You've seen this cook up some pretty wild stuff here at Meat Eater, whether we're fixing diet, making our own sausage, rendering down fat or even making tallow, we're passionate about what we cook and how we cook it.

And we know not everyone has access to these odd cuts in materials. So we decided to hook up with Porter Road and give you a chance to join in the fun. We're pumped to let you know about our new meat eater, Porter Road boxes. They work a lot like other subscription boxes, but we got wild with it.

Yeah, there's there's a lard and tallow box so you can try your hand at rendering and stepping up your frying and baking game. There's a sausage box, which is my personal favorite for obvious reasons, and that includes enough pork fat back pork trim and casing to pair with one diers worth of trim and make a bunch of sausage. And finally there's a scavenger box that has everything from kidney to pork shanks. That one also includes a signed copy of our buddy Steve Annells, The Scavenger's Guide to Hot Cuisine.

With any luck, you've already got some gamey and maybe some fish in your freezer or soon will. And now it's time to start thinking about how to put it to good use head on over to Porter Road, dotcom back slash meat eater to check out our latest collaboration and get cooking.

That's p o r t e r r o a d dotcom slash meat eater. Find all these ingredients on your own. It's not easy. And we got limited inventory, so be sure to get yours while you can.

Hey, chances are if you're living on this planet and have a television, you've probably been exposed to some Hollywood version of the survival genre that pits man against nature as though nature is some mean bastard that's best avoided.

You guys know what I'm talking about, but threatening about mountain lions while you drink your own pee.

Yeah, just like that.

You know, the reality is most of that survival stuff is produced purely for entertainment, and that's it. Sometimes fun to watch, but much of it is nothing more than a good way to make a bad situation even worse.

And that's why we wrote The Meat Eater Guide to Wilderness Skills and Survival in Steve Renel, his latest book, You'll learn from the hard earned advice of accomplished outdoors men and women, including river guides, lifelong hunters, mountaineers, emergency room doctors and wild food experts. Yeah, like how to effectively find and treat water, how to gear up for any outdoor venture, why cooking accidents mess up way more people and grizzlies. How to deal with a porcupine quills in your dog and its meat on your fire and how to develop a mindset that keeps you calm, rational and focused during your most stressful moments.

No matter your skill level, this book will be a staple on your essential gear list.

And if you don't have an essential gear list, it'll teach you how to make one head on over to the meat eater dotcom slash survival and check it out. Now, that's the meat eater dotcom survival. And I'm like, other than being in shape and cut and having the stamina to paddle far enough out to catch sailfish on a kayak, we're basically the same person. This is what you're going to use. You might as well just grab, like, the towel bar out of your bathroom and tap a real to it.

You have not honed your micro fishing skills and therefore will not survive. It feels like they're trying to drag out the sound of the plastic slowly sliding from his nostril cavity. Good morning, degenerate anglers, welcome to the podcast that swears this is the year it's going to finally, once and for all, perfectly organized all its tackle and keep it that way. So it's not constantly buying hooks swivels and soft plastic's. It knows it already has, but can't find the night before a trip.

How you like that one? I'm Joe Savelli. I'm Miles Nulty.

And I don't believe in New Year's resolutions, but if I had one, it would be something along those lines about organizing tackle because.

Because that's something I know I do because.

Yeah, well, I own I reorganize my tackle at least twice a year. It's this weird, like Zen therapeutic thing for me. It's and it's especially true for fly boxes. There is something about a perfectly organized fly box that satisfies me and brings me brings me some inner peace.

I don't know why I could not agree more like I, but it's so rare that mine are organized.

Like I have to take a picture for social media because I'm like, wow, that only happens once a year because I do.

I reorganize in the spring and like the streamer, Boxey will get all nice, nice before the first warm season streamer trip. But by now like I mean like right now, now in winter my shit is chaos.

Yeah.

But I'm one of those people like I got to say, I know where everything is, at least in the general sense of like what region of the garage, what Fondren should be and yeah.

What quadron it's in that quadrant. Yeah.

But the only time I go nuts is when I jump into a curveball program, i.e. like I get invited on a random Muskie trip, you know, because I don't do that often.

So finding and organizing all the musky Luras and leaders that I have scattered about would take effort but not totally.

It does feel good in the spring when everything is perfectly in place.

Yeah. Yeah, I, I can relate to much of what you're saying and I feel like, I feel like maybe I was misleading with my statement.

So let me clarify. My shit is not organized, not by any stretch of the imagination, in any sort of functional sense like unlike you, I can't usually find what I need among the precarious stacks of gear that are just lining my garage. I don't do well with that. What I'm talking about is the the small and useless act of organizing and reorganizing individual boxes.

There is something to battle, not the war. It's like a battle, not the war that I can that feels like something I can handle.

And so I will I'll take all the losers are flies out and just kind of reorganize according to some system that I decided makes more sense this year. Like last year, I decided that all the various prince nymphs that I have, like all the different kind of prince names that I have deserved their own box. And so there's been heavier on them. I've seen them. I've seen. You do have a lot of those. Yeah. Yeah.

Again, guiding out here, you kind of have to. And they used to just be lumped in with all the small stone flies. But I was like, no, I've got enough. They deserve their own box. I pulled them all out and reorganized everything. And will that help me find my prince nymphs or catch more fish? Absolutely not.

I already knew where they were, but still I got a sense of joy out of it. Yeah, it was not useful, but it was joyful.

See, I don't own enough Nîmes to organize them beyond the one standard size fly box that I have for nymphs, you know what I mean? Like, if I broke them down further, we'd have like separate thimbles or something like that of Nîmes.

Anyway, look, I've got no problem with New Year's resolutions just to get back to the to the opening point there.

But if I make one, I won't tell anybody about it. Like I have a problem with public posting of resolutions.

Like if you're going to do it, just shut up and do it for yourself, you know what I mean?

Like, and I could be a jerk here and get flack for this. I don't know.

But I never got that like one week smoke free. You know, 400 people are like, awesome job, bro, keep it up. But then if any of those people see you burning a heater a week later outside the laundromat, now they just know you have no follow through. So why make that public?

You know, I'm sorry I was left out.

I think that's the point. I think that's the point. I think, like that's for people who need the social pressure to keep an agreement with themselves. And. Sure. Great. I don't I don't.

I'm with you, man. I don't want other people judging me for choices I made about my own self and health or whatever.

And like this whole conversation just has me thinking about last episode when we were talking about how New Year's kind of gets you down. And I've actually been thinking about that and and wondering why it doesn't bum me out quite as much. And I think there are a couple of answers. Like, one, we have skiing out here, which makes the the winter nicer. And that might be part of it.

But the real answer, the thing that I've been thinking about is is super deep and like mind blowing. All right. Are you ready for this? Do. Well, lay it on me. The days are getting longer. For dumb and obvious is that sounds because it does. I think I think we sometimes forget that the whole point of having winter holidays are to keep us from losing our minds during the darkest days of the winter. And we made it.

Those days are over. Yeah, from now until June. Every day is going to get just a little longer, just a little brighter, except for, you know, if you happen to be a listener in the Southern Hemisphere, I feel like I feel like you guys get really screwed on this whole deal. All the winter holidays happened in the middle of your summer.

And then what do you have to get you through the dark, cold days of July? Yeah, I never thought about that.

International Day for the fight against illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.

That's not a real thing. International Day of Yoga, World Seafarer Day, all those are actual UN recognized.

For the record, I looked it up anyway. For those of us who live in the top half of the globe, congratulations. We survived the darkest days of the darkest year in recent memory.

You know, amen to that. Amen to that.

I like I like where your head is at. Let's turn the page on this. Some bitch. And from the view out of my social media feed, it looks like many of you are way ahead of us. And I'm seeing lots of pics. You guys getting out and having fun in many of those pics have involved big coats and little rods. But maybe some of you dreamers out there, you have the coat like you figured out the coat part, but just need the perfect little ride to begin your hardware pursuits.

Don't worry. Miles found a super sweet Internet score for you in this week's sale bid.

Why don't you put the head of hair? You don't know what I'm getting that you didn't have to be so hurtful with me.

So angry today in the sale bin, we find a very simple offering. Whoever posted this particular gem on East Idaho, Craigslist is not a person of many words. It's not someone that I would call verbose. They are into the whole brevity thing. The title is simple. Ice fishing poles, that's all it says, there's a lot of things about this that are simple, very simple.

All right, look, I am not an expert on ice fishing.

I enjoy ice fishing. I have some ice gear. I get out when I can. I've worked on some ice fishing shows. I like grilling brats, drinking beer and fishing through holes in the ice as much as the next guy. But I do not claim, like, solid expertise there. Mm hmm. It's just something I do. Yep.

I'm right there with you. I love it, but I don't have all the gear. I'm on somebody else.

Yup. Yup. I mean, I feel like I know stuff, but I know enough to know that I'm not the guy who knows it all.

But when I look at this post. Even I know that something doesn't seem right, because while I might not be the most experienced sailor on the planet, I do know the difference between an ice fishing rod and a fly fishing rod. And what I see pictured in the two photos on this post are just the bottom sections of two very, very crappy fly rods with two very, very crappy flywheels. All right. Just for context, picture the bottom section of a four piece fly rod, the really thick part.

Now, picture that with a couple of snake guides attached and a tip top glued to the end of it. And you've got it. That's that is what is being sold.

You can't zoom in enough on the photo like even the tip guides.

Something looks weird about those, like they were like a repurposed something else that was glued on the end.

I mean, there's there's a lot of creativity here, which I respect. But I think I think there's there's one major problem.

Right, because so as far as I understand it, ice rods have two sort of basic essential qualities. One is that they're short so that you can jig over a hole without sitting six feet away from that hole. That makes sense. And these these fit that bill. They are short. You could do that.

But the other thing that I expect from an ice rod is that it will be sensitive and have a pretty soft tip because you need to detect a light strike and set the hook and a fish up through the ice without breaking a pretty late line. And that's where this this particular innovation, I think, falls short in that respect.

Yeah, it reminds me of a quote, I believe that Gary Lumis once said, I can build you a rod that'll never break. You just won't want to fish with it.

Exactly. I think this is what you're going to use. You might as well just grab, like, the towel bar out of your bathroom and tap a real to it like that that would essentially perform the same function as others. It wouldn't look as cool, but it would do the same thing. So. All right. I respect the repurposing here, right? I mean, you got some old fly rod sitting around, you don't know what to do with them.

Like I got an idea. Maybe I did. Maybe I could turn into a nice rug, but it didn't work. It clearly didn't work. And now someone's trying to sell that bad idea.

Yeah. I got to say, though, ten dollars for both. And that's the thing.

If you needed a couple cheapo reels to knock around with, that's the deal of the century for sure.

For sure. And and honestly, not even that at that price for ten bucks for both. I would consider buying the set just to see the looks on my friends faces when I like, rolled into the ice shack and pulled out these little rods and started digging with them like that. That would be worth ten bucks for me just to see that reaction.

Like, what the hell is that? Those trust. You like it.

So the part that gets me is like, what do you do with this when you're in 80 feet of water, Jigen, for giant Lakers, like you're going to be standing there, there's no quick release on a fly reel.

So you just send energy like wind, rain at all. Right, right, right.

Forty five minutes to get it down the depth. That's the major so I can forgive the half a fly rod, but like stick a couple spinning wheels on there, you know. Yeah, just this is not functional.

It didn't work. You're trying to trying to sell us your mistakes, which, again, good on you. And at least it's cheap.

So that one man I got a lot of laughs out of that.

Whoever posted that in East Idaho. Thank you. If you come across any online fishing gems for sale, just let us know. Send us a link to Bente at the Meat Eater Dotcom. You all been doing a great job sending us those submissions and we do appreciate them. And we look forward to the next ones that you come up with.

So that's true, we have been getting a lot of good Salvin submissions lately, several of you out there sent us a link to someone in Minnesota who's converting old beer taps into ice fishing rods. And while we didn't quite think that one had the legs for its own segment, it definitely deserves an honorable mention. It's a good one.

The only thing that one that we can expand on, I particularly like the fact that they're price not according to the quality of the rod, blanko like the action or anything. But the price is according to how rare the beer tap is, like the standard bud heavy tap goes for 60 bucks.

But if you want the limited edition Bush Lite corn cob tap, that's going to cost you Wando.

Yeah, I mean, I think the rods are all just broken off. Enza ugly sticks.

So like this, no one's not carbon, you know, whatever, you know, priorities.

The priority. Someone also sent me one that was a set of matching beer tap rods. And I believe all the taps had little Montreal Canadiens goalie masks on them. You know, the whole set, I'm sure.

Sure it was Molson anyhow. Whether people are out there using beer, tap rods or normal rods. I have been seeing some stonner lake trout pictures lately.

And I'm jealous, I got to say, because Lake or one of those fish that I rarely get to mess with them, but I love them and find them so fascinating to me, too.

Definitely. I feel like a total dumb ass when it comes to fishing for lake trout because I've only ever caught them by accident. I've never really no, I've never targeted lake trout. But I know like I know enough to know that the people who really get after them have it down to to like a science. There's that due to the guy, Grant Gulley, who took Steve out on the last season of that boat. And I've gotten to know Grant a little bit.

And that guy, he's got the Laker game dialed. He just got to figure it out. Yeah, for sure.

No doubt. One of the coolest things I ever did was I targeted them on the ice in Colorado with legendary guide Bernie Keefe. Awesome dude. And he said in the beginning, he's like, you want to catch a lot or you want to catch giants. And I went with the ladder.

And in two days on the ice at Lake Granby, we only hit five fish, but they were all over 40 inches on giant tuna sized soft plastic wrap.

And to fight fish like that on a tiny rod like scream and drag, it was insane.

It was insane.

And, you know, but of course, seeing where I live, I also have a soft spot for Great Lakes fish, too, because they're one of the few fisheries that we've been able to successfully recover after we've, you know, pretty much damn near wipe them out.

So I go up to the Great Lakes to fly fish for them, though I do understand most guys troll their Lakers, but I hate trolling.

Yeah, that's a great get some. He's he's a young guy. Yeah.

And I'm not a trolling guy. Like if I never go on another billfish trip again, that'll, that'll be fine with me.

And in fact, in today's weekly word, Miles is going to tell you what lake trout and billfish have in common.

Webster's Dictionary defines fish as. This week's word is pelagic. No, not the apparel brand voted most likely to instigate a bar fight in the Fort Lauderdale Airport. Chili's pelagic comes from the ancient Greek word, pelagic kose meaning sea. For the purposes of US anglers, the term usually references the pelagic zone and pelagic fish. The pelagic zone describes the part of a body of water outside the tidal influence of a shoreline and not near any sort of bottom structure pelagic fish or fish that live at least part of the time in that open water.

We're talking tuna, billfish, mahi mackerel, sharks, rays, lake trout.

Yeah, freshwater fish can be pelagic too, if they live in a big enough lake, as well as the massive schools of baitfish on which those species feed herring, whiting, anchovy, jellyfish, flying fish, sardines, smelt and lots of others.

Still, other popular fish migrate between the pelagic and coastal zones like Jacques's Barracuda, Redfish and salmon. Point is, many of our favorite targets are at least partially pelagic. So if you like to fish, you might associate the term with abundance, big fish, bloody decks and full coolers. But the truth of the pelagic zone is very different.

Pelagic actually describes the vast nothingness of open water, one of the most sterile and least hospitable places on the planet. Pelagic fish only make up 11 percent of the total fish species, though they live in the largest aquatic habitat on Earth. And here's the thing that a lot of us don't know. The pelagic zone is actually broken up into five different categories because open water isn't just broad, it's also usually deep. One does anglers talk about the pelagic zone.

We're usually just referencing the surface layer, the epic pelagic zone, which generally extends down about 650 feet depending on the clarity of the water. That's where the vast majority of sunlight, oxygen, energy, nutrients and organisms are found. And not surprisingly, it's also where most of the fish live. But the pelagic zone goes a hell of a lot deeper than that. Below the epic pelagic zone, you find the Messel pelagic zone, Messel being the Greek word for middle.

This area goes down to about three hundred feet and is also known as the Twilight Zone, because even though light does penetrate down that far, it's pretty diffuse. There's not enough sunlight at these depths for photosynthesis. So no plankton, quite a few fish species do live down here, but they come up into shallower water to feed at night and hide in the depths during the day. Below this, you hit the batho pelagic zone from the Greek word Barth's, meaning deep.

This extends from three feet down to 13000 feet. And it's also called the darker Midnite Zone because the no light reaches down here. This is the zone where those creepy deepwater fish that create their own bioluminescence and have ultra black light absorbing skin live. Check out Fish News from a few weeks ago for more details on these strange but fascinating adaptations. The zone is pretty damn inhospitable, at least from a terrestrial perspective. Aside from being completely dark. It's also cold, low on oxygen and high in salinity and pressure.

Fish down here survive either by eating the remains of shallower water, fish that die and sink, or by eating each other. Next, you hit the abyssal pelagic zone from the Greek, a besos meaning bottomless. This goes from 13000 feet down to nearly 20000 feet and is where many of the deepest oceans bottom out. But in certain places like the Mariana Trench, the ocean goes to an even deeper zone, the Hado Pelagic Zone, sometimes called the underworld.

Since Hado comes from Hades, the Greek God of the dead, we're talking about depths down to 36000 feet. And honestly, we don't really know what lives in that zone because we can't get there for me.

Like lots of other anglers, I think the word pelagic conjures up images of early morning offshore runs sinking the horizon blobs in the bubble trail, trolling lines popping off outriggers, scrambling shards of fish on long, sweaty stints in a fighting harness, prismatic flashes through blue water and if you're lucky, a well-placed Gafoor tag followed by high fives and cold beer. It's a word that we've appropriated to describe a particular kind of fishing big targets in open water. But the actual definition of pelagic doesn't fit that fantasy very well.

It's a place of scarcity, a massive, watery desert that includes the least comfortable parts of this planet.

I don't exactly know what all this says about fishing culture. Maybe it reflects our optimism, our confidence that we can find the haystack needles that are pelagic fish.

Maybe it just shows that we don't actually understand the English language all that well, or maybe it speaks to the kind of native intelligence common among our kind. I know a lot of anglers who barely pass biology class by sitting tall behind the smart kids, but can recite exactly which boys fads, seamounts and wreck. Hold particular fish in any given conditions. The one thing you got wrong, I believe Hank Parker fish the Hato Plague Zone well over a dozen years ago with flying lures the spider wire.

Yeah, it was all about the spider wire. It was right when spider wire came out and it was like, you want to hit the Hato plague zone, you know, spider wire that you're going to need lead core for that.

Oh, yeah, I'm kidding. But going on what she said there, that's pretty much how I got through some of my science classes, dude.

Like I was I was never bold enough to blatantly cheat on the test, but I damn sure copied some homework. I also somehow ended up in AP bio one year. And what I did in that situation was just simply fail.

I had I did not I intentionally did not sign up for AP bio because I knew that if I had, I would have either failed or cheated. I don't know why I did it. I really don't. That was a bad choice.

But unfortunately for us, there are no notes to steal or shoulders to peek over because it's just the two of us going mano a mano in fish news. That escalated quickly. All right, so before we kick in the news, I do have one fan shout out this week and that's going to Tyler Berman, who e-mailed us. And the subject line of that e-mail was, Dude snorted a sanko. And I followed the Reddit link in this e-mail to a video of a man getting a sinco removed from his nose by a doctor.

Now, you watch this.

A doctor, a doctor. I'm using I'm using air quotes in my voice, in case you couldn't tell a doctor.

OK, so I. Good. So you saw this. Do you watch this, too? And this isn't a news story we can officially use. It's not news. And I think the reason is because as you've just hinted at, I'm calling total bullshit on the whole video.

I'm calling it 100 percent fake.

Got to be bullshit, but I can't figure out why anyone would stage such an elaborate fake. It's not like why. I don't know.

I don't know. And perhaps it's already been debunked. I don't know how long it's been around, but I don't think the doctor is real or anything because this dweeb is acting like he has a length of barbed wire jammed up his nose and they remove this sinco painfully slowly with with with tweezers.

Here's a bit of audio. Oh, man, oh, sorry, it's just so I just feel so weird, sorry.

Yeah, and then and then later, a little bit later, here's this OK clip. OK.

And I don't know if you read the comments man, but most of them were saying what I was thinking, which was just pull it out. Yeah. Why are we extracting this. Why is this doing one centimeter at a time like it feels like one of those. I don't know if this is is it Asmar videos the weird like.

Oh yeah. Yeah.

It smells like they're trying to drag out the sound of the plastic slowly sliding from his nostril cavity.

Like, I mean, first of all, Sancho's are lubricated out of the package, man. Like if I was there. Yeah. If I, if I had a choice between a sinco or like a big pen jammed up my scooter, I'd take the Sanco every time, you know.

And also when it finally wiggles out, it's oddly void of boogers.

So I'm calling I'm calling this fake. Right. But Tylor.

Yeah. I appreciate you saying that.

I want to say one more thing, but if you watch this video like it is very elaborately staged, there's like a very doctor seeming actor and a code and a lot like they spent some time and some effort and some resources making this and I cannot understand why.

So that's, that's what and not that I expect many people to like just know this off the top of their head. But the guy who's getting it pulled out of his nose looks like the lead singer of Mudhoney.

He does not. You're absolutely right. Yeah. There you go. So that's my fan shout out, Tyler. Thank you.

I mean, I've got my little early one, and I'm not going to shout anybody out by name on this one. And it'll make sense in a second. But it does connect to that in sort of the shape of the bait.

A lot of people lately have reached out to us with links to lures in the shape of penises.

And I got to admit that I was I was totally ignorant of this, like, propensity that Angler's seem to have for casting out phallic lures and trying to get fifty them.

I had no idea that was a thing.

And we've gotten we've got links to crank beats, stick beats, soft plastics, all.

But I remember I know where you're going, though, here. So we've gotten a lot of links to ones that are premade for sale. Are you going to the gentleman that made his own.

I'm not calling him out, but yes, that's one of the ones. Yeah, he's one of the ones that I'm not.

He said he sent us an email. He said, I got a 3D printer for Christmas and I made this top order. And it's a it's a penis and nuts. And like in my head, I'm like, why? Why did you make that? And furthermore, why why did why did you send that to.

That's where I'm going. Where I'm going is I don't get it. Like, is this some weird desire to debase the fish?

Is it like some kind of, like, dominance thing? I, I don't I don't know. I don't I don't get it.

I believe it's all I don't believe anybody's using those wiener laws. It's just like it's like a joke you buy for your friend. But it was funny thirty years ago, like these are not new. Like you've been able to buy them boobie and wiener laws forever. You just had to do it, you know, through mail order instead of on Facebook. But it's like the Spencer's gifts of the fishing world is that we're saying. Yeah, pretty.

Yeah, pretty much so. I think what we're both saying is we love seeing weird stuff from you guys, but you can stop with the dick laws.

Like we're not doing a sale ban on the dick laws. Nope.

We're not sharing your homemade dick laws on Instagram, which I don't know why you'd want us to do that anyway, you know, anyway.

Oh, anyway, I just I had to get like they keep coming, so I felt like they had to be addressed by open. But let's let's move on to some fish news, maybe something a little more substantive. OK, all right. All right. Fair enough. Fair enough.

So I get to kick off this week as a reminder, as always, this is a competition, Miles, and I don't know what stories the other guy's bringing to the table. And Mad Man audio engineer Phil will declare a news victor at the end. And I'm going to start off today with a nod to a buddy of mine, Jason Knaack, who's a journalist of the highest caliber, exquisite writer.

And I met Jason two summers ago. He was working on a piece about snakeheads on the Delaware River watershed for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and he tagged along with me on a snake hunt.

Now, this is a caveat that has nothing to do with the story.

I just I just have to tell it right. I just have to bring it up. At the time I met Jason, he was a very clean cut, well-dressed man. And then last summer, last summer, I'm snakehead fishing on the side of the road in South Jersey and up pulls this pickup with a kayak stashed in the back. And out pops a long haired, very unshaven Jason wearing like a full brim boonie hat and like he's all sweaty.

And it turned out he became so snakehead obsessed. He now spends his summers just mucking around the swamps of South Jersey and I like, ruined Somalia.

But tell you what, Jason is still writing and writing very well. And he recently had a story in The New York Times. Times headlined the problem with problem sharks. OK, and I'm going to summarize a lot of this because it's a long one.

All right. But here's the gist. We all know I think we all know what shark culls are. Shark bites. A swimmer causes mass hysteria.

And in the past, even here in the U.S., that would lead to the killing of a bunch of sharks in the area of the attack. Right. With the idea being you're getting rid of the problem.

OK, now, while these full on bloodbaths don't happen like they used to in other countries, particularly South Africa and Australia, they do still use nets and baited hooks time to time. They're still deployed along some beaches where swimmers and large numbers of sharks often mingle.

So there is a doctor, Dr. Eric Clutha, Clue Sea Lewa.

It's French. I don't know how to pronounce do you know how to pronounce?

And I'm going to which is going called Dr. Kalua, OK? And he's a marine biologist based in Paris. And he says he's figured out how we can get away from shark culls, which, as the story says, is like executing everyone in a police lineup in order to ensure justice was dispensed on the guilty party. I'm going to quote from Jason's story here.

Fascinating.

Dr. Lewis said he has found a way to make precision strikes on sharks that have attacked people through a form of DNA profiling he calls bioprinting.

And he believes it's usually just solo, quote, problem sharks that attack humans repeatedly analogizing them to terrestrial predators that have been documented behaving the same way instead of culling every bear, tiger or lion when only one has seriously attacked people, wildlife managers on land usually focus their ire on the culprit.

Dr. Clu has said the problem, sharks could be dispatched the same way.

Once a database of these bite prints is built, DNA could be collected from the wounds of people who were bitten by sharks and matched to a known shark. The offending shark would then need to be found and killed. OK, OK, with me so far, I'm with you, I have a couple of questions, but let's honest. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So many other people in the science field have pooh poohed this idea. And I don't necessarily mean the bioprinting part. Right.

It seems most agree that collecting DNA, you know, via byte print could work.

Right. And not Cluett is is perfecting the technique using tiger sharks in French Polynesia. And here's a quote. He says, I'll let them bite a peg leg or something else with flesh, muscle and bone.

And that's what he's using, the perfectness DNA collection from a bite wound. But many people are saying, first of all, the idea of a rogue jaws like problem shark has been long debunked, like there's really no science that that proves that's a real thing, Cluett is saying.

On the other hand, his research and data collection will prove the opposite. The problem, sharks do exist. But I mean, here's where we get our fish tie, right?

What what what this guy fails to address in this, even though other sources who aren't even anglers have addressed it very loudly in the piece is OK.

Like, let's say this this data collection proves there's a problem shark that's bitten three people. How do you now single it out and targeted? That's just that was that was my question.

Yeah. That's that's like I do know which one it is from the DNC. He doesn't address that at all. Right. And that's just not how fishing works. So if I'm understanding this right, like theoretically a great white could bite someone in, say, Cape Cod. And by the time you get the data back, assuming that there's a pool, a pool of data.

Right.

Like, I imagine that shark would have had to have bitten other people, at least two people, at least two people for for, you know, proper data to be collected. And then you take the time to determine, oh, yeah, that's the problem, shark. It could be one hundred and twenty miles off Jersey and 500 feet of water. Like, you can't just take a boat out in the ocean and say, I want that one.

So in my opinion, this is just a case of hard core science, not jiving with simple common sense. Like in my head it's like teeters on ridiculous. It's like saying, you know, new study finds serial killers drive cars.

Well, yeah, but it doesn't it doesn't help us find them.

So I, I tend to give researchers the benefit of the doubt in these things. Not always. Right.

But they're generally pretty smart folks who understand complex problem solving. So. Right.

I would love to be able to ask this guy like what's your what's your solution, man? Like, OK, you've got the DNA of a problem shark. How do you know they're 500 sharks in this area? How do you tell which one is the one without killing all of them or something? I don't get it. No, no, you're right. But, you know, if you could tell which one, how do you target that shark in a pack of.

Yeah, I just don't see I don't see how that would ever work. I don't I don't doubt that hypothetically that database could be created. But in my opinion, it would take a damn long time like we like we were saying in order to identify one of those sharks, wouldn't it have to bite multiple people? And you'd have to have the DNA from multiple people?

I mean, you could what it would do. Here's what I'll say. It would prove or disprove the idea of problem sharks.

And so if that's what we're going for here, you could say like, oh, this this person in this person, this person, we're all bit it's the same shark, OK, but yeah.

But even that man, I don't know, I could counter argue that and say that, like, if you look at the New Jersey attacks from close to shore, the book I did on Philistines here, there's a million theories as to why those sharks were there doing that.

And in a lot of cases, they point to environmental things. It's not like those fish were blood hungry for humans.

They were were they weren't supposed to be here, got pushed there because of weather factors or, you know, they ran out of a food source here.

Like what what what is a problem? Shark. OK, but regardless of the reason why they get there, you can say the same thing about bears in that we do have problem bears. They're usually environmental factors that drive a bear to seek an alternate food source that maybe become human based, whether it's human food or people. Yeah, but once that's happened, then that bear is a problem. I said it will continue to seek out that food source.

And so that's where I would say it could be valuable.

OK. All right. Well, I sort of I find the shark. I'll use their problem. I don't think we have to figure something else out of that.

There's a lot more work to be done here, you know? Yeah. There's a lot more work to be done.

And on the kind of on the subject of areas of fisheries management where we have a lot of work to do, I'm going to pivot from the salt to the fresh air. And, you know, in previous fish news segments, we've talked quite a lot about the detrimental impacts of fertilizer, specifically phosphorus on water quality.

Right. And just a little quick update, nutrients from fertilizer used and lawns, golf courses in agriculture get into waterways and then concentrate in lakes and then cause algae blooms lead to all kinds of problems like oxygen depletion, cyanobacteria.

These are things we talked about. And this is a major and growing problem in fisheries across the globe. Right.

You think about the massive red tides and fish kills in Florida or the blue green algae warnings that seem to be just growing in scope and scale every summer all over the place. So in light of all that, here's my question on this story. Why is a ranch on Colorado's Blue River requesting permits to intentionally add phosphorus to the river?

And why do some conservation groups and environmental advocates support the idea?

All right, so I'm going to I'm going to give you a little backstory here so we can put you. What was that supposed to answer yet? No, you're not supposed to say that was hypothetical.

Rhetorical, right? Not a hypothetical rhetorical. All right. First, a little back story. The Blue River cuts through the mountains of central Colorado on the west side of the Continental Divide in the 1960s, as Colorado's front range population began to expand, city planners realized that they didn't have enough water to support the number of people they were hoping to attract into these metropolitan areas. East of the divide. We're talking about Denver, Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Fort Collins.

So they devised massive pipeline projects to divert water through the mountains from the wetter western side to the drier east side where all the people want to live because it's warm and sunny. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. The back story on these water diversion projects is, like, fascinating in and of itself. It's worthy of its own segment. But I ain't got time for all that right now. I just need to give you the basics.

What's important here is that the blue is one of the rivers that gets diverted, moving water from the Dillane Reservoir over to the South Platte River. And therefore, Denver Dillane Reservoir sits above a 230 one foot high bottom release dam, meaning that the water flowing out of that dam into the Blue River below comes from the lower reaches of the water column. So it remains at a relatively constant temperature that's optimal for trout never getting too hot in the summer or too cold in the winter.

Just about every famous trout fishery in the US sits below a bottom, at least for exactly that reason.

And and the blue has long been a famous trout fishery. It's known for producing just massive rainbows and big browns.

Two part of the reason that fishery has remained so healthy is that in the 1980s, as the mountain towns grew in the Upper Blue River basin, water quality measures enacted very strict regulations on wastewater discharge, which kept levels of pollutants, including phosphorus, pretty low. For several decades, the blue was arguably one of the best trophy trout rivers in Colorado and and the country really guides and outfitters proliferated and profited and private ranches were bought up along the banks, creating exclusive access for their owners and clientele.

One of those ranches, Blue Valley Ranch, owns a stretch so noted for its big fish that local anglers refer to it as Jurassic Park. OK, so now fast forward to 2016.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife stripped a 19 mile stretch of the blue, which includes the Jurassic Park section of its gold medal status, because they found that the size and number of trout in the river had significantly declined. Biologists explained that the water lacked nutrients. So basically many of the nutrients flowing into the system were getting trapped in Dillane Reservoir and not making their way through the dam. Low nutrients means few aquatic plants, which means low numbers of aquatic insects, which means no no food for trout.

Yeah. So this year, Blue Valley Ranch, a 25000 acre swath of land which again houses that Jurassic Park section, wants to pilot a program that would intentionally add nearly 2000 gallons of phosphorus to the river annually in order to boost nutrient levels and hopefully fish size and populations. Now, this could sound like an evil plot by a rich landowner to improve the fishing on his private stretch of river at the expense of the ecosystem. But it's not actually that simple.

Paul Tudor Jones, the second who owns the ranch, the dude, he's actually proven himself to be like a pretty good steward of the land in the water and wildlife. He's he spent a lot of his money trying to improve habitat. He built these these these wildlife corridors to get through the busy highway near there. There were less issues. He set up a foundation that works to protect the mangroves in Florida. And he's just he's done a ton of stream habitat restoration on the blue, which not only benefits him, but all the anglers, the fish, that river.

So various local conservation groups and water planning organizations are backing this project that includes Trout Unlimited, the Blue River Watershed Group and the Colorado Basin Roundtable. And they're hoping that this has the potential to rehabilitate the section of the river. But what I want what is rehabilitation really mean here, we're talking about an artificial system that's been dammed and redirected and planted with completely non-native fish that grow to disproportionately large sizes. Sarah Marshall, an eco hydrologist with the Colorado Natural Heritage Program at Colorado State University.

She sees value in the Blue Valley ranchers experiment, but said further tinkering with the river to restore it could have risks. She told the Aspen Times the proposed study sounds like a Band-Aid rather than fixing the underlying causes of degraded stream habitat. And I got to say, as I so often am, I'm torn on this one. I fish the blue and it's it's an incredible fishery. Like, it's it's amazing. And I hate to see a second stream lose its fish, particularly one that's as good as that one.

But I'm also not totally comfortable with intentionally adding phosphorus to a river when we're working so hard to limit the nutrient load in so many of our waters. It might help that 20 mile stretch that's lacking nutrients, but then just add to the problem downstream. Right. It seems like one of those situations where we've completely screwed up the natural system and we're just going to keep doing more and more tinkering, thinking that, like screwing it up further will fix what we've already done.

But projects like that don't really have a great track record. So it's a tough one, man.

Yeah, man. And this is a hard one for me to speak to because I certainly know the blue. I've never fished yet. I mean, I'm not I'm not that in tune with that particular river, but you can't help but see both sides of it. I mean, without knowing what the vegetation in there look like. I mean, that that is important. And forget all the pollution and conservation. I mean, you get a high water year here on the river and then the grass doesn't grow.

The fishing sucks in certain spots like you like you do need that.

And sometimes I also think that you can overprotect something because, I mean, if you look at something like this that was so special and blue ribbon, how many great trout streams out there are not protected nearly as much as this one is.

I mean, especially like I look at Pennsylvania, there's a lot of great trout streams in Pennsylvania that I mean, they're not coddled the way some of these Western fisheries are. There's all kinds of shit dumping into them and they still fish and they have big fish in them. And so I'm not saying you can't do anything, but I mean, I don't have a firm answer on that either, because I see I see the value both ways.

But I mean, this wasn't this was not a trophy trout stream initially. Originally, we're talking about what it used to be. It was you know, it used to be probably a pretty good touch, cutthroat stream, but no one really knows because there was so much mining activity in that area in the eighteen hundreds, it basically killed everything off. Right.

And then in the 1960s, they built this dam to send water over to Denver that created this bottom release fishery that grew these massive trout.

And for 40 years it was great. And then they ran on nutrients. It's not great anymore. So, I mean, what are we fixing? What are we trying to restore?

Yeah, you're fixing something that was manufactured from from from the get go.

Right, really? And I get it like I love big trout streams, too. I love bottom release dams. I love Stillwater's.

There's some of my favorite places to fish. But is it worth potentially adding more phosphorus load to the greater Colorado River system that could mess things up downstream just to have that one piece go back to what it was for a very short period of time?

The correct the correct answer to that is probably not. I mean, probably not. But I mean, did you know how anglers are, man? It's like people care most about what where they're fishing and how it affects what they want to do. And I mean, that's that's a problem with so many conservation issues is we're worried about right here now and not fifty miles from here.

I mean, it happens all the time. And look, I get a lot of people make their living guide that river. And I'm not trying to say that their needs aren't serious or significant. I'm sure. I just it's a hard one.

It's complicated. It's a very hard one. It's very and I don't I don't think we'll we'll necessarily resolve it here. But by all means, email us, weigh in. We'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

And how do I say this? Well, hopefully it'll get back to a status of some serious meat eating trout, gigantic meat eaters, which is that's a that's a shit Segway, but.

You know, I just want to see where it goes now, like, really. But here's here's where it's going to go, because this is a fun one that's ironically going to pair perfectly with this week's Closing and the Line segment. So stay tuned for that. But you'll know where that's going. As soon as I read this headline here from Louisiana Sportsman to Catfish Eat Family of Ducks.

OK, so this pair, this pair of blue cats was caught by angler Nick Price near Haoma and the fish weighed 19 and a half and twenty point two pounds. So definitely respectable blue cat's right, but not like supertanker monsters either. And according to the story Nick noticed, the guts on these cats were abnormally distended.

So after falling, he slit open the stomachs and outpoured a whole family of ducks.

Wow. OK, and Nick says one cat was full of just babies. The other one had one baby and the momma duck. So, like the full grown duck rights can't be Malad. That's all I'm going to say. There's no way these are there's got to be a smaller duck.

And so, anyway, I'm going to throw a shot up on the on our weekly bent insta story so you guys can see it.

They're pretty. You could tell their ducks they're kind of decomposed.

And I'm not I'm not a bird person. I don't know what they are, but one is definitely a full grown duck. OK. And because that's what I thought, like babies. I understand. But the mama duck, that's impressive, especially considering these were not 40, 50 pound blue cats like 20 is good, but it's not it's not insane. So Nick, Nick reckons the fish were paired up and swimming around together when they happened upon the Ducks Worth family here.

And he says he showed this the pictures of the stomach contents to his dad and uncle.

And they've both been cat fishing in this area for 50 years and said they'd never seen anything like that. Now, remember that part right there as you venture into the end of the line segment, 50 years, the local cat crew had never seen anything like this. That will be important again later. But Nick says he did do some research and found some video of catfish taking shots at ducks and other birds, which I've seen them wells, catfish over in Europe.

Oh, yeah, you're right. You know, but I don't I don't think Nick's going to start baiting with with duck parts. He did, however, ad and I'm quoting here, I have an unusual catfish bait. It only catches a big catfish. It won't catch a lot, but you catch bigger ones with more meat than five small ones. His secret speckled trout belly. Hmm. Now he says it's prime catfish bait. They love it.

I've been using here for at least three years. My biggest catch has been about 38 pounds neck.

Like what? Just right on the ducks. Like, why are you giving shit away like that?

Yeah, you know, we're good. There's a chance that we're going to tell it to everybody.

But, you know, I mean, we kind of just. So I just thought that was an interesting little one.

You know, the birds pop up now and again, the mice in the voles and the things and the trout stomachs.

But I don't ever recall seeing a whole family of ducks in blue cat stomachs before. No, I haven't.

I've actually I've never caught a blue cat, so I can't speak to it, but no.

Oh, really? Oh, well, black.

I know that I've got lots of other cats, but I've never got a blue eye sort of for my my second story today, I also went a little bit more like light hearted and fun.

Not not quite so science and serious. You know, it's a but but like you, you know, you went you went salt into fresh and I went fresh air now into salt.

So we're getting a whole smattering of everything. And I'll admit my first story was really long. So the second one is going to be pretty short.

I got I got to close with the best headline, and that's purely why I picked the story, the best headline I found all week. Fish sex organs boosted under high CO2, and this one came from his dog, one of those science journalism websites that I enjoyed, just like hanging around on and I'm going to file this in the very, very slim category of benefits of climate change.

So a new study out of the University of Adelaide found that one particular species of fish looks like it may actually benefit from ocean acidification. You know, that's happening right now as a result of increased CO2 in the atmosphere, the common triple fin or for Sterry Jieun Lipin them.

I know. I believe that is a shallow water species found off the coast of New Zealand when exposed to increased levels of oceanic acidity. These fish produce more sperm and eggs and take better care of their fertilized over. The research team compared the often found in areas of underwater volcanic seeps that naturally have high levels of carbon dioxide with fish found outside those areas.

And they discovered that those fish experienced no negative effects from acidification and significant increase in gonad production. The males in the area of high acid ate and forage more, and the females devoted more of their energy to ovarian production. The researchers also found that the males spent more time and energy guarding the fertilized eggs, which might lead to better recruitment. So there's the good news in all this.

The bad news is that we're talking about tide pool fish that grow to a whopping eight centimetres. So I don't think you're going to look for the triple fin to take the place of your favorite sport fish, which are not going to fare so well from acidified oceans. But something's going to do.

All right. I don't even know what to say about that. I was thinking that maybe they were like a different version of the triple tail. I know. I know. I was I was just I was like, oh, oh, oh.

Like, no, no. We're talking about tiny little tide pool fish. That that will do great when everything else does.

Here's what I'll say about that. I once did an interview with a very smart gentleman who wrote a very great book about micro fishing.

And I was like, what is all this about? And it was a very interesting conversation. But one of the things that he said is like, you know, micro fisherman might be laughing all the way to the bank because at some point, like that might be what's left. And then you have not honed your micro fishing skills and therefore will not survive.

So. Don't joke, you never know these, you know what, if you don't, I don't know. I don't know what we're in for in 30 years or what's going to be the thing that makes me most excited. It might be a whopper. I got an eight centimetre bro. Yeah. But at the same time, it's huge.

Like like when are we when are we going to get like the like the, you know, some climate change thing produces ten pound bluegills, you know, like we've been hearing about that our whole life, like the radioactive like we get some of that, you know, you know, well at least we know at least one fish.

Seems like he's going to benefit from it. So maybe others will, too. Who knows? We'll we'll we'll all find out soon enough.

We can only hope that we clean up the whole climate and the whole thing or we just hope for, like, you know, stupid radioactive fish.

Phil's got a lot to take in here. We got sexual fish organs, duck duck sauce, the catfish with duck sauce.

Catfish. Yeah, Miracle-Gro. Sprinkle a little Miracle-Gro and your favorite trout stream and shark hunting. Phil let us know what you're thinking, man.

We'll see which way you sway this weekend. As soon as we're done hearing from you, it's on to awkward moments and angling. Quack, quack, Joe Smellie, you are the winner this week. Also, I just wanted to ask you guys for a favor for a friend of mine. If you guys come across any news stories about how increased CO2 levels can improve the performance of human sex organs or anything, it doesn't have to be CO2.

Go ahead and pass the stories along to me and offered them on to my friend for, you know, but no reason.

Thanks. When you take a picture of a. So I want to say I feel bad about what we're about to do here, but I don't know, I can't I can't feel bad because you guys send us shots to trash like you guys opt into this.

You put the shit talk ball squarely in our court and you say things like, here's a picture, destroy me. So I can't I can't feel too bad because those are the emails that we get. But no guilt at all. Exactly right.

But I'm going to enjoy this one a little more than usual because today's awkward moment, awkward photo is from a friend of mine.

And today we're going to deconstruct a photo of this pal or maybe former pal Kevin Hughes. And when he sent this shot, he didn't even provide a back story. He was basically like, hey, you said you were looking for awkward shots. Here you go. That's what I got from Kevin.

Yes. And I don't know Kevin at all, but I feel zero issue with trashing this one because. Awkward. Awkward it is. Yeah.

Again, I don't know this guy, but I'm going to go ahead and say that Kevin is either just incredibly self-confident, like just just one of those people who's automatically comfortable in their skin, no matter how they look, or totally unaware of what he was getting into when he offered up the shot.

Well, I can tell you that he's totally confident now because a quick bit of back story on Kev.

I've known him for years and he lives down in Miami. And you can find him on the Instagram at Small Craft Advisory Fishing, which is a very clever name, considering his shtick, his kayak fishing. And he produces all kinds of cool videos and social media and even guides a bit.

But when I say kayak fishing, I mean like giant tapin and snook and tuna and all kinds of macho stuff, like he gets after it. Kevin's not at the golf course pond, you know what I mean?

And while I don't have time to explain why, I also believe he's one of the luckiest anglers on the planet. I have joked with with mutual friends more than once that he has a horseshoe stuck up his ass. So good for him. He's lucky. Kevin is also a gorgeous man, like, no kidding. Over the years, my own wife has been like, OMG, Kevin Hughes is so hot.

And I'm like, oh yeah, this is not a famous celebrity. It's a buddy.

And I'm like, other than being in shape and cut and having the stamina to paddle far enough that to catch sailfish on a kayak, we're basically the same person, Honma, you know. Yeah.

I'm sure that, you know, other than other than his, like, seemingly chiseled physique is his southern location and his badass has jackalope tattoo. You guys are basically twins. We are.

But then Kevin had to go send us this photo of him in April 2001, standing on the shore of a Colorado lake.

And I don't even know where to begin, but I guess I'll start here. 14 year old Kevin was not so cut. Not at all. And let's just say he was likely familiar with oxy or Stridex pads.

OK, and look, I was too. I'm not making fun of that. I'm just we're stating facts about the photo. Yeah. Pointing things out.

And I felt the need to go there, know that that's I think that's earned. And I also feel like I got to say I was an oxy guy myself. And for the youngins out there who grew up in the Big Pharma generation, we're talking about a stringent acne pad's.

All right.

Not hillbilly heroin, but I'm not I'm not one to pick on the little kids pimples. I'd consider that a low blow. I will reserve my ridicule for the clothes that his mom proudly bought for him and young Kevin's mom seems like she had good taste because his attire is what's what's what's the adjective?

Stunning. It's stunning. I'm dying to get into that shirt, but I will I will start at the top. I will hold back. Kevin is wearing a white Abercrombie visor, which leads me to believe that he was either the last preppy kid still wearing Abercrombie in 2001 or he was really into Eminem.

And I hope it was the latter. Like, I hope the when he wasn't fishing, he was just watching Eight Mile on repeat and daydreaming about himself winning rap battles, let's say strong chance there were Slim Shady posters in his room.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, OK, you mentioned the shirt. The shirt sort of backs that up. OK, this shirt, it's loose, fluffy and breathable, buttoned up like a Hawaiian shirt, but it's got this crazy Asian print happening, right?

I mean, it's all over the place. It's a white shirt, but it's just slathered with Chinese letters and dragons. Just all different color dragons, man, like randomized all over the shirt.

I'm pretty sure I hate to interrupt you, but I'm pretty sure that when I saw Wu Tang play in Hawaii, one of them was wearing that shirt. Oh, you saw Wu Tang?

Yeah, I did, man. All right. We can't get off on that now, but there you go.

So that's that's you just made the shirt cooler and kind of ruined the whole make fun of the thing.

But anyway, I look at it, I'm like, well, this is kind of foreshadowing, right? Because I was like, it's kind of kind of a little bit Scarface.

And Kevin did end up moving to Miami, you know what I mean? So it's like a little picture of the future, like what he's going to rock and, you know, where he lives.

But I can't you see him at the mall with his friends falling in love with that shirt, like, you know, while there were no adults there, like eyeball, you know, weird clothes and stuff. When I was at the mall with my friends and my dad had a pair of is my dad be like, what the hell you wearing? Bell bottoms, you know, happened all the time. I mean, yes, I could relate to that.

But the shirt does not flag that way for me. It's like I think we have different perspectives on that shirt. The Asian themed Hawaiian shirt just doesn't throw me at all. I can picture. I can actually picture so I think some of my high school teachers wore that shirt in the late 90s, if I'm being honest, and I would probably still rock that shirt to this day.

I could see where I you know what? Damn it, I could see you wearing that shirt.

Yeah, I could do a Christmas party or something. Yeah, totally.

Or just out fishing on a summer day. It could happen. I will admit that the shirt feels a little out of place, like with the backdrop of the Colorado High Mountain Lake.

So, yeah, I see, I see how it's a little out of place there, but I can't throw too much shade because I could see myself doing that. But let's let's move up the shirt. Let's move on to the fish.

Yes. Kevin's holding a small rainbow trout. And it's not like when I say small, we're not talking like four inches of Furi. Small it's but it's also not it's not what I would put into the hog category. No, right. Let's just let's call it a venture. It's a perfectly respectable fish for a fourteen year old kid to get excited about. He could have used maybe a little guidance on the whole, like maybe loosen up the bull hand around the death grip.

But again, I've seen worse. It's not the worst I've seen. Yeah.

See, we may disagree here, but like what strikes me is the look on his face. Right. A face, by the way, that's wearing glasses that I don't recall being in style. OK, just very thin, gold framed oblong, not sunglasses.

These are like glasses, glasses that I just I don't feel match his age. It's like he's trying to find his own style with with the ensemble, with the clothing.

But like, these are the glasses, like his mom bought him six years earlier that he's still wearing.

OK, but anyway, I don't think the ensemble belongs in this fishy setting. And his face to me looks as though someone else caught the trout and handed it to him and said, he oh, my trout for a sec, dude. And then like before he could respond and say, I don't know how to hold a fish, someone quickly snapped this photo. That's what I see. I get that. The thing that sticks out for me on that one is just his apparent total lack of enthusiasm.

Right.

And it doesn't come off like it doesn't come off like the I'm too cool to look excited, aloof teenager thing, which I would understand for a fourteen year old. It doesn't feel like that it feels strangely more wholesome. Like if I were to caption this photo, it would say something like, hey, this fish and stuff is pretty neat. That's just what I would.

You said that you say it like the moose from Wally World.

So I say, yeah, this fish is a pretty neat one. But my big takeaway from the photo is that I'm looking at someone who has no business being as comfortable and confident in his body as he seems to be, like, I don't know how you can have that look of confidence and be the 14 year old kid that he is. And it seems like I got to see I got to say, it seems like it's all worked out for him because you say to I sprouted into an absolute angling bad ass he has.

And my my final point here is that this picture should provide hope to all the mid puberty kids out there stuck somewhere between wanting to be caved in.

I don't know what's called post Balón, depending on. And they're like they're like trying to make this decision based on what they think is going to get them, get them more attention from the people that they're interested in romantically. But here's a hint for all of you. It's always the musician and the fisherman. Oh, yeah. Just plain and simple.

You'll make it so much more being a drummer in a Def Leppard cover band, you know, especially considering you have two arms then, like winning the Bassmaster Classic. It's true. But listen, there there is a video of Kevin out there paddling under ten docks with a forty pounds. Snoke on the line. Passing is right around, pilings twelve times. And you're watching this go. And there's no way this dude is landing this fish. But he does amazing angler cuz you're an American bad ass and we do thank you for sending this to everyone else.

If you're dying to be this embarrassed on our podcast, please keep those shots coming to bent at the meat eater dotcom.

You know, I got to say, Kevin's story is the life story of his that you laid out there kind of makes me think of the fairy tale, The Ugly Duckling. You remember that one?

Of course I do. It's classic.

Yeah, I feel like. I feel like when I was a kid, I got the modern, like, watered down version of that original story because I was looking at I was I was looking this up some to do with, like, get my kid new books and the original by Hans Christian Andersen. And it's like so many other classic fairy tales, it's so much more brutal. Oh, yeah, stuff the kids get nowadays, like it's not a nice little fun story.

No, totally, man. Like, my daughter is really into The Little Mermaid and, you know, Disney, the whole deal. And I but I found out much to my surprise not long ago that was originally a Hans Christian Andersen tale. I did not know that. And in his book, in order to walk on land, she had to drink a potion that made her feel like she was constantly walking on knives.

Oh, I mean, how terrible is that? And then after enduring all that pain, the prince marries another gal and the Little Mermaid kills herself.

So they left that out of the musical, you know, and we want to be part of that world. And, you know. Oh, that's good.

That's good. Yeah. I mean, you look at that stuff and then we wonder why we're bitching about the fact that kids are softer nowadays and they were in the eighteen hundreds anyway. I didn't mean to derail us into talking about gory fairy tales and sensitive children. I was really trying to set up a nice little Segway there because for end of the line, Joe is going to tell us about some ugly ducklings whose entire purpose in life is to elicit violence if it's not loud enough.

But. Tracing the history of any style of law to its true origins is often pretty difficult. The first Frogh laws as an example, we're likely widdled in a backwoods cabin and crushing fish long before the world was introduced to the rubber snag.

Prufrock In many cases, Allures story starts when either the inventor or someone with more business savvy than the inventor begins mass production. And such is the case with the first duckling law. I went down quite a rabbit hole trying to get a bead on the first duckling to hit a tackle shop shelves.

And to the best of my research, it was the duck spelled creb d u k.

Multiple kind of reliable sources have its mass production starting in the 1950s. That mass production happened in the town of Oregon, Ohio and the Cree duck was the brainchild of Mr. Bill Zabo.

The creator was made of molded plastic and looks exactly, precisely like a classic bathtub rubber ducky. The bait has a flat bottom and it's through wired with one big old hunk and treble hook dangling behind the ass region. On either side of that hook, two more wires create little duckling legs, each with a small silver spinner blade.

At the end, critics, at least per eBay, were available in classic black and yellow, black and white and even white and cinnamon. Those zabo was eventually bought out by a larger manufacturer. It seems as though the Crytek was made through at least the 1970s. What's most interesting about it, however, is its origin, which I learned about from a single magazine ad I found online from the 1960s that appears to be written by Zabo himself. Across the top, it reads, Indian Guide tells all.

Now you can use his secret to catch big fish having fish.

The river system in northern Canada. I knew right away he was talking about the Cree Indians, hence the name. The ad says nobody could figure out how the Cree guides were managing to consistently catch stringers of massive pike. Which is silly because I know for a fact the pike up there will swipe at a gym sock.

Still, it goes on to say, it was only after I had become almost a blood brother to an Indian guide that I found out how they were using a crudely carved and painted wooden duckling with hooks attached.

Zabo even guaranteed success with your duck in the ad and offered a full refund within ten days if you weren't satisfied.

I cannot help but wonder how many refunds he gave because I have never been satisfied with the duckling lure, not once ever. And in my opinion, they fall squarely in the novelty category. Not only have I never caught a fish on one, I have never seen a live duckling get snatched in person. I want to see it.

I think we all want to see it and love the idea of a piker. Muskie or Bass that sucks living thow off the surface. And that's why I think duckling lures sold back in the day and continue to sell. Now, though, duckling sort of faded away in the 80s and 90s. Companies like Savage Gear recently resurrect them. If you fish and are on social media, strong chance. You caught that fairly recent video of a kayak angler nailing a monster pike on a buzzings savage gear suicide duck search for ducklings getting eaten by fish on YouTube.

And you'll find plenty of clips. Nobody, including me, ever said it doesn't happen or never happens. In fact, I also know there are certain lakes in Canada that basically have a yearly duckling hatch and the pike gobbled them up like Tic Tacs. But I call bullshit on the idea that a duckling is some sort of secret weapon everywhere. The way I look at them, if you throw it long enough, eventually something's going to clobbering. The massive Instagram attention you'd get from the shot might be worth it to some, but I haven't the patience to throw a lure I have no confidence in for more than twenty minutes and I will quickly opt for something.

I know the fish eat on a regular basis.

My colleague and buddy Sam Longan meat eaters fishing Ed echoes my feelings.

But then there was a Muskie trip he took with his dad on the Flambeau in twenty eighteen. Immediately after his old man caught his first ever Muskie, he cut off the whopper flopper that it trashed and tied on one of them new fangled suicide ducks.

Sam scoffed, and I get the impression he was mildly embarrassed in front of their guide Fuxin, though that duck got hammered by a forty plus incher, which might not have gone over so well, considering Sam was working really hard on that trip to get one on fly.

And as Sam put it, my dad fish that damn law for the next day and a half without so much as a passing glance.

Did that fish really identify that as a duckling or did it just make the right sound and get in front of a fish that was ready to kill?

We'll never know, even though I think you know what I think. And Sam, I do hope your dad gleaned all the insta love he could out of those photos.

Well, that's all we have for you today, but if your New Year's resolution was to start scrapbooking like I know Joe's was, this week's page would include the worst use yet for flywheels, further proof that anglers are either illiterate, brilliant, or some combination of both.

A Cinderella story of inspiration for all the pimply, fat kids out there fondling their zip codes and possibly the best, worst lure ever invented.

Oh, my God. Terrific. As always.

Send us a note and let us know what you're up to. It bent at the meat eater dotcom. We look forward to all your news ideas, bar nominations, seven items, awkward photos, love letters and unmitigated hate mail.

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