing and I wrote, hello, interesting. Kit, do you think I'd be able to use these items for trout?

I'm just starting to get into trout fishing in your area.

OK, now you just heard the grammar in the description and here's what I got back in four minutes.

Usually a rod and real well suited for a main line in the four to eight pound test range will serve you well for trout fishing and also will get the job done for other popular freshwater species such as bass and fish.

In perfect grammar, and I just cut and paste it into my search box and it was straight out of a Google article called Trout Fishing Basics.

Yeah. So he just he just he just cut that right out of a Google answer. I can I give credit for that.

That was actually pretty clever.

I was like that was slick. That was your dancing around. You have no idea. But good, good move.

No doubt followed up by to each their own story. You have to find what weights you like best. Followed up with, however, for this little amount of money, I'm asking for the kid, it's a win win for you regardless.

Are you a R d SS?

Regard. Yup, yup, got it, he sounded it out, he sounded it out for so fishing kit. Twenty four bucks. Enjoy. Enjoy your summer.

So my friends save a little cash. Oh, yes.

I mean, let's be honest. Those eight ounce figures are no more than 75 cents apiece. They're not. Seventy five dollars.

But the thing is, that kind of markup, that's the kind of thing you usually only find in fly fishing gear. I mean, like and that's that's an unfortunate truth because it gives fly-Fishing a bad rap. But the truth is that fly fishing doesn't have to be that much more expensive than conventional fishing. And in this week's tackle, heck, our good friend Tim Romano is going to tell you how you can save yourself some cash on fly float.

I'm getting calls from inside the city, the blood of Tim Romano.

How are you doing, buddy? Oh, I'm doing OK. It's kind of a loaded, loaded question these days, but I'm OK these days.

It sure is. But we're not going to think about all that bad stuff and we're going to think about the good times ahead. And you are going to drop some knowledge on us specifically for the drive fly fisherman. You've got a hell of a trick here to tell us all about it.

Yeah, I think it's a trick. It's basically all those little fancy dry fly phones that you spend, I don't know, five, 10, 20, 30 dollars arm. You can buy those and they're great and they work really well. Or you can Google up Fletching Powder, which I didn't even know what that was, because I'm not an arbitrary guy. I'm sure some of your listeners will know exactly what I'm talking about. But it comes in quantities like 10, 15 times what you can buy at the fly shop for Dry Shake.

And it's basically the exact same thing. Yeah, I believe you use this stuff.

You put it on your fletching to keep them dry so they don't get waterlogged.

Like if you're out in the rain. Right, right. Yeah, exactly.

And you're saying that's a good substitute for like a frog's fanny or something like that.

All inclines. Yeah, it doesn't. I mean, I'm trying to think about they're all slightly different. Right. But they're basically just a desiccant powder. What I the little bit of research I've done, I think it's actually called hydrophobic foot. Are you telling me how to pronounce this? If you need food, hydrophobic food, silico? It was perfect. So, yeah, it's you just have way larger quantities and it's, you know, literally like one tenth of the cost.

So you just refill your empty frog's fanny or whatever with that stuff.

Yeah. Like whatever container you like using, keep it. I will say it's supposedly non-toxic, but you definitely don't want to breed that crap. Don't blow a line of it. Correct. I mean you can try. I didn't tell you to do that. The what I do sometimes instead of pouring it from bottle a bottle, which can be really messy, I would suggest putting it in like a Ziploc or a thin plastic bag so you can basically put the corner of that bag and then just kind of tap it in slowly, because if you try to pour from the bottom of the bottle, that's a complete mess.

And generally speaking, when you're fishing alone, do you shake it hard or medium or just a little bit?

Depends on the day, certainly. Dude, that's a that's a legitimately good hack, right? Yeah. The last time I went and bought a bottle of that fancy Japanese dry shake, I'm pretty sure I came up short on rent the next month. That stuff is expensive.

I know. I know. The thing is, it's anything, right?

Anything that says fly-Fishing on it, you can at least double the price. That's true. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Like, I can get a spool of fluorocarbon to spool a spinning real pretty cheap, but then you get a miniature tippett's full of the shit and fly shop.

It's like a 400 dollar markup. And this is a problem.

This is a I believe through I believe I believe smarter people call this a barrier to entry.

Yeah, it is. It is. And it's part of what gives fly-Fishing a bad rap. It really is.

Because everyone's like, oh, what kind of chump would spend that much money on line? And I don't know. By the regular stuff. By the line. That's what I always do. Yup. Me too. But I'm here to tell you, all of you, that you don't actually have to be rich or be a sucker to get into the long road game. It's a ton of fun and you don't need to drop two grand to do it.

We are we're going to stick with this theme, the Everyman's fly-Fishing theme to close out this week's show with our End of the Line segment.

It's not loud enough, but. Rubber legs, Patts, rubber pickle, Jimmi legs, no matter what you call it, the pads, rubber legs is one of the greatest fly patterns ever conceived. I call it a turd for reasons that are obvious, if you've ever seen one. But the pattern is actually named after its inventor, Pat Bennett, and the assortment of splitted jiggly rubber legs that hang off of it right now. All the Western guys out there, like the everybody knows about the turd, vibro well, know everybody you hang out with knows about dirt flies.

But I'm willing to bet that at least half of the people listening to this have no idea what I'm talking about. And I'm pretty sure you guys don't know the history of that fly you love so much.

So listen up. Imagine a toddler's crayon drawing of a caterpillar with a hook hanging out of the ass and you'll have some idea of what a patch rubber legs looks like. It's a long chain took somewhere around a size four, wrapped with fuzzy brown or black or all of chenille with six or eight or ten or however many feel like putting on their little rubber legs dangling around the edges. As with most fly designs, the parts of rubber legs is really just a slightly altered rip off of a pre-existing pattern.

The original that spawned the modern turd was the girdle bug invented by a guy named Frank McGinnis of Anaconda, Montana, in the early 1930s. Back then, flattening materials didn't exist. People tied flies out of whatever feathers or other shit they had laying around. Turns out McGinnis was a true pioneer when it came to creative materials for dressing flies. See, Frontier women were known for their toughness and resilience, but not so much for their svelte physiques, if you know what I mean.

That said, even the pioneer girls like to get dolled up once a while and hit the town. And back then that meant smushing their midsections into constrictive shape, enforcing garments called girdles. Girdles were some of the first articles of clothing to employ elastic bands. And legend has it that when McGinnis saw some of those little white strings of supple elastic poking out of his wife's well worn undergarments, he got inspired only, probably not in the way she was hoping.

He figured those little white bands would look damn good as legs or antenna on what flies. So it cut off a few, paired them with some black chenille he stole from her sewing kit. And Bam, one of the world's greatest fish fooling inventions was born a half century later, the girdle bug got upgraded with new colors and synthetic materials and became the ubiquitous trout catcher we know today.

Simplicity is a virtue in fly design, spending 40 minutes crafting a perfectly proportioned work of Bogarde only to snap it off on the second cast. Suk's turn flies consist of three materials for if you add weight, good tires can whip these out in a couple of minutes flat, no matter how many empty PBR cans are scattered around the vice turd's work in any river with populations of stone. Flat stone flies are found on every continent except Antarctica and are as irresistible to trout as Waffle House hash browns are southerners.

I want you smothered.

You like my Waffle House.

That's brown turds. Don't look all that much like real stone flat. You can find dozens of other patterns that look a whole hell of a lot more like the real thing. They have perfect abdomen to thorax proportions, detailed modeling on the wing cases, articulated legs. They look like they might just crawl out of your box and join one of the annual streamside orgies that stone flies have after the hatch. Problem is, those realistic flies don't really work, at least not for me.

Maybe fish appreciate simplicity, too. Or maybe they're just dumber than we think. Turds are the ultimate guide fly simple, fast and cheap to make, but deadly effective. Even if you've never tried a fly in your life, you can wrap up three or four of these in a half an hour and they will catch fish.

So go buy yourself some chenille rubber legs, Longshanks Hooks, maybe a six pack or two now is as good a time as any to learn how to tie. Flies and turds are as good a fly as any to learn on.

So if we're recapping, Hank Patterson is apparently still alive and well, time on the water is the L.A. punk band version of musky literature.

I've got a new bar to hit up on my home turf and fly fishing. As it turns out. Shocker. After all these years of research isn't just for rich people. True story.

Carry those bullet points of brilliance into the weekend and do some good with them. Maybe even catch a fish or two.

And and if you do, tell us about it, send us an email at Bent at the Meat Eater Dotcom. Tell us what's great. Tell us what Suk's tell us all the reasons why we should never be allowed to host a podcast again.

And I'm going to head over to St. George's Pub with the copy of Time on the water that I stole from your bookshelf.

And do me a little quality reading son of a bitch.

I'm going to piss off my whole family by reliving my high school angsty days and blasting some classic descendants cuts. Yes.

See you next week.