I don't think. Screwing around. I won't put a handful of my cream of wheat one, you know, I want my ass at all.

If I had, I never seen nobody cast a rod as bad as you. They'll keep your phone dry, but nobody will be able to hear you. Good morning to generate anglers and welcome to Bent, the fishing podcast, where we call it a scene, I call it disaster. Down here, the kids grow up faster.

I'm just really old. And it's everyone who caught that song reference a round of applause and a round of drinks on me. If I asked you at the bar. Yes.

I'm assuming I'm going to say not many people did catch it, but that's OK. We'll explain. We'll explain. That was the tip of the hat to the band Operation Ivy, who inspired our new band theme music. And we want to know what you guys think. We think we love it. Yeah, we love it. I think it's fantastic.

I would listen to that song any time, but yes, it's weird.

And the way the like are the timing of our song change happened because there was that I know there was that whole subject of discussion that came up in social media recently and and so like so years of because you're not all following the somebody on a camera who was some listener asked if if he's the only one that rocks out to the best theme song in the car.

And we're really happy that people like it. But the truth is, like when we were putting the show together initially when we first started, we just had to grab something that sort of fit stock music website. It wasn't what we had in mind, but it got a lot of work and we didn't hate it. But it was it was just not exactly what we had in mind. So we've been we've been talking about itching to try and get something written uniquely for us, and we finally got it done.

So that's the new song, things that mediator tend to like come together real fast. So literally, it was like, oh, we need a song. Are you cool with this? Do you like this? Yeah, I like it too. And we just went with it. So, yeah, that's that's where the original theme came from. But the studio band we worked with for the new theme is actually from Philly represent East Side. And we've got to give a shout out to Haden Samwick, who works behind the scenes with Phil on our show.

He's the one that set up the band, orchestrated the whole thing, and we had a meeting with them and we were like, yeah, just make it sound kind of like this.

And I think they nailed it. Oh, they totally nailed it, that it was like I said, I would listen to that song any time and were pumped because I mean, the truth is that, you know this. But Joe and I are huge RPV fans. And for those who were unfamiliar, Operation Of is a historically significant band in the punk scene. They just kind of they just kind of appeared in the late 1980s, made one bad ass album and then vanished.

It was just like, boom. Yup. Here it is. Might drop and they're out. But their legacy, like for a band that only had one album, their legacy has endured amazingly like I'm guessing some of you have heard of Rancid. Well, Tim Armstrong, the legendary frontman, was the guitarist in Operation Ivy and Matt Freeman, Rancid bass player and also one of the best bass players ever was also an op ivy. Yeah.

Yeah, that's right.

And while those two dudes went on to be like Punk Hall of Fame, people like the Punk Rock Hall of Fame Status OP, Ivey's frontman Jesse Michaels just went on to become a lunatic.

That's that's harsh, but seriously not wrong. You're not wrong.

The dude went off the deep end. And even if you have no interest whatsoever in his music, do yourself a favor and look up the Jesse Michaels thrash metal blog on YouTube because I can't help myself. Here's a little clip montage.

What I like doing is lying in a bathtub, taking a shit and calling it self spa treatment of all crap crap.

Piss on my severed head. I'm not kidding, OK? I like funk, I, I will admit even be in Operation Ivy fan.

I had no idea that existed until you were like, hey dude, have you seen this.

Like no one's seen that. And I think it's just proof that like that to me is proof of what's wrong with with the whole punk scene, because that's what happens to like a true punk when they grow up. Nothing good if you're, like, really like a true punk.

Like, you shouldn't survive into your 30s because you wind up there and that's fair. Yeah, yeah, that's like I was never a real punk is like that didn't happen to me. And I think, like, when I listen to those or I watch those, I think I think Michaels's is both clinically depressed and completely straightedge. Right. But if he wasn't, I'd suggest he could probably use a drink. Right. Like, hey, man. Oh, have a whiskey, talk about it.

But on that subject, I think we need to move off of punk rock and and think more about drinking. And let's let's get into that.

That's my bar. Yeah. Let's do that. And everyone will be shocked to hear probably that we're headed back to Wisconsin. And I always knew. Yeah, I always knew the state punched above their weight when it came to fishing and drinking. But until we started doing this show, I had no idea the extent to which Scotty's dominate the fishing bar scene. Fishing bars are like a goddamn institution. They're damn those of you who are not super enthralled by, like our 80s punk conversation.

How about what we're gonna do? We'll stick to that Araba. Let's switch it up. We'll switch up the details. Perhaps you were more into Pakman, Frogger nut huggers, shorts and sweatbands.

Best God damn bartender from Timbuctoo to Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon.

And for that matter, you'll remember that the goal of our That's My Bar segment is to pay respect to those most important cultural institutions. Great fishing bars, respect, mad respect.

And we love them. We we will never achieve our goal of properly documenting all the great watery watering holes worldwide.

Without your help, you are criticalness.

And you know, you've got a favorite fishing bar or ten, perhaps take some time and pay homage to those hallowed places and send us what you come up with.

OK, please. Yes, we we get some good ones. This week. Submission comes from Mike Willinger and and he wrote something so compelling we're not even going to mess with it. We're not even going to interfere. We can't.

No, we're just we're just going to read Mike's ode to his favorite childhood fishing place.

It's it's that good where it stands alone. And that's rare, I got to say so. Yeah. Props to Mike. And and we begin being from Wisconsin. The bar talk makes me want to both wet a line and my whistle. I'd like to recommend one of my favorite Skåne bars of all time. It might just be more of a memory than a real place at this point, but I'll submit it here for your reading pleasure.

I started fishing around age two. My parents would take me to Pioneer Lake in northern Wisconsin, directly across from the boat launch area was the coolest bar I could ever imagine. After long days of fishing, evening hours were generally spent at the bar.

Enter Maple View Resort, a.k.a. Auschwitz's Polish retreat.

That's being mostly Polish. That's great.

Well, that was sort of their name. They sold T-shirts that read Auschwitz's, but I think their surname was actually a koseki. Of course, I had the Auschwitz's T-shirt and as a pre-teen wore it proudly every chance I got a picture.

The early 80s nut hugger shorts sweatbands back when Dad's had hair and lots of it. All the photos from the fish cleaning station, which is within a stone's throw of the bar, of course, seemed to contain sons, fathers, Marlborough's blats and plenty of forty plus species for the wall or table to a six year old fishing freak kid like me.

It was the ultimate bar.

Every wall held fish, huge glass encased musky mounts in various wheaty or woody habitats. Monster walleye, four pound perch, fish, as far as my eyes could see.

And I swear, every one of those mounts were world records from my youthful yet extensive experience. Those muskies most certainly weighed one hundred pounds each and the walleyes at least half that. To top it off, at the end of that beautiful fish, Rainbow held the world's best Cherry Cokes, always with extra grenadine and two real maraschino cherries. If you ask nicely.

They also had Pacman, Frogger, other video games, a pool table or two, and hummingbird feeders outside the massive windows overlooking the picturesque lakeside. These windows were artfully sprinkled with a handful of fake bullet hole stickers, the veracity of the holes in question and how they got there. I left my six year old self in a constant state of wonder. The video games didn't fascinate me nearly as much as fishing, and whenever I could pull a buddy away from plinking quarters to go fishing from the resort dock, that's what we do.

The most memorable night was late, dark, breezy, freezing cold with a constant drizzle. And we were just. Hammering fish on the end of the dock, two kids, roughly six and eight years old, supervised in quotes, he put that in quotes supervised through that legendary bar window from a dry, warm, alcohol laden, short distance away, drenched and chattering.

We were lip ripping 14 inch perch left and right from the end of that bardock.

No shit or no shit ski's, should I say writing this has reminded me that I really need to make it back there and pay my respects either to a bar well done or a memory well embellished. Hopefully both. That was pure poetry. I mean, that was like poetic perfection. Mike, let us know how it goes when you finally do make that pilgrimage back. And I hope it's exactly as you remembered it. And do us a favor. Send photos and all of you out there listening.

Take a cue from Mike and send us your bar nominations. If they're half as good as that one, they will probably get our attention.

I've never been to that bar, but I feel like I have. Oh yeah, much like Mike, I accompany my pops to many a Wisconsin drinking establishment after days on the water. And and that story like that email that he sent, it just got me thinking about those days, which then got me thinking about what we used to call our fishing equipment when I was a kid.

Yeah, you've been thinking about this a lot. In fact, Miles is going to delve into a touchy subject among some anglers in today's weekly word.

Webster's Dictionary defines fish as. I once worked with a guy who proudly identified as a North Carolina redneck, we'll call him Chris, let me be clear. Chris was neither dumb nor uneducated. He was the kind of person who could frame up wall, repair a hole and rebuild a Chevy short block with the same set of rudimentary tools. He never once made a vehicle he couldn't pilot from sport fishers to yachts to jet boats to super cubs to G4S. If it swam, crawled, flapped, ran, he could find it, catch it and kill it.

I can't say I always like Chris, his skills were only overshadowed by his ego, but he earned my respect when no one else was around, we'd sometimes share beers and a quiet conversation. In those moments, his drawl seemed to dissipate and he'd admit to a love of books and language. When anyone else was in earshot, though he mispronounced words and mangled grammatical phrases, his language became intentionally crude and exactly imprecise. I actually once heard him yell at a client I never seen.

Nobody cast a rod as bad as you.

And that exchange hit on the one semantic line in the sand that he could not stand to hear violated. If anyone called a fishing rod a pole in his presence, he would set upon them as if they had just insulted the good name of his maternal grandmother, which is apparently a big thing in the South. More than once I overheard him exclaim, You grow beans on poles to fish with rods. Here in the US, the terms, Rod and Paul, are sometimes used interchangeably, and as far as official American Dictionary definitions are concerned, they're equivalent.

But few topics inspire as much polarization and fishing culture as the Rod versus Paul debate. What you call that long cylindrical thing used to deliver bait and Wrangell Fish says a lot about how you identify as an angler, such semantic sensitivity might seem unnecessarily divisive.

Who gives a shit what you call the thing you fish with? We argue enough about fishing stihler species. Do we really need another point of contention? Well, no, but like it or not, fishing is what linguists refer to as a discourse community or an insulated network of people who come together around a shared set of goals. And we judge who is in and who is out based on the language they use. When I was a kid, we had Poles, my dad had poles, my uncles always had the best poles.

I was usually saving up my money for a new poll. In fact, the first nice poll ever bought myself was branded the Berkeley Power Pole back before hydraulic shallow water anchors were a thing.

But when I get older and more serious about fishing, I started reading fishing books and magazines and hanging around tackle shops. And I noticed that the real sticks, they didn't use poles. They used rods. As I started working my way into the fishing industry, I figured out that calling a rod a pull at the boat ramp was kind of like calling a deck a board at the skatepark. In his classic novella, Norman McLean wrote Always it was to be called a rod if someone called it a pole.

My father looked at him as a sergeant in the United States. Marines would look at a recruit who had just called a rifle a gun and no mccleen was describing a scene from the 30s. The same attitude holds in contemporary angling circles. A quick search through online fishing forums will produce a slew of comments like. I cringe when I hear someone refer to a fly rod, spinning rod or casting Rod as a pole. Or. Fishing rod is what fishermen use a fishing pole is what rednecks and country bumpkins use in that last quote.

You can hear that the two different terms also carry a connotation of social class and standing. The language policing comes off as obnoxious and snooty rods and poles are completely separate tools and their differences have absolutely nothing to do with superiority or class warfare, the distinction between the two comes from our angley, obsessed buddies across the pond in England. If it's got guides and a real. It's a rod. But if it's a long stick with a line attached to the end, it's a pole.

Here in the states, cane bulls used to be common tools, but very few people fish with them anymore. Just about everybody I know uses rods with Real's. Certain folks in the UK who target especially spooky carp will tell you that casting a line, even a lightly weighted one, makes too much disturbance on the water. They proudly use poles, some of them up to 30 feet long, to delicately LDAP their baits in front of finicky rubber lips.

So if you want to get technical about it, that's the difference between rods and poles. I use the term Rhod to describe my fishing implements because it's accurate and it avoids annoying rebuttals, but I don't actually care that much. I will say that it's pretty damn funny to walk into a flower shop and ask where they keep their flagpoles so long as you're not hoping to be a good customer service. And speaking of the fly folks, Tenggara became the hot new thing in certain fly fishing circles about a decade ago.

If you're not familiar, Tinka is a stripped down form of fly fishing without a real. The fly line attaches directly to the tip of the rod. I mean, pull. And to be honest, Tenggara would actually be fun if not for the people who love it. Tinka seems to attract the most holier than thou uppity folks I've ever met in fishing. They proselytized harder than Jehovah's Witnesses and Latter day Saints combined. But here's the part that I love.

Every Tinka enthusiast I've ever met proudly refers to their equipment as rods, but technically. They're wrong. So all you think people out there. I hate to break it to you, but you fish with polls.

Well done, man, and this rings so true for me, like when I was little, my gramps always said, grab your fishing poles. Yeah, that's what they were. But now if someone refers to Rod as a pole, I instantly label them again, like, again, just maybe a little harsh.

But at least, look, you've clarified the terms, right? Like there is now clarification, which means everyone that calls a rod a pole is now officially wrong. Like that is wrong.

It's no longer tomato, tomato. You're just wrong. So you use that.

There you go. The genius of the fish community about about the terminology right there. Use it.

That's what we're here for, is to educate you guys. And now that we've gotten that out of the way, we can move on to clarifying what's happening in fishings current events.

It's time for Fish News, Bishnu. That escalated quickly, so that little story I did about using goldenrod, golf flies for trout bait. I remember that last week.

Oh, yeah, that that resonated. Right. I've got quite a few notes about that, ranging from just like, hey, my papa taught me about this years ago to thanks for spilling the beans on my secret baked you Jack wagon. I, I'm not I'm not that surprised because I figured more people were going to be in tune with that than me.

I had no idea. But I think my favorite came from Tom Nesic. He sent us an email and he says is good. Right. He says it's really good. His brother Steve isn't much of a Rodden real angler, but he's just generally big into the nature, you know what I mean? And apparently foraging. And he sent along a video of his bro hunting down goldenrod gall larva to eat.

And I watch this. And I got to say, he almost made it sound appetizing and delicious.

There's no almost he made it sound incredibly appetizing and delicious. I don't know if I believe him, but that's how he made it sound.

He describes them as having a sugary taste similar to maple sirup mixed with banana. And a crunch is if they contain crystallized sugar.

And I said, well, that's true. That's true. I don't put a handful of my cream of wheat, you know what I'm saying? They should be right next to the walnuts at Baskin-Robbins. But yeah, apparently Goldenrod got good stuff. Tom, thanks for sending that. It was both amusing and informative. So that's what I got for shout outs this week.

I just got a quick one. Andrew Peterson wrote in basically saying, well, because last week we talked about Toby's Tavern in Ah, that's my bar segment.

Yeah. Yeah.

And and he appreciated the shout out for Toby's Tavern, but he doesn't think we gave it enough credit as a fishing bar is located, he claims, within eyesight of some exceptional, exceptional pike fish water.

So apparently we didn't again, I'd never been to Toby's Tavern. But now another reason to go, because he claims that the fishing there is incredible in addition to the drinking.

So, you know, yet another point in favor of Toby's Tavern as a fantastic fishing bar, Toby's Tavern, Pike and Beers and Lion Mount's having sex.

Good place. OK, well, OK. So let's move on to the real news now. Remember, this is a competition, as always, Miles, and I do not know what stories the other guy is bringing to the table. And at the end of it, our official punk rock deejay and audio engineer, Phil, will weigh in on who is the news winner.

I do not have the floor to open. That goes to you, sir.

Big advance. True. It's true. I'm going to sidebar for a second, and I would love to know Phil's favorite punk band. Oh, I know you've been called out.

You just called him out as the punk deejay. So I'm just curious what just happened. Well, it's true.

Don't say mousepox or we won't like you as much anymore. Salesroom All right.

Getting into the goods here.

This story is is a follow up to an article that Spencer Neuharth published on the media website a couple of years ago.

Spencer does a fact checker series that you should check out because he runs down myths and legends and the stories that, you know, the culture of fishing and hunting has a bunch of of things that we take as gospel and that we pass among each other that are necessarily true at all. Some of them are some complete bullshit.

And so when when Spencer was a kid, he asked his dad why they had stocked so many damn bull heads in their family farm pond. And his father's response was that they hadn't. Why would they do that? And he went on to tell Spencer that ducks were to blame. In doing so, Spencer's dad passed along a popular yarn that fish eggs stick to duck feet and waterfowl spread those eggs far and wide.

And many years later, as an adult journalist, Spencer decided he was going to dig into that theory because it seemed like it might be questionable.

Yeah, I mean, for the record, I've heard that my whole life. I've heard that a million times. That's how fish places.

Yeah, duck feet on a duck feet.

So he started doing some research and he quickly identified some some some issues with this idea, including the fact that most fish eggs are just barely adhesive enough to to delicately bind to aquatic vegetation, which would make it kind of hard for them to remain stuck to a duck's feet during takeoff.

In flight. Yeah, just like coming out of the water at altitude. Yeah.

Yeah.

And another thing like the chances of fish eggs surviving a high speed water landing on a duck. Feet are pretty slim. Right? So those are those are two strikes against this. And and to quote Spencer's article, he said, this duck transfer theory seems to unravel under scrutiny. However, a couple of listeners recently sent me a link to a Smithsonian magazine article that might force Spencer to reconsider his conclusions. Turns out, though, the idea of waterfowl transporting fish eggs on their feet is far fetched.

Ducks may be smuggling fish eggs in a different way. The Smithsonian article described a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last summer titled Experimental Evidence of Dispersal of Invasive Supernet Eggs Inside Migratory Waterfowl. Note the word inside the Smithsonian article has a catch.

Your title, Fish Eggs can survive a journey through both ends of a duck. Aha. I knew.

I knew there was some poop coming. It's a poop issue. It's poop issue.

The researchers in Hungary fed 500 fertilized common and Prussian carp eggs to eight mallards and waited for the eggs to to reemerge in plastic trays placed below the ducks enclosure. In total, 18 individual eggs passed through the ducks digestive tracts, and three of those 18 went on to successfully hatch into baby carp.

Interesting to Prussian carp in one common carp, meaning that point zero zero six percent of the carp eggs consumed by mallard ducks in the study remain viable after journeying from one end of the bird to the other.

Many wings journeyed a distance far, and that number may seem insignificant. I mean, with that low of a survival rate, how could you possibly be a factor in spreading fish populations? So we got to put this in context. And to do that, we got to do a little math. There are about 12 million mallards in North America alone. They're also quite common in Europe and Asia.

And mallards love fish eggs, according to the lead author of the study, quote, If mallards find these spawning areas, they will go there and eat the eggs until they can't move. So if you assume just 10 million birds consume a thousand fish eggs every year. That would equate to 60 million fertilized fish eggs popping out in Malad poop annually, since mallards often travel up to 15 miles a day, the opportunity for dispersal could be significant.

Now, all that said, the study is very preliminary, small sample size, and it actually brings up a lot of follow up questions, right. Like the next thing the research team plans to look at is they're going to they're going to repeat the same experiment with other types of fish eggs to see if the survival trait is unique to carp, because that would really matter. And they don't talk about this in the article. But what I want to know is I want to know if fish eggs can survive a trip through other bird guts, right?

Yeah, there are 12 million mouths, but they're like more than 40 million ducks in North America. A lot of them eat fish eggs. Sure. So there's still a lot to learn here.

But it actually seems possible that the old yarn about ducks transporting fish eggs had some truth to it is just that the old timers got the mechanism wrong.

Sure. I mean, what pops into my head is Canada geese, because around here, I mean, we got some ducks, ducks there, got ducks in Jersey. But I mean, I see more Canada geese than than mallards on a lot of the lakes and streams and things around here. So I would point to them as a culprit. I have to imagine they eat a certain amount of fish eggs, too, and they're everywhere.

I don't know. I would imagine so, too, but I don't know. That's what I'm saying. Like, there could be a lot of potential vectors for dispersal with waterfowl. Sure. And we just don't know. So this is a fascinating one for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being there have long been all these questions like how did these fish get here?

You know, those those spots are like, how should perch get into this lake? I don't know. And we always blame Buckett biology, and that could be it. But it might actually be birds.

Yeah, no. Interestingly, though, at least around here, it's always seems to be tied to warm water.

Species like the duct connection comes up with carp or catfish or bass. But like, I've never I've never heard of that happening with trout, you know what I mean? So I also think, though. Exactly.

That's what I'm saying. So I also think it's fascinating because it's obviously only going to be certain kinds of fish.

They have to have a certain hardiness because do those that there has to be acid in those. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty impressive to to make it through that, you know. Yeah. So I'll be curious to see if other fish can make it through there. And I think it's going to be warm water species. If there's another one that will work with my money would be on Pike because those bastards are everywhere and you can't kill them. That'd be my guess.

Yes, that that is true.

So I don't I don't have a great transition other than to say we've sort of busted a myth there and we'll bust some more here with this little story. So as a media person, I always admire when a news story is presented in an interesting way. Right.

So I have to give props to the UK's Guardian for this one.

And we've we've featured other stories in the past about the seafood industry pulling fast ones. Right. Either by renaming fish to make them sound more appealing or just straight up serving you different species than what's on the menu.

But this has apparently gotten so rampant, particularly in Europe, but also in the US, that The Guardian ran a story called Could You Spot the Fake and turned it into a quiz.

And naturally I aced it, but naturally I aced it if I was only that good in Algebra one.

But it it painted a really great picture of some of the most common fakes, which, again, occur here and there.

And when you answered, you'd get this little pop up with with more details that I thought were pretty good. So it was actually very interesting.

And the first question, it would just say this is often sold as red snapper.

What is it really? And it's a picture of a tilapia.

And then you have a multiple choice dropdown like what fish is this?

And when you click the tilapia, it tells you red snapper is an extremely popular reef fish that has been overfished to the point that stocks are now extremely low in most of its habitats. It's cheaper. Common substitute is tilapia right now.

What they're doing with his CUI'S is is posing the question of whether you would know the difference if it was served to you in a restaurant. And I feel like for that one, I would I, I wouldn't know. I would know that I was at least eating a freshwater fish, not a saltwater fish.

I'm. And there's a bunch of these that this is a really fun quiz. It's a very good time and I'm not going to go through all of them. But one of the more interesting ones to me was you ordered delicious grouper.

But what is the common substitute? There's a photo of a catfish, right.

And when you click on catfish, it says the nasal grouper is critically endangered species from the Caribbean while the dusky grouper is threatened in the Mediterranean Sea. In both cases, something else entirely is sold in their place. And this one hits for me because, again, like you and I can look at this with an angler I this quizes for just the consumer of seafood, but with an angler's eye.

I would never order grouper anywhere. And I know not to do that. For years I've only ever eaten grouper.

I caught because just in the US alone, the seasons and the limits are so wonky that I never trust grouper on a menu like it's it's in every restaurant in the keys and people just assume, oh, we're in Florida and there's grouper here.

Well, that's true. But there's a strong chance that you're eating frozen grouper from the last time the season was open or you're eating something else entirely and they assume the tourists don't know which. Most of them probably don't.

I don't know if that substitute happens here, but I thought that was fascinating. The Guardian was saying the most common substitute for grouper on a menu around the world is catfish.

So that's two times I did not know that. Right. That's two times already. Red snapper and grouper, two fish that are known to be delicious that they're saying the most common substitutes are freshwater farm raised fish.

Man, I feel like the texture of those are so different.

So do I. But again, you eat a lot of fish, you catch a lot of fish, you clean a lot of fish.

If you're just, you know, my grandma and grandpa go into Red Lobster, you probably don't know. And the last one that tickled me was this one.

White tuna is frequently on the menu, yet it does not actually exist.

What is this fish that's used as a standard now in this this is a case, right, of of Chilean sea bass style Renesmee, because fishermen know damn well there's there's no such thing as a white tuna.

And I've always known white tuna is actually a fish called an Escalade. And their deep sea dwellers, oil, black and ugly is how they look. Kind of like they're so delicious. Oh, yeah.

They look they look like a black king mackerel. Kind of. Yeah, yeah. But this story also says it's it's it's it's usually asked for, but sometimes white tuna on a menu is butterfish.

That's what I've heard it called that. OK, that's the renaming I've heard for Escalade. OK, butterfish.

Well yeah but butterfish is also a real fish. They're tiny bait fish that we buy here for chum, like for tradition. You buy a flat of them.

They almost look like little pompano. Silver pompano.

I know. I didn't know that was a common, a common swap there.

I always thought it was always escala, but I don't really care which one of those it is like fake me out, don't give a shit because it is, as you mentioned, so buttery and delicious like it is.

White tuna is my absolute favorite sushi. I don't actually care if it's butterfish or like it is just. And however, you also know that it's known as the laxative of the sea.

So you can't you can't binge a couple. If you got a couple of pieces, you add a couple to your sushi deluxe. But like, you can't you can't go all in.

And I've actually been on the dock in Louisiana several times, like mean mugging, taking photos with piles of yellowfin tuna we caught and another boat, like with complete new batteries. I don't know what to do and come back in. And they're all holding an Escalade. And I'm like, oh, like I want this.

I wanted that. I want the Escalade, too, and I want that Escalade.

So if you can find it online, The Guardian quiz, could you spot the difference? It's fun. It'll kill a little time at work.

But also interesting because there's just so much shadiness out there.

Yeah, no doubt. Sticking with salty species, the people love permit, which you may have heard of Hermit instead of. Yeah, maybe once or twice. And we're joking because these fish inspired this level of obsession and reverence.

My God, among certain anglers, that's I think it might be unparalleled, except for maybe with billfish of the permit. Love is is is real. Yep. And there is some irony in how much people love permit because technically they're their subspecies of Jacs. Mm hmm.

And and Jackson like the trash fish of inshore angley. I mean, they're not like they're not like saltwater hardhead catfish level or dogfish. But outside of the state of Hawaii, I know very few anglers who intentionally target Jaxx.

Yeah. Now and I have a comment here. Same thing with permit. If you put a permit in deep water and throw a chunk of crab at it, it'll eat as quickly as a jack carveout as dumb and fast.

We'll get there fit. It's you're right. It's all it's situational. It's situational. Yes. But despite the fact that jacks are kind of considered easy and stupid and not that desirable, they're big eyed, rubber lipped.

Blacktail cousins are totally different story.

People just lose their minds over a permit like permit tattoos are a thing I know otherwise seemingly normal individuals who have spent many years and sums of money that honestly far exceed my annual income.

Just trying to catch one single person. One. Just one. Yes, you're right.

Which is it's crazy.

And and we might chalk this up as an example of Angler's arbitrarily assigning value to one species of fish while denigrating another similar fish. But as we were alluding to earlier, there's some logic to the permit mania, at least logic by fishing standards, unlike other kinds of Jacques's permit can be.

Maddeningly difficult to catch on artificial lures, and that's part of the reason why Flagler's go nuts for these fish as they feed in shallow water. So it's like fishing and they're hypercritical of presentation. Speaking from experience, however, if you drop a live crab in front of one, it's probably going to get munched.

Yep, yep. I have no shame. I don't care that you're out of luck and just drop that live crab. It's going to work. But because it inspires such devotion, they're very valuable to local economies in the places where they can be found in significant numbers.

Dedicated permit lovers save up all their spare time and money to travel to places like Belize or Cuba, where permit populations are high and less pressure. But the original hub of Perman fishing is the Florida Keys, and the Lower Keys is one of the only places they're consistently targeted in this country.

For the past 50 plus years, anglers have been making annual pilgrimages to the southernmost tip of the continental U.S., trying to fool these black tailed devils and they bring their checkbooks and their credit cards with them.

Despite that value, the Keys permit fishery has been largely taken for granted.

Very little was definitively known about their spawning habits. For example, until the Bowen Fish and Carbon Trust, a fisheries conservation nonprofit, began an acoustic tagging program in 2015 to figure out exactly when, where and how permit reproduce. Results from that study indicated that about 70 percent of the permit that live in the Lower Keys congregate in one small area to spawn. Now, local anglers have long known that Western dry docks located about 10 miles south of us is a prime spot to find huge schools that permit mutton snapper, yellowtail snapper, grouper and other fish in the late spring and early summer.

Many of those anglers were savvy enough to know that massive groups of fish congregating seasonally meant that their spawning.

Yep, right. And so some chose to avoid the area during that time of year, but others would chase.

The high concentrations of fish in the Florida angling community grew sharply divided about the ethics of intentionally targeting the sponsors, and the area became a flashpoint of conflict.

Regardless of personal opinion and since morality anglers who chose to fish there during spawning season were completely within their legal rights. That changed this year when the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission established a four month fishing closure in a one mile area around western Dirac's. In addition to the tagging study that showed the majority of the area's permit went there to reproduce.

Other studies showed a dramatically increased mortality for permit and mutton snapper that were hooked and released in that zone during spawning season.

See, anglers aren't the only ones who sometimes maybe take advantage of large concentrations of fish that are distracted by biological imperatives.

Sharks do the same. Mm hmm. And research showed that one third of the fish released by anglers were getting eaten by sharks.

So even if anglers weren't filling boxes, even if they weren't keeping anything, if they're like, no, I release everything, I'm not hurting these fish. Yeah, those numbers were still getting decimated, whether they knew him or not, because one third of the fish that they released were getting t boned.

Yep.

And now the area is closed to all fishing April through July, and the decision is kind of amazing to me, it's being applauded by a whole host of different fishing and conservation groups that include the Bonefish and Tarpon, just Lower Keys Guides Association, AGFA, Florida Keys Fishing Guides Association, American Sport Fishing Association, Coastal Conservation Association, Congressional Sportsmen's Foundation, Fly Fishers International and Guy Harvey Ocean Foundation. I only mentioned all those names. And you know this because it is so rare to get all those different ogg's to agree on anything else.

It is they won't even hardly agree that they all like to fish.

Like it's barely a thing that they agree on what color the sky is on a given day to get them to come together and agree on a piece of legislation and rule change. To me, that signals a ringing endorsement for this. And and with that many different people on board, it's got to be sound.

Oh, did I mean, look, you talked to anyone who was fishing the keys in the 70s or 80s.

They'll tell you that it pales in comparison, even though it's still a Mecca and it's still amazing fishing. Generally speaking, it's nothing like it used to be.

So if these are the kind of drastic measures that need to be taken to preserve what's left of that old school, Florida Keys fishery, to me, this move makes absolute sense. Now, I'm sure there's a handful of charter guys who are not so pleased. Not happy. Yeah, yeah. But and I mean, we're talking about as drastic.

It's a one mile area that's closed to fishing for four months. Right. Yes, that drastic I mean, it all depends on you respect. No, no, no, it's not in I understand you're saying it's not like they closed the entire Gulf out of Kiwa. I get it. It's like this one little area. But at the same time, if you come out and say, hey, this one mile area, how many people are like, oh, that really makes me want to fish that one mile area?

Yeah, you know what I mean. Like, you didn't know. Kind of like if you knew, you knew. And there's, there's, you know what what are you going to do about that. But also, you know, you tell me you can't fish in this one mile for four months.

I'm like, what is happening in that one mile?

So I mean, there could be I hope they can they can police that, you know. Or do police that. Yeah, but yeah, I it's funny.

People get so crazy over this fish. You've told me you've had no problem catching them on the fly.

I would say no problem. I've had better luck than most. Yeah.

I've only tried it on the flight a couple of times but I'm not ate up with them all the time and I caught have been on bait.

Like I was saying. They're so funny because if you do it in 40 feet of water on a wreck, it's like fishing jackals like no problem. Crab touches down. It's when they get shallow. But I think that's great, man.

And even though I'm not part of that call, I admire that obsession.

I mean, we're talking about dudes who refuse to use glue on their flies like they won't put a drop of of cement or you've cure on a fly because the fish are in that sense, they can smell it a mile away and they'll turn right off of it.

I don't have the patience. I did it a few times and missed a few shots. And I'm like, any barracudas around?

Can we do that? You know? But did I think that's great. And I do think that's amazing that all those organizations like you say, it's rare that they all come together to agree on nothing that says something to me.

Yeah.

And the only transition I really have here for this one is that, you know, when you do get your shot and land your permit on the fly, I will assume you'll want to take a picture of it.

OK, and this is going to be a giant free commercial for Apple.

But I don't care because it's a good PSA and it's too good not to pass along, in my opinion. And you know how like hooking yourself is kind of a rite of passage.

You know, I mean, like I always say, like if you've never had one in your past, the barb, you're probably not fishing enough or maybe hard enough.

And I also feel like losing a cell phone in the drink is a similar rite of passage.

It's like a modern rite of passage. You know, I don't I don't believe I have any close personal angling buds that haven't sent me the I got a new phone, lost all my contacts, text, you know what I mean?

Like, at least one time.

And I have personally donated three phones over the years.

Anyway, I found this story on Sagheer Dotcom, and it's about a woman in Canada and she carrier who dropped her iPhone eleven down the hole while ice fishing on West Kazue Lake in Saskatchewan in early 2021. Now, most anglers like me as an example would have said, well, there goes that.

And off to the Verizon store.

I would go, but not Angie, OK?

She was on a mission to recover this phone and she made three separate trips back to the lake over the course of a month, loaded down with Augur's and aquiver cameras and the works to get this phone back.

Right.

Well, about thirty days after she dropped it, they finally locate. It was like it had to be like the Titanic, like the akumu swept over here, like there it is.

They found it and then spent two hours using a magnet on a string to get the iPhone back.

And guess what? It works perfectly, according to Angie, after a month. Under the ice, under water. OK, now there is a PSA here, so just bear with me. The iPhone 11 is in fact advertised by Apple as being waterproof, but only to two meters and only for 30 minutes. Like that's like the max to me.

Yeah, but this is the useful part. They actually interviewed a tech expert in the piece and the phone was down a little deeper than two meters.

But he said what likely saved it was the stillness of the environment.

So it hit the bottom and laid there 100 percent undisturbed.

So I have to I have to ask, was there a case on this phone? No. No case. No case.

OK, just no case. Just a protective cover, no case.

And this this tech expert said if it was summertime and you had boat traffic or current or anything like that, strong chance, the gaskets would have failed.

So the point here that he makes is if you drop your phone in the drink, whether it's an iPhone 11 or otherwise, if if you can try to retrieve it quickly and as gently as possible, like if you're knocking it and flipping it along the bottom with a landing net, trying to get it stronger chance, it'll be toast.

And even if you drop one in like super shallow water on the edge, says, you know, pick it up really slowly, really gently, don't like violently snatch it and grab it and like move it around underwater because the less it's disturbed, once it hits the drink, the better shot of saving your phone.

So you're saying fight your natural inclination, which is to light your necklace and get that thing out of there and rip it out of the water? Right. You have a better shot of saving your shit if you just gently pick it up and slowly pull it out of the water.

Interesting. So, I mean, I found that use for whoever I like, while I feel better about inevitable sogginess, now that I personally have an iPhone 11, I still question just how, you know, quote, perfect.

Angie's phone really is because I dumped my last iPhone, which was an eight, I believe, and that was also supposed to have some level of resistance.

And while everything appeared fine and I lost no data and everything worked, the camera lens, microphone and speaker were shot.

Like, once you get water behind that camera lens, there's no going back. And like, it was it was completely garbled.

So, you know, look, some people are very anti apple.

In fact, I recently got in a heated debate over this with our friend Ross Robertson, in which he called me an ostrich with my head in the sand because I shan't be swayed off of Apple products.

But this story is a big check box for Apple, for Angler's, as far as I'm concerned.

And also for any of you saying as you brought up, we'll just get a case, get a life proof case.

Remember life proof? Oh, of course.

I had several of those cases. Here's another PSA, right.

Like they'll keep your phone dry, but nobody will be able to hear you.

OK, so that's exactly what my issue was. I had to dig it out of the case to have a conversation.

And it's not easy to get him in and out of the case. OK, no, I don't know if you had the same experience, but when they first came out, this is going back a long time now.

When they first hit the market, they were the bomb. Like my first one lasted the entire life of my phone.

No problem. And I don't know what happened. I don't know if they changed where they manufactured or cut corners or what.

But like the next four that I had and I even would send some back for a free replacement like this one screwed up. I need another one.

Dude, I got so tired of people, the people telling me they couldn't hear me, which irks me any time I want to call them.

Like what? I can't hear you. I just hang up and I'm like, I'll call you back later.

That drives me insane. I literally rip the last two life briefcases off my phone and like, threw them in the closest trash receptacle.

Couldn't take it anymore. No, it protects your phone, but it ceases to function as a phone. Yeah. So true. So yeah. Yeah. Then you can't actually talk to anybody. So little techie little little PSA there you know, hopefully we'll, we'll see what Phil thinks on this one.

I also want to hear about the punk band and then as soon as we're done hearing from Phil, we actually have a fishing report, pre Sporn report from Prepon from our bass pro buddy on the tour, Randt Simpkins, who probably can't afford an iPhone eleven.

But we'll see what he's got shaken out there.

Joe, Somali, you kind of Trojan horse to tackle hack into that last new segment, and for that, hey, you're our winner. My favorite punk band. I have two answers for this one.

The one I think you're looking for.

I'll call it my CBB answer is television, love television. Now, I am of the age and this is what I will call my Warped Tour answer. My embarrassing answer while you were smoking cigarets listening to Circle Jerks behind the Bait Shop and I was behind the video game store trading uyo cards answer. We're talking bands like Yellowcard, Jimmy, World Motion City soundtrack pop punk Joe. That's what I liked. I can feel you shivering from two time zones away.

I know you thought next was going to be my lame answer.

Joke's on you.

Listen, these bands were unfairly maligned at the time as just bait for faux emo preteens. But their pop songwriting sensibilities, a knack for melodies, elevated them above a lot of the bands of that early twenties generation.

And everyone thought I was so cool after that Pokémon segment a couple of weeks ago. Hey, are your favorite professional bass fisherman Ranch Tompkins here with a little update from the tour, I'm sure you already heard how close I came to placing in the bass open event, Lewis Smith, like yesterday. If it weren't for a run of bad luck, I'd have been in the money for sure. That's all right. I'm fixing to give them hell on Douglas in Tennessee.

This is going to be my tour. I can feel it. Well, right now, I'm stuck idling in the parking lot of a flag just outside Old East Iboga. What? You know what I want my ass would only be if I heard what happened was a basketball peanut SFL or selling them out of the back of a Chevy. They called out to me on Highway 65 yesterday. I plumb forgot about this. No mass, no entry bullshit at all.

These truck stops. About 20 minutes ago, I gave my last five dollars to some guy named Arlo and asked him if he'd please run and buy me one of them hot dogs. I reckon he should be back any minute now. Anyway, you ain't here for my culinary advice. Y'all want some juicy respon advice. So listen up. I noticed over on Lewis they wasn't responded to, not just ours, throw ours in all the right places, but even the custom square bills with the blood krako paint.

I traded my back up promotor battery for what do and shit I knew right then and there. I was going to have to pull out the big guns I had on my last four inch Yamamoto creature and lot bloodborne slug it to the stumps fish I it before it ever touched down. I threw that little one three in the well and started feeling like I was part of my rhythm. But I got a little too excited after feeling that good ol Wiggill hung that beat up on the very next cast.

Of course I went in after it but Mattarella Motor had to start but and knocked the damn whole rod out of my hands. Luckily one of the older guys gave me a spare outfit after I said it's missing a few guides and the real sounds like rocks in the Gulf again, but it ain't nothing. A little WD 40 and some zip ties can't fix shit. I fished worse. I figured the guy did it because when I'm on stage at the classic, someday he will still as kids.

Help me get the hold on a second. Oh shit. I missed him anyway. I got to scrape up enough cash to buy at least three bags of Yamamoto's and some of that Ozark Trail break before I get to Douglas. So if any y'all in the northern Alabama Tennessee ish area looking for a pro to speak at Yale's fishing club, shoot me a deer. Also, if you're interested in buying a CB radio, got a fence that needs a little mended or need someone to mind your kids while they're on Zoome school all day, call Darryl over at the Dollar General and leave a message for me.

Otherwise, I'll a child again right after I catch that fat bogus check. See you later. I love Randstad, I really do, and I wish him all the best. He's got heart, kids got moxie. And if you think about it, I mean, Rantes is kind of like the punk band that's still hustling in the garage, you know what I mean?

Like booking gigs at the local VFW. Like we like for people. Yeah, for people. Exactly. And if nothing else, maybe like maybe he'll just inspired, like one other kid to follow his dreams of bass fishing greatness. That's all it takes.

No, you're. I mean, maybe maybe I wouldn't like I don't look at Lance's life. I'm like, damn, that seems glamorous to me.

Like even if he made it big, I don't think he would change much, you know, like like maybe he'd ordered the deluxe gas station burrito.

Right. Or. Oh, no, you know, what did he do? He'd pony up for the big bag of jerky instead of the knock on the fifteen dollar back. Yeah. You know, I can afford that.

You know, this is a it's a rare treat, but I, I'm like, dude, what do I know. Like yeah that that probably is some kid's dream. You never know. The truth is like you don't know which people or bands or anglers or whatever will turn out to be massively inspirational and influential until later through far into the future.

And that's actually the case with the with the lure the Joe's covering this weekend and align it rose to glory, made history without knowing it was making it, and paved the way for countless other great lures.

But just like you can still download our baby music on iTunes today, this leuer continues to have dedicated fans.

Sure, it's not loud enough, but. You can't escape swim bait culture these days, it makes very little difference what you target because there's a swim bait for that.

Swim baits are loosely defined class of fishing laws that imitate fish, which doesn't really say much because lots of laws that aren't considered swim baits imitate fish.

But what we can all agree on is that swim mates like tacos are available in hard or soft varieties. And it's the soft ones that have really become ubiquitous across all fisheries and smallmouth on a little three and a half inch high tech swing impact, muskies go for the eight and a quarter inch defiant trout croppies.

You say the two and a half inch ziemann slim swims. Have you covered regardless of size? What all these soft plastics have in common is a paddle tail or a modified paddle tail that thumps away when you reel, creating both action and vibration. This style of bait is so commonplace now that it's not even really a thing worth talking about anymore. It's been around so long that it's hardly considered innovative. But how did we get to a place where there are twenty five or more varieties of soft plastic swim bait at any given tackle shop?

Most people credit the California big bessin that bloomed in the 1980s with kicking off the swim bait craze. And that's not totally inaccurate. The law building pioneers of that era may have created the demand for big swim baits designed to catch big ass fish, many of which were super expensive in the early days. But to say those lures led to smaller, cheaper, widely available swim baits isn't totally true. Ask any of those early swim bait makers what inspired them, and many will point to Mr.

Twister's sassy shad. With so many soft plastic bait companies around today, I think it's fair to say that Mr. Twister is kind of been sidelined. Yes, we all know this company made the curly tail grub a staple in fishing, and there's a strong chance you still buy Mr. Twister Grub's today.

I mean, I certainly do, but we're not exactly hearing the pros praise their latest innovations on the tournament trail. But what people might not realize is that in the 1980s, Mr. Twister was a titan, not just because of the curly tail, but because when they dropped the sasy shad, it was revolutionary.

The sasy shad was really the first mass produced, widely available paddle tail swim bait to hit the market. And furthermore, Mr. Twista produced them in a wide range of colors and sizes that appealed to everything from croppies to large mouths to stripers.

All you had to do was stick one on a jug head cast real. They were also no more expensive than any other soft plastics at the time.

Personally, I have a very distinct recollection of buying a few packs of small sasy Shad's as a young lad, but not really catching a whole lot on them.

And maybe that's because I didn't give them a fair shake, but it certainly didn't feel like I was fishing something revolutionary at the time. Strong chance.

That's because while these laws were certainly pioneers, they also had shortcomings. The plastic Mr. Twister used was stiffer than modern plastics.

Injection molding techniques at that time didn't really allow for realistic colors and patterns. You mostly had solid or tutone options, perhaps with some glitter mixed in law. Historians also point to a design flaw. Yes, the sasy Schad had a paddle tail, but compared to modern paddles that tend to be large and really, really ramp up vibration, the sassy's tails were pretty small, making its KIC pale in comparison to present day offerings. By the early 1990s, there were no shortage of sasy Schad copycats on the market, many with more effective tails.

Still, even then, most were fairly rigid, limited in color and required an external jughead. It wasn't until Storm introduced the wild ashad in the early 2000s, complete with an internal Jagjit and snazzy holographic finishes that the paddle tail craze really kicked into high gear.

Mr. Twister's still produces the sassy shed, which tells me they still must have devoted fans in the Freshwater's scene. I just don't happen to know any. And while a sassy Shatara sassy Shad knockoff may not be the first swim meet anyone is tying on for snooker stripers these days, they have carved a niche in the saltwater scene, particularly in the Northeast.

For the countless dudes trolling umbrella rigs that might feature a dozen or more sassy Shad's that harder plastic stands up to all that drag and water resistance far better than new school plastic. And if a bluefish clamps down on one of your Shad's, it might not get cut in half.

And if you need to replace Shad's within your umbrella rigt, you can do so very cost effectively.

I can't honestly remember the last time I saw a bag of large sasy Shad's for sale in a northeast tackle shop. In fact, maybe I never did because just like when I was a kid, these baits are usually sold individually, often displayed on the bottom shelf and repurposed tubs that once held bulk cream cheese or perhaps macaroni salad. The only real difference is that instead of being fifty cents a piece like they were at Bayside Bait and Tackle circa 1994, I reckon they're pushing a.

Out three bucks a pop these days. That's all the time we have for this week. Remember, if you're headed to the thrift store, keep an eye out for an Ocean Skis T-shirt, grab all the top ivy, seven inches you can find. But don't ask Jesse Michaels to sign any of them, purchase that hazy Ziploc bag full of old school sheds. If you're feeling sassy and if you're looking for a lightly used CB radio, we got a guy.

We do. We got that guy.

And if you've got any questions, comments, concerns, bar nominations, seven items or awkward photos to share, we're always on CB Channel 19 and my handle is Jaspan Coyote or just email all that stuff to Ben at the Meat Eater dot com.

We'll see it there as well to Chaz Bono. I don't I don't have a follow up to that.

I don't want to get long, but I actually got that off of a CB handle generator online that that is like my personal. Yeah. That I'm sticking with it.

Don't forget those Digital Angler and Bente podcast hash tags on the gram. We are watching you at all times. Hopefully those of you who liked rocking out in the car to our old music are digging the new gym. Or at least we hope you'll get used to it. Yes, but remember, eyes on the road. Don't give yourself whiplash and crank it up.