The Bente podcast is presented by Black Reifel Coffee Co., which is cool because not only does Black Reifel support the veteran and military community through sales of their totally delicious rose to order coffee, but did you know that founder Evan Hafer also used to be a fishing guide? Therefore, he understands that legit anglers thrive on coffee and subsequently so do people that make podcasts. So if we ever sound jittery now, you know why.

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I bought him a couple tubes of dill pickle Pringles and wish them the best. This looked like a chicken exploded and someone glued it to a hook. Remember, if they don't come to you, stroke a check while wining and dining you on a corporate card at the Sizzler. You're not actually on the pro staff. You guys know anybody that will trade some Roland Martin DVD for some repair work? You better hit me a. Good morning, degenerate anglers, and welcome to Ben, where we drop the know how to get you on a hot bite faster than you can eat a bag of White Castle burgers.

I'm Joe Somali.

Miles Nulty.

And this week we've got a real buffet for you guys, except it's not like the expensive buffet at the MGM Grand where you get them crab legs.

It's more like the buffet at the Flying J, the restaurant connected to a Truxton. And you're mostly skived out. They have good showers. They have. Yeah. You can rent them by the by the minute. You're mostly schemed out by the by the buffet, but there are still a few things, you know, you just can't help a pile on your plate. You're like that's going to make me vomit. But then chicken feet look real good.

I'm going to feel terrible later. But you know, we've got we've got soupy bread pudding, we've got shoeleather, prime rib and potato salad for days.

But before we hit our main courses, we need to we need to help get you guys dialed in with a regional fishing report.

So we know there's a lot of tournament bass fans out there. And Miles and I aren't two of them.

I know. No, not at all. I mean, but to be fair, I have a lot of respect for those folks.

I know that they are incredibly talented anglers, but it's kind of like how I know that Dave Matthews is an incredibly talented musician.

But I'm still I'm still not listening to crash into you anytime soon.

Like, I'm not going to play that at my house. It's actually crashing to me. And I hate that. I know that. I don't like I don't like Dave Mack, whatever.

You know what I'm saying? It's a terrible song. But but I respect the grind completely with these guys. And while I enjoy bass fishing myself, I'd never want it to be the thing that helped me pay my mortgage or put more frozen chicken nuggets on my kids' plates. But as you guys know, we welcome all anglers here at bat and we certainly want to cater to the wants and needs of you bass addicts. And I personally just love fishing for largemouth bass.

That was probably one of the first fish that I just got totally sucked into and couldn't get enough of. I mean, to this day, one of my favorite things in the world is to fish a frog through heavy cover and watch a bass blow up on it. I think that is one of life's great joys. And, you know, it is I don't care what you bring back.

I'm a brown bass guy, but if I'm in the mood, I'll go for the green ones, whatever I despite your throwing shade, those those big mouth bass guys, they know a lot. And I respect their hustle. But I've always been more interested in that tournament scene from like a like a sociological perspective.

Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. Weird shit that goes on in there that I genuinely don't understand. Right. So we want to do a segment about it, but since we don't know we're talking about, we figured we needed to bring in an actual expert. Yeah.

I mean, the original plan was to get an occasional weekly tournament report from one of the top tier pros. But it turns out they all require money.

Yeah, we don't we don't have any of that. So this week's tournament report comes from a man on the ground, self-described pro Randt Simpkins. An interesting story with his kid, which I believe I've told you, but I met him at a Dollar General and Stucky, South Carolina, a few years back. And I just I just popped in looking for a bottle of Tylenol PM. And this ranch kid comes up to me, totally invades my personal space.

And he's trying to sell me a radar detector. And I used radar.

I used radar detector. Right.

And spouting off some shit about needing a hundred more bucks to get in to a tournament on Lake Murray, which is bizarre.

But he was so nice.

Right. Like us Northeasterners, we're all jerks and like everybody in the south is so nice. He was so nice that I actually felt bad for him. And I didn't I didn't buy the radar detector because I don't need a radar detector, but I bought him a couple tubes, a dill pickle, Pringles and wish him the best.

And the funny thing is, like years later, he had no idea that was his big break, because now we need a legit bass pro to give us occasional bass reports.

So we give you Rantes Simpkins.

Hey Yo, professional by Sangla Ranch Simpkins here, before we get into the meat of this report, I've got to thank Evinrude outboards for always get me up and down like I mean, except for that one time and not my lower unit off at Santae and spend the night roped up to some riprap. Other than that, though, it's got me back to the ramp every time, as I'd like to say with that route, you'd be screwed. Look, I know y'all are down for this inside scoop on this recent little goat rodeo we had at Lake for Van Dam.

And I can there may have had 30 pounds a day, but over it's here. I was watching them online on Saturday while eating off the Waffle House kids menu and home by the time they got their checks on Sunday. Shame of it. Is I this damn close again? All right, guys, here's what happened. I only had three of my very special deep diving crank baits. Not going to tell you which ones, though, mostly because the company didn't cut me a check yet, but also because I buy the good ones on eBay, not those shady maiden channel ones that don't hot or the shit.

I set them on the dashboard of my truck until chartreuse and blue back are perfectly faded. And that paint bubble in just a little bit. It's a deal I learned about from an old timer down there on Seminole. Much of it is I gave one to my roommate Travis, because he hasn't cut a check all year and I need them to stay on the road with me. I mean, I got to split expenses with somebody and I figure I guess I can beat them simar consistently.

So that left me with two cranks. And I mean, I was just absent lately, smoking them on it and practice. I was feeling myself so much that I took the last day of practice off what Travis was still prevision hoping he'd left that crank I'd gave him, I was going to grab it and blam methods hanging around the trailer. We'd ran it, but he was smart enough to lock it away. And then it's kind of a time and I'll lose one of them.

Kranks the first day of mourning and now I'm down to the last one. So I start their own similar patterns, figuring that I go back to that crank on championship Sunday, get myself a comeback win and bask in the glory. All them people finally getting to know the name Bryant stampings. Well, I only ended up one two pounder all day, but that didn't give me down. I mean, this is like freaking for ten pound to grow on trees around here.

And I knew where they live, but see boat sixty seven and by the time I got my spotless four dudes already fighting over it so I didn't sportsmanlike thing and left. Well also one guy I won't name here threatened to have my eighty eight Ranger Saudek if I didn't get the hell out then. Veterans are like that though but I think they'll come around as soon as I get that big win. It's coming. I can feel it. Mine. I don't know what happened.

They just quit and I'm sick of crying. I mean I hit all spots where I was wearing them out in practice, but I just barely managed twelve pound limit. That was the end of it for all right, I reckon. But hey, don't worry about me. None. I'm keeping my head up. I just need a good break or three and a six figure title sponsor. Oh shit. I also need to replace the rear suspension in my dodge.

So if you guys know anybody that'll try some Roland Martin DVD for some repair work, you better hit me up. Now, listen here, folks, if you want to know how real pro attacks the country's best lakes for loop fence pandas, check out my YouTube channel. I mean, I haven't created it yet, but I've got tons of footage that'll blow you all away. Also on an Instagram account got hacked after I bought a bunch of knockoff Sancho's from All Express, but I'll have them back up shortly.

You know, mean, I actually believe in Rantes, I think he's right, I feel good about that, dude. I mean, I know he's not really pull it off, but I think he's just like one good break away from making it. And then you can he can retire all those second hand jerseys. We've been seeing him dumpster dive out of the back of sports authorities.

Yeah, I like the crystal clear Pepsi jersey.

I like that dude. I think we should keep him around.

He'll get there and we should keep him around. I'd like to hear from him again, trying to track his progress, you know what I mean? So you he have to do that. You know what else? I think we should keep around the weekly word segment. Let's do that.

Webster's Dictionary defines fish as. This week, we're taking a look at Adipocytes, as in Adipose Fin, as in that fleshy little nub that sticks up between the tail and the dorsal fin of trout, salmon, catfish and about 6000 other less popular fishes. The word comes from the Latin root out of him, which means soft fat of animals. See, up until the last 20 years or so, fisheries biologists thought that the adipose fin was just a leftover fat deposit, that natural selection hadn't gotten around to scraping off yet, like a rubbery little appendix.

Turns out that's not correct. Recent research has shown that, one, the adipose fin isn't actually made of fat and too, it seems to serve some kind of purpose. We're just not entirely sure what that purpose is yet, since at least two separate lineages of fish catfishes and so monads evolved adipose fins, it's likely that these wardi looking bulbs serve some function. Recent findings show that adipose fins are connected to the nervous system, and they're mostly found in fish that live in moving water.

The hypothesis goes that they might act as flow sensors, helping fish feel and navigate current. And that's all well and good for scientists.

But for trout, steelhead and salmon fishermen, that adipose means one thing and one thing only. Wild fish, because for generations, hatcheries have been cutting the adipose off pen raised fish so the anglers can tell them apart from the wild ones. And since wild salmon and steelhead are protected in most places these days, the presence or absence of an adipose fin determines if you were allowed to keep that fish.

It literally dictates the fate and identity of a fish West Coast steelhead. Purists will cradle unclipped wild fish with all in reverence, then chuck aside, a mildly mutilated cousin muttering God damn hatchery rats.

Consequently, those weird little skin tags have become symbols for wildness, healthy fisheries and the cultural divide between anglers who fish for meat and those who fish for sport. Macro photos of adipose fins have become one of the new stand ins for grip and grins, especially on the fly fishing catch and release crowd. In fact, there's even a popular drift boat manufacturer out here in Montana called at Oppos Boat Works. We may all have trouble agreeing on the function, importance and significance of that little fin, but just about everyone agrees, myself included.

Those are some badass boats. I suspect we only care about the adipose fin because we're so obsessed with trout and salmon. If that spinel bump only protruded off the backs of Kandal fish and whiskery bottom feeders, I kind of doubt any of us would even know what it's called as an experiment. I think I'm going to start doing like artsy photos of great catfish nubs glistening in the sunlight and see if that catches on. Joe, what do you think?

I'm what I think is that they have to refill the catfish none's tray at the truck stop buffet pretty much every time I'm there, because those are delicious. Slap a little Texas pizza and a dash of lemon pepper. You know, I just cut those off like shark fins and let and let the fish go when I'm catfish and.

Oh, that's what I think about those catfish knives.

Also, you use the term rubbery little appendix. I'm claiming that is the name of my next commercial drive fly for the UMCOR catalog.

So please back up Somali.

You know, I trademarked anything halfway clever that I ever come up with. You know, I do that.

Moving on, let's get to trivia. And if I'm not mistaken, we've got one of your very best friends playing today, right? We do, yes, sir.

Captain Eric Kerber of On a Mission Fishing Adventures here in Jersey. From stripers to tuna to flounder to Fluke. He's your man, one of my oldest pals. And we'll be hearing from from him more in the future, rest assured. But for now, I'm just going to try and throw old kerbs off with a little trash talking slang.

You've got to be highly skilled for these shows. You understand it? Yes, I do understand you. Well, first there. You're very smart, man. Yes, I am. All right.

Playing today, we have one of my oldest and dearest friends, Captain Eric, serve on a mission. Fishing adventures, jersey boy like me. What's up, bro?

Hey. Hey. You ready to play?

Yes, I'm excited about this trivia question because it's like tailor made for you.

As soon as I came up with it, I was like, this is a question for Eric. All right?

So get for me to get or not get. I don't know. I don't know whether you're going to get it or not, but you're going to like it.

You're going to you're going to use it when you're done.

All right. So here's your here's your trivia question. All right.

Hollywood is a slang term for which of the following, a guy that insists every fish he swings on is a giant only to typically backpedal and say, man, it's not as big as I thought it was.

A guy that owns a boat costing more than two hundred thousand dollars but has no idea how to run it. A guy that insists on keeping the clicker on so everyone can. Here, his fish run, a guy who shoots hours of head cam footage while fishing but then never edits or posts the video anywhere, which one of those is a Hollywood?

Let's say all except they know it's not like that one. One answer is no. All of the above. Nope, there's no all the above.

It's a specific answer.

I'd go, so be a guy that owns a boat costing more than two hundred thousand dollars but has no idea how to run it. Exactly. That is incorrect in Hollywood.

Now, here's what I thought of you. Hollywood is a West Coast term, and you spent some time in California living in California.

I did in Hollywood, actually.

So on the West Coast, Hollywood is the douceur that insist on keeping his clicker on.

So everybody knows that he's got a fish running on the other end.

I was going to be my second choice or the first one, but I thought of you because I don't know how many times you've been out.

You're like, turn a god damn clicker off, click or turn that clicker off and get a little bit annoying.

So now this season, you can start throwing out Hollywood. When all your people do that, they're good attempt. Thanks for playing.

I like the Hollywood.

Hollywood, I like that, I like that, I'm pretty sure I would have gotten around, though, but yeah, no, but I would have gone with the first one.

I would have gone with the guy who's like every single fish he swings. He's a monster. I got a big one. But I mean, probably that's because I don't actually use clicker right. Ever. So I'm kind of out of my element on that one. Yeah.

Dude, I can't tell you how often I've thrown clickers off on my boat.

Like when you're fishing like a big lightweight, like live bunker for stripers, you know, if you know what you're doing, if you've been doing that a long time, you don't even need the clicker.

You just feel it. You feel it with your thumb.

But when you have newbies on the boat, the clicker, it's less for them and more for me.

Right. I want to be able to hear the tone of the runoff because all I need is the audio. You know, if a striper picked up the bait or it's just the pulling because I mean, even with the clicker on, it's like him. That him, that him.

I'm like, no, you know, it's you know, it's going to be me. It's going to be a lot higher pitched and faster. Like, that's no now. And as soon as I'm finally like, yeah, that is him now set the hook and they come me. I just walk over to my good job.

Let me just switch that clicker off for you. Really. Yeah. But then you do that with then how how's that new supposed to let everyone else know around what a bad ass she is on a first time out. You got to let them know and you're a bad ass when you get it to the net.

You know what I'm saying like that. Then you're the bad ass when you put it on the ground. Anyway, get ready because we're about to let all of you know, we're not just talking about clickers. We are talking about news. Put on your thinking caps and grab a turkey leg while Joe and I joust medieval times style to see who brought the best newsy bits to table this week. It escalated quickly, so here we are, we've landed at Fish News, which, for those of you have been following along, is not only designed to keep you informed about all things fishing and fishy going on, but also let you in on this little news competition that Miles and I have going because we do not know which news stories the other is bringing to the table, which makes this fun.

However, before we get into news, just a quick quick note here that we are listening to you guys. OK, since the show has started, we've been getting a ton of amazing feedback.

So I just wanted to say, because I don't know if it'll ever be an actual weekly word, but for the like dozens of people from Wisconsin who wrote in to say, please use the acronym Phibbs F IBS as one of your weekly words, I'm not sure I'll do that, but I do appreciate it.

And that's what I guess Wisconsin people refer to Illinois's people as. And that would be effing Illinois's bastards. Yeah.

So apparently you guys are really digging the derogatory terms for out of staters that was do have a tidal wave of Phibbs tidal wave box. And we do appreciate it. So we are listening to you.

I just want to give a little bit more context on the Pebble Mine permitting situation that I talked about last week. A number of you have written to me about that one. So just so we're all clear, the mining permit was not accepted as written by the Corps of Engineers, but northern dynasty minerals can still change their application and resubmit. Point being, this isn't over and we'll probably be covering it again. But despite all that, the decision last week was still a huge success because, you know, digging was about to start happening imminently.

And at least we got that stayed. And, you know, it's just another move toward what our ultimate goal is, which, again, we're not finished with, but kind of keeping that mine from ever happening at all.

Yes, it's a battle one within a big war. And it was definitely worthy of an extra white claw or two last weekend.

So we hope you did that. And hopefully I won't need a few white claws after this because it is your week to lead off and you always want to be the lead off man in this news competition.

So I give you the floor, my friend. I appreciate it.

Just so you guys know, we're making a slight change to this segment. Yes. You know, like up until now, we've just sort of like, independently claimed victory without any fair judgment, just assumed that we both won. But who knows who won. Right. And and I don't know about you, but it started to wear on me, Joe, because I'm competitive and I want an actual winner. So that's that's fine. The old message, you should feel better.

Well, just so I know, the only solution that we can come up with is to bring our very own field engineer as judge, jury and executioner. Moving forward, Phil will be the decider and one of us will emerge victorious. Namely me. All right. OK, I'm going to start out this week with something that's a big problem for many fisheries and and some new research that just came out that might help mitigate that problem. I'm talking about algae, right?

Algal blooms pose a significant threat to many of our lakes and estuaries, which are some of the most fertile fish habitat in the world. Big blooms can cause big problems. They can choke out other aquatic plants, produce nasty neurotoxins, and when they inevitably die off, the surrounding water can be completely depleted of oxygen. Red tides are often exacerbated by algal blooms. And the growing marine dead zones that you may have read about are usually the result of those blooms between warming water temps and increased fertilizer runoff.

Algae blooms have been growing in scope and frequency all over the world, a trend that researchers refer to as eutrophication. If you pay attention to fishery's news at all, you know what I'm talking about, right? Just two weeks ago, there's a massive fish kill reported in Biscayne Bay, Florida. So far, water quality managers have been the only ones working to find solutions for this problem. But a recent study out of Sweden suggests that fisheries managers may have a role to play in controlling algal blooms as well.

And that's good news because the more tools that we can find to combat these blooms, the better equipped we might be to combat them. So this research team, they're studying the relationship between large predators, small predators, grazers and algae. In this case, the large predators where pike and perch they eat, the small predators, in this case, sticklebacks which eat the grazers and the grazers feed on algae.

That part is key. The team found that when large predator populations started to decline, algal blooms increased. Fewer pike and perch meant more sticklebacks. All those sticklebacks ate the grazers that would have otherwise eaten the algae. OK, so this might seem like esoteric science nerd stuff, but it really matters for us anglers because it suggests that fisheries management might help us deal with increasing algae. I mean, yeah, we still got to mitigate the floods of nutrients that we're pumping into our waters.

But this study suggests that maintaining strong populations of top predators might also knock back algae. Extra bonus, those top predators, those are the fish that we target.

So another way to look at this is that the lakes and estuaries with more of the fish that you and I want to catch are also more resistant to large algae blooms. So this is a win win if we can figure out how to do this. Right. Wow, OK, so I'm that was a lot to take it no, you didn't lose me at all, but that was a lot to take in because I absolutely understand what you're saying.

Like, it's all sort of it's all food chain related, obviously. But I think I'm missing the part about how fisheries biologist can help this or what we can do with predator fish when you're dealing with situations in Florida where those algae blooms are completely out of control because of outside factors like how do we not have them kill the predator fish in the ecosystem they're affecting?

They're still going to do that, right? That's that's not this isn't a panacea or like a fix.

All what it's saying is that if we can maintain high populations, those predatory fish, that we can help keep the grazers around, that can feed on the algae. It's not a one size fits all kind of solution. We still have to deal with these massive nutrient influxes that are happening. But it's one more tool that might we might be able to put in the toolbox for management. So it's not all on water quality engineers. The fisheries managers might have a role to play that we might be able to help this whole thing out.

I'm not trying to suggest and none of the researchers have said, hey, we got this figured out, but even a slight possible win in that direction. I'm calling that fantastic news, particularly in this case when it says, hey, if we can keep the populations of fish that you guys like high, it might help knock back some of these algae blooms. No, no, I get it.

And it is really interesting because we have a lot of us have heard about these blooms over the last few years. And a lot of it's associated with Florida, like you hear about it in Florida so much, but it is happening in other places.

In fact, just last summer, two local lakes that I've been fishing since I was a kid had some sort of bloom that that all of a sudden calls signage all around. It was like, don't swim in here, don't fish in here, don't eat anything in here.

This is really bad. That has never happened here in my entire life.

So I do I do think this is important science now because this is happening more in places that it didn't before.

And it's it's all over the country. It's all over the world. And it's not just in those estuaries like we hear about it a lot in Florida and Louisiana and places like that. But it's also like saying happen in freshwater lakes. More nutrients are coming into those lakes. It's the same the same situation. You get big algae blooms, particularly that blue green algae which produces those cyanobacteria neurotoxins. And then you can't swim there. You can't eat the fish.

It's bad for everything.

So the short version is that we can use we can use pich and walleyes and predators as a tool to fight the algae, right?

Yes, that's the gist.

So I'm going I'm going to I'm going to use that to jump over to to my story where high powered rifles are used to fight something else.

Yes, I saw this one. This is fantastic. This is the one that I thought you were going to grab.

And so I was actually first alerted to this story by listener Mike Guillain.

And I thought at the time it was just sort of a weird one off, like something he dredged up from somewhere, you know, and within a very short time, this was blowing up on several news outlets. But I will start with the version that Mike sent, which was on task and purpose dotcom headline We salute the bad ass coasties who opened fire on a friggin shark that crashed his crew swimming call.

Headline of the century right there, it's a really good headline, right? OK, so this happened essentially in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is in one quote. One of the stories puts it a zillion miles from land.

And the story says, as a way to be technical, but. Right. Zaillian you know, whatever.

As a way to break up the daily monotony of life at sea, the crew of the U.S. Coast Guard, Cutter Kimbal, was recently rewarded with a swim call, meaning everyone kicks off their flip flops, parentheses or combat boots and leaps into the wide open ocean.

However, they had an unexpected and entirely unwanted guest, an eight foot Mako shark.

Now other reports have it as either a Mako or a pelagic thresher. But to my eye, looking at the photos that had his way to pointing to be a thresher. So I'm going to go with Mako. So the crew of the Kimbal is swimming. And I need to add they also had an inflatable unicorn, which is great.

Cheers, guys. You guys are so awesome.

An American badass is out there when someone on the bridge of the cutter said shark over the radio and maritime enforcement specialist First Class Samuel Synthron was the dude on the flight deck tasked with shark overwatch during the swim.

And when the Mako appeared near the ship's rescue door, Sintra got locked on target.

So this task and purpose article quote, It also quotes the Facebook post from crew members on the boat. And my favorite line is our animal lover chief who wants to save every animal she finds yelled, shoot it.

That's a great line. As the Mako move toward the swimmers still in the water, Cintron fired off a quote. Well, aim burst right over top of the shark. And he says the shark would wave off with each burst because there were multiple births, but kept coming back towards the shipmates. And, you know, several of these stories, including the task and purpose story, made a point of pointing out that the shark was not injured.

OK, and there's a quote in there from a crew member who says, our goal was to keep it away from shipmate mates, not harm it if possible. But like I said, he did shoot at it more than once and everyone got out of the water safely.

There was no injury. Even the inflatable unicorn lived to tell the tale.

But here's the thing. All right.

I watched the video of this because there is very good, very clear video from the flight deck. And I got to say, if Synthron was purposely trying to just scare the shark away, he might be the greatest marksman ever, because to my eye, he wasn't shooting near the shark or next to the shark.

Like it looks like he was going for center mass man. Like and this shark, you had to remember, it's right into the surface.

You can you can see it very clearly.

And you also clearly see it doesn't go belly up and there was no blood. But if you watch how he placed those bursts, I do not understand how that was not a dead shark. They both looked dead on to me. And, you know, to be clear, right, I'm all about shark conservation.

I've done some shark fishing. It's been a long time, but they've been hit hard.

And I believe we should leave the sharks alone. And many rules have changed. I mean, even out here on the East Coast, you can still Kmetko, but it's got to be pretty big. They've changed the rules. They've made it harder. But anyway, this crew, per the story, had been trapped on the cutter for four weeks straight.

And God bless them again, you guys are bad asses.

And this swim was the first time they got off of this boat in four weeks.

So would it have been so terrible, given that the shark was posing a threat to end the story with?

And then the crew feasted on Delicious grilled Makow and enjoyed making sandwiches for the next three days?

You know, instead of the standard Chef Boyardee raviolis or whatever you eat for a month on a Coast Guard cutter, like, come on a given why we could have given our boys one shark, I would have been fine with that ending.

Yeah, that that would not have made me sad. And I'm with you. I'm pro sharks as far as I think I talked about in the last episode. Like, sharks generally don't want to attack us. We don't need to attack the sharks. But in a situation like this, you know, sharks, sharks out of line. Yeah, he was an ordinary shark.

He kept coming. I mean, the video, he keeps coming back. It's a pretty good if if if he was shooting in such a way that, like he knew he was going to get that close.

But, Miss, he's the man because. Up, up, up, up, up, like. Right. I mean, let's just call it that. He's the man and, you know, a much better trained marksman than either of us. And my hat goes off to him. Yeah.

Well, you know, and I think this was pretty justified. I mean, it was an absolute safety issue with a lot of people in the water, in the open ocean.

But like, you know, there's some offshore dudes in Louisiana, Texas do this stuff every other Sunday, you know what I mean? Yeah.

Yeah. And I can't I can't actually support that. But this I think this would be a case of justified shark aside, I'm going to.

I'm going to transition to a much smaller predator and one that didn't win the battle, and I got to say, this is very different from the stuff I've been reporting on recently, but this is just a cool story and it comes from your side of the country.

Joe, I'm sure you remember the somewhat awkwardly named tropical storm. You say us.

Oh, dude, the eye literally came over my home. Yeah, I know. Talking that day. We know each other well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of people out here, by the way, are calling it Hurricane Easybeats.

That's fantastic. That was not mentioned in the coverage. And I know I know it knocked out a lot of power in a lot of communities like overbuy you. And one of those communities that lost power was Burkum said Connecticut. And that's where our stories protagonist Leslie Slater just happens to live. Leslie and her family were having a tough day. It was brutally hot. The power was out.

So there's no air conditioning. There's still a global pandemic going on. So they don't have a lot of options on what they could do. But Leslie and her family, they did not wallow in their misfortune. Oh, no, they did what all of us should do in a situation like that. Leslie, her husband and kids packed up their kayaks and fishing gear and they headed out to the local river and saw Leslie's in her kayak. She's got two kids.

She's got her husband. She's got her lights spinning rod. And she's just fishing and floating and relaxing and making the best of a tough situation.

Now, according to the story she told the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, she was, quote, jigging a rooster tail for trout, which I don't know that I've ever jigged a brushtail, but I'm going to let that one go when when she got bit.

And no surprise, it didn't turn out to be some dinky little finless Toby's stock tank rainbow.

After a very long and apparently very exciting fight, Leslie brought in a forty six inch, twenty nine pound pike. I know what I did see that I did not.

Yes, OK. Yes, Munsen Fish.

You guys, this thing is a beast. Yeah, it really is.

Do a little Googling and you can find it for yourselves. And somehow Leslie managed to bring this thing in on like spinning tackle without breaking the rod, without breaking the line. And then she wrestled it into this teeny little like tippy kayak. This wasn't a fishing kayak at all.

This is not this is just like a regular kayak that she didn't even have a skirt on. She wrestled this thing into the kayak without capsizing. Somehow she didn't get any of her digits bitten off, which I also don't understand. Then the whole family paddle over. Sure, it takes patience with the fish, which the exactly should done. I mean, things are amazing. They tried to release it, but between the long fight on the left tackle and the warm water, I mean, that was just done.

So their next mission was to try and get it weighed at a certified scale and see if it was a state record.

But you know that that also proved to be quite the challenge because, again, you're in the middle of a total power outage everywhere. Yeah, yeah. And all the covid shutdowns. So the first place they took it to was a local deli. And she carries this giant fish in and sets it on the local deli counter. But the fish are too big for the scale.

The ham scale, like the lunchmeat scale, can't possibly be served.

I never look, you know what? In a tough situation, I give him credit for that move. Right.

But like, that is not a certified scale. But I mean, well, at least it shows that they're banking. Exactly. And this is my favorite image. They like slap it down on the deli counter. They put on the scale and, you know, the head and the tail does fall down onto the counter. Right. So that's not going to work. And Slater described the reactions from other deli customers as, quote, priceless.

And I could only imagine, like, you're standing in line to get your lunch meat and there's just a pike hanging off either end of the scale. So anyway, finally, they did get the fish to a certified skill at the local county store and it officially tied the state record pike. And I got to say, man, I love everything about this story. It's just like a positive attitude pays dividends. And we've said this before. If you're having a terrible day, just take it from Leslie.

Go fishing. Exactly. Going to get better.

I was just going to say, man, I have lived through I got spared by Easy Earth.

I didn't lose my power, but I've been there for five days with no power. And like on day four, it's like, OK, the family is somewhere else and I'm just manning this, you know, shut down home. You go fishing. So she's right on the money. And man, this this news post, however, might and my follow up might upset our friends in Connecticut, because as a man who loves Pike, I have Pike Junky.

I am long overdue for some PICH missions in Connecticut and there is some seriously good public water in that tiny state, clearly, and and now the world knows where one of them is.

So well, I mean, I think it's probably going to end up either in her family's belly or on her wall. But, yeah, I mean, that was that was a huge buy. Twenty nine pound pipe. The thing's a monster. That must have been a lot of fun. Good on you, Leslie. Yeah.

That's that's like Saskatchewan numbers, right? Sure. I mean, that's that's incredible.

OK, so we'll go from we'll go from big predators to teeny tiny worms.

How's that sound. Like it.

This story comes to us from the environmental section of Buffalo Rising Dotcom based out of Buffalo, New York. And it reads as if we didn't have enough to worry about. Now we've got jumping earthworms on our hands. Yup, you heard it right. A new invasive species has reared its iList and squirming head in these parts, causing another concerning EchoStar and similar to the actions of Asian carp, another invasive species that is on our doorstep.

When these suckers are disturbed, they thrash about hence their jumping moniker.

It is also significant to note that these unwelcome critters are also slightly iridescent and leave behind granular castings that resemble ground beef, according to earthworm scientist Nick Handschu right now.

So apparently these more aggressive jumping earthworms are cropping up in significant numbers in western New York. And the article says that they've actually been down in the South for a number of years now and have really only been noticed widely in places like New England in the past 15 to 20 years.

And it says it is thought that the earthworms arrived in a shipment of mulch similar to how invasive species arrive in the hands of humans.

The kicker here is that these destructive worms live close to the earth's surface where they can scavenge for fallen leaves.

And typically these leaves are left to decompose and then get recycled back into the soil, thus providing the trees with the nutrients that they need to thrive. And we're going to get to the fishy part, because this does connect to fishing directly.

It goes on to say the ability of these worms to reduce the leaf litter, to mix up soil horizons and to add a whole lot of bacteria to the soil is very disruptive to plants, to animals and to organisms that live in that soil.

And the fear is that the jumping earthworm could actually displace the beneficial regular old earthworm that already exists in an area.

But this is where it gets really funky, right? According to the story, regular old earthworms, which I did not know, are technically not native to western New York either.

Earthworms, scientists, this Nick Handschu dude who's like the the worm, you know, savant.

Right.

Says like worm guy. I got worms. Yeah, you got a worm.

But he says it's likely that the glaciers moved earthworms well south of the area. In other words, they were there.

And then when the glaciers came through, the glaciers should have pushed them well out of western New York.

And the reason that they exist in western New York and other northern areas is that boats bait, potted plant soil being moved easily, transports teeny tiny earthworm egg cases.

And Handschu says people go to these pristine areas on fishing trips and we see this as an invasion front.

They dump their bait overboard because they think it will kill the earthworms or the fish will have a good meal.

And what they don't realize, and I didn't know this, is that earthworms can live quite happily underwater for about three weeks or more if the water is oxygenated enough. Really? I didn't I did not know that.

Three weeks. Yeah.

So the end of the day, you know, you take your container nightcrawlers and just go off dump them.

Yeah. You figure, well, they're going to drown, right? Like, I know they live in the dirt, but there's like little air channels and stuff. I thought in in the dirt like they have to have air but no, according to the worm guy, three weeks or more underwater.

Oh, yeah, lots of layers to this first, that that last piece is fascinating and will forever change the way I think about disposing of worm bait. But what about the new worms? Like, they sound like they might be dynamite bait. So there's there was a little video embedded in this.

And if you didn't know what you're looking at, you really wouldn't know. It wasn't your straight up Nightcrawler.

They have a little bit more milkiness, like some milky bands. I guess that's the iridescence they're talking about.

But, I mean, you know, they have this big worm in someone's hand close up and it is it's wriggling and twitching all over the place. But I mean, in the right circumstances, I've pulled regular nightcrawlers out of the dirt in my yard and they do that, too.

So it's not super noticeable side by side. However, the end of this article, it does say, although these pests have now made their way into western New York, it's important that we do our part to slow the spread. God, that sounds familiar of the worms by practicing the following, don't use jumping worms as bait.

Be vigilant when taking part in plant swaps. Obtain clean mulch and compost from reliable sources.

All right. Well, it doesn't sound like feeding them to fish is going to be the solution to this problem.

I mean, chances are if there's as many as people are saying people are feeding the fish all the time, if you're digging your own worms, I swear, man, like if you if you didn't hear this, like, chances are you wouldn't even be paying enough attention.

But I do think it just it brings up sort of a more interesting point in bait transport overall.

You know, like a lot of people just go catch crayfish in this creek and go fish in this river, you know, things like that.

There are laws state by state that you really need to check before you do anything like that. You think it would be so benign to, you know, even with Shiner's, there's there's so many lakes that say do not dump your unused bait. And this sort of ties back to that.

I just think it's one of those things that a lot of people don't think about and what the effects of dumping a few shiner's are.

Bring in a few crayfish from here to there, you know, can do, you know, huge problem. Bucket biology extends beyond just the fish and level. And that's I think that's a really good thing for people to remember. All right.

So, Phil, you have a lot to digest.

You've got gunning down sharks, algae, jumping worms, just so like the record pike.

Phil, I don't know how you're going to pick, but I know you're going to pick the shooting of a shark anyway. So we're going to find out who won.

And then right after Phil has declared a victor, if you are not already full on jumping earthworms, we're going to kick it over to our own Yannis Pantelis for this week's Yoni's Desk.

And he's going to tell you why. Castagna, you should be eating some smallmouth bass.

Hear ye. Hear ye. All rise for the honorable Judge Phil, the engineer who can count the number of fish he has caught in his lifetime. On one hand, Miles Nolte came in hot this week, spanning the gamut from the scientific to the sensational.

But the allure of guns, sharks, jumping worms, it was all too much for me to deny.

And therefore I declare Joe Somali the winner of week one.

Thank you to whoever will be keeping track of this on the bench wiki page.

Please find something better to do with your life. All right, welcome back, Johnny's desk today, smallmouth is on the menu. That's right. You heard it on the menu because it is good to eat. I don't care who you are, how many small mouth you've caught, what body of water you're catching them out of. If you think otherwise, you are simply a bad cook or whoever's cooking the fish for you doesn't know what they're doing. I would put it right up there with a redfish, very similar, actually.

In flesh, the texture and the density is very similar to a redfish.

The flavor might be a little bit different, definitely a little bit more freshie water tasting, but awesome. I recently caught a couple, decided to grill them up. You can definitely fry them.

You can fry any fish and make it taste good, but it tastes like cornmeal and oil and whatever seasonings you put on there, if you don't taste what a fish really tastes like, it's good to keep it simple, throw it on the grill. And now my buddy Ryan Callahan told me about this method of preparation for Smalley's. So we decided to try it and it worked out slick. I simply fillet them and I did not scale them. Steve talked about this before and I noticed this.

I really dug up my knife for playing these fish and working through those scales. We had some good sized ones. Seventeen, eighteen inches.

Some people will scale fish just for that reason so that their knife will work better when they're filling the fish.

Then that is Fallada lots of scales on. And then we did them a couple of different ways. As far as seasonings go. We had olive oil and salt and pepper on a couple, we had olive oil and Cajun seasoning spices on a couple. And then I also did the trick I learned from our friend Jesse Griffiths down in Texas is we caramelize a whole bunch of onions and it took those caramelized onions and put them right on top of the raw fillet.

And then we took all those filets and just set them on a hot grill, put the lid on it. Definitely didn't take more than ten minutes. And those filets were cooked, didn't cook them too long, don't want to dry them out, but they're very raw. We tell you they were delicious. Everybody thought they were delicious. You should go try it out.

You need to be careful, though. SMALLMOUTH, unlike their largemouth cousins, are slow to grow and long lived.

They often take five years just to reach twelve inches, which is the legal harvest size in many states. The oldest record smallmouth lived to a ripe old age of twenty six years.

That is an old fish.

You kind of feel bad about killing on that old, but you're not going to be able to know when you catch them so they don't spawn every year. Only about twenty five percent of the males make nests in a given year. SMALLMOUTH also produce far fewer eggs and largemouth about half as many per fish.

Now, this all isn't to say that you shouldn't harvest and eat Smalley's, but just be thoughtful about it. Only harvest from healthy stocks, avoid harvesting the large females and only keep what you need for a meal. It's not like a giant salmon run. Where are you going to fill your freezer for the next year? But it's definitely worth eating fresh. I've never frozen ones. I can't tell you what it tastes like after it's been frozen for a while.

I'm sure it's still good. But I think just to keep your local fish or your wherever you're at healthy, take what you need for a meal, enjoy it, fry it up, grill it, do whatever you want to do. There you go. Smalley's on the menu.

Well, if that wasn't controversial enough, here comes our boy, Lance V in this week's Cherlyn with Lance. He's going to teach you how to get on a pro staff. And some of what finally going to explain will undoubtedly be hard for many of you to hear.

And I apologize.

But sometimes the only way to make it as a successful Internet angler is through the school of hard knocks.

The land to the boats, to the lake, to the sea, filling up the inundate with your boy. What up as clowns? Welcome to another installment of Trolly with Lance. I'm Lance V and I just racked up more Instagram followers in the time it took to introduce myself than you could in ten years.

Hashtag triflin, but I'm not here to be discouraging. That's what mirrors and selfies are for. I'm here to keep it real and help you on the path to internet fashion greatness. I haven't read any Midem since like 2016, but I know a shit ton of them goes something like this. Yo Lance, I just hit two hundred and thirty five followers on Instagram.

How do I get on a pro staff? Great question.

After all, being a legit Internet fisherman has nothing to do with enjoyment of the sport. Sharing useful fishing info or creating a community is about free Girma or at least the appearance of free gear.

It's about making people think your shit is so tight that companies throw endorsement deals that you like you a dartboard.

Now, this is kind of a complex topic because there are two kinds of pro staffs, real ones and imaginary ones.

When you see me drop hash tag, Gucci, hash tag, nitro, hash tag, monster energy, hash tag hook hashtag Applebee's hashtag Netflix, hashtag Banegas hashtag 13, fishing hashtag Def Jam, hashtag Spencer gifts and hashtag Megabus.

It's mad real. It's so real that if I backed out of those deals, there's social media presence would drop harder than a Skrillex break down hashtag truth hurts.

Oh my God. In this segment, I'm going to give you some tips for getting on an imaginary pro staff, because let's face it, you ain't getting on any real ones.

That would be like telling a blind kid he could drive like they do in Fast and Furious Tokyo Drift if he works really, really hard.

I mean, I fronton with false hopes. That just ain't right.

So here are the four levels of imaginary prose that status hashtag dream, big level, you know, tag, you're in Choo's anywhere from 15 to 47, seven fishing gear brands you like actually using any of their products is not required.

Tag all of them in every single post you drop. You're now on all of their pro staffs. I mean, it's total bullshit, but you're the only one that knows that, right, dog? Every other poser will tremble with reverence and respect. It's simple psychology. Most people naturally assume that if you tag a brand, you are affiliated with it. If you aren't, why the hell would you give the company free promotion for no reason? Nobody would ever do that.

Hash tag knowledge is power level to stick them up. There's no way you get enough money in that birthday card from you. Grandma grabbed by that Shimano steller. You been tagged, but you do earn enough in one shift, the Chick fil A to purchase copious amounts of Shimano stickers. Your sticker portfolio is more important than your stock portfolio for real. Every time you take a picture of one of your cheap ass tackle trays because you ain't catching shit, there needs to be a different sticker on the lid.

Nobody will ever assume you paid your hard earned money for a sticker.

Ergo, when they see that Jackel sticker on your Home Depot bucket, they'll assume Jackal hunted your ass down to represent hashtag Jackett level traced the friend zone.

I know you don't have many friends, but you know that one guy with a hook up.

Maybe your cousin gets an employee discount at Wal-Mart or your uncle in Florida knows someone who makes soft plastics and you get a free bag for Christmas.

It really doesn't matter. You just have to be able to flaunt that. You don't pay full price for shit. More importantly, once you've established a line to some level discounts or freebies, you have to tell your three friends you can hook them up, but then never follow through.

Hash tags suckers love Laurino.

Quatro Bag.

Let's assume you have an insignificant number of insta followers like less than three hundred thousand. If you got the time to send hundreds of DMS and emails, eventually you get on the pro staff of some half assed company. You might be saying Lance is not like being on a real pro staff. No, it's still imaginary. You have to commit to buying a certain amount of their shit at twenty percent to 40 percent off. Rest assured, giving you that fake discount will not hurt their bottom line.

You'll then spend the rest of your life over talking to them and smile every time you do it. By the time you finally realize that they'll sign anyone with a pulse, it's too late. You'll have to either keep fishing with their garbage that you're actually paying for or revert back to complete loser status online because you're not on a pro staff hashtag. Choose wisely. Remember, if they don't come to you, is stroke a check while wining and dining you on a corporate card at the Sizzler?

You're not actually on the pro staff, but don't sweat it because for ninety nine point nine percent of Internet fishermen, being on an imaginary pro staff is just as good. Maybe even better, real pro staffs come with real responsibilities. Yo, you got to produce pressures on son. You've got to catch fish and I mean somewhere other than the pond and your friend's gated golf course neighborhood hashtag on money mo problems.

So that's it for this week. I know Miles and Joe would love me to drop hashtag bent all over my posts, but meet Peter ain't got that kind of scrilla. I'll catch you next time if you're lucky. And I'm not a full fledged member of a goon squad by then. Hashtag job is but Jesus.

Every time I hear Lance talked, every time his mouth is moving, I just miss the days before social media. Remember those days like when when being a fishing celebrity just meant you had multiple pictures of yourself tacked up on the board at the local tackle shop? Oh, yeah.

I mean, brag boards, a thing of the past, but you know what else I mean? Remember, I had the good old tackle shops would have like a bulletin board, like a communal bulletin board somewhere, and they would just be like classifieds.

I tacked up like, oh yeah, free dog, missing one leg, deer, corn, handmade crab nets. And they would just cut the bottom and it'd just be the low.

Yes or no. Great rip off. No one cut it. You just ripped it. You just ripped it. And then everybody and you'd like you'd stick those in your wallet and prank call those people later.

I miss that.

To the community forum in Thumbtack for totally I, I remember there were always those three by five note cards you probably had like a like a jello mold recipe on the back. And there's something and you know, just said in like chicken scrolling 1966 one for sale, minor damage. Call Billy at five, five, five, six, two, five, seven. And then you'd have to waste half a Saturday and actually drive out to Billy's overgrown backlog, figure out how minor the damage actually was.

Well, nowadays, you can just see the photos online. Right. But they're usually very strategically taken, which is the other thing. So now it's like, oh, minor damage.

But the only thing you can see is like a tight close up of the Makow logo. So you at least know that it is a Mako boat and it does exist somewhere.

But like, that's all you see. I mean, it's it's it's it's still a gamble, you know.

But the online shopping, it's a trip, man. So let's let's take our trip this week to the sale bin.

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

All right, man. So, Miles, you are going to take the reins on this one because you've managed to pull yourself away from the casual encounters section on Craigslist long enough to look for some good bowsman junk.

This week. We got a ringer here. We got to we got to have some some regional diversity in these. Like you got the East locked down. I'm looking out for the West. Absolutely.

I was digging through the the old Bozeman Craigslist and not in the way that you guys are going to accuse me of later. But I found this post for wedding special occasion fly fishing boutonniere with feathers only twenty five dollars.

And I mean, the thing about these is I have actually. Had to wear fly-Fishing boutonnieres and and seen nicely tied, beautiful flies that went for boutonnieres is kind of a thing out here. And and what I'm looking at are not those. This looked like a chicken exploded and and someone glued it to a hook.

These are these are craft store feathers, OK, for one thing, like these are not even nice flashmob feathers.

These were purchased at a chain craft store. I know this because I buy this shit for my kid to tie her flies with like she likes to do that. So she's not using all daddy stuff and they are just the most hideous, drab colors. They're not. Oh, God. It's just shades of browns and grays. But dude, I've actually so I've I've I've been in a wedding with a fly boot in here too. And I was the guy tax with tying the theme colored deceivers for the boutonnieres, OK, black and chartreuse from my buddy Eric Kirby who will be and has been on this show.

And it's funny because it's like dudes don't do weddings, right. Like you don't get as crazy as ladies about wedding things. But I was like spray painting patterns on the tail feathers and things.

And like, I do want to be like, this is not perfect. This one is just this one's not perfect. This is for a wedding. It's not. And I had to tie seven of them.

And it took me like six months to make them to make them perfect. So knowing the pain that actually goes into crafting this for somebody special day, these are horrendous. And I so bad. I like the write up.

It says in huge caps, never used twenty five dollars each or one hundred dollars for all five. There's about three dollars worth of material in all of them.

And either the way I see it. Right, bullshit. They were never used.

You're just trying to make a quick buck off something you have laying around from your old wedding or dude what, what if, what if dude got stood up like what if these were ready for the big day and he just, you know, fly fish to long one too many times in this whole thing went kaput.

I think the third option that I came up with is that they ordered these because they say they ordered them from a co. artisan in the write up. I think they got them. They realized how hideous they were. They claimed that I should also say this, that says that the lessons unfortunately, we forgot to pack them to our wedding location. So they have never been used. I'm calling bullshit. I think you intentionally forgot these because you bought them and you had the buyer's remorse.

Like I'm not wearing that shit on my wedding day. That's not coming with us. And now you're trying to recoup some of your your your sunk money on that.

Also, these awful feathers are just placed in, like, little little black like super sharp pointy parking cones.

And all I could think is that if you drilled through, you could make a line through, you know what I mean, fly out of these and let you get something to eat.

Or I can make a sweet daisy chain to troll for tuna as is, although I guess I could make these for a fraction of one hundred bucks so they can have them.

But maybe where the jerk stood, maybe somebody out there, their special day. This is exactly what they want. Hideous store jerks. It is craft store, definitely the jerks.

But if if you want to help us continue being Internet jerks and making fun of things that people are selling that have something vaguely to do with fishing, please let us know. We need your input to continue making the segment amazing. Send us an email at Bent at the Meat Eater Dotcom and let us know what kind of weird crap you found on the Internet for sale.

You know, man, I'll pass on the boutonnieres.

But one thing I do buy on occasion online, be at eBay or Craigslist. I do buy old lures, especially like hard to find stuff, you know what I mean?

Like, do you not do that? Do you not root around, like and buy things you just can't grab in the shop anymore?

I, I always threatened to like I do, look through the things for sale and regularly go, oh I would love to get that, but I never, I never follow through. I'm just, I think I'm just weird about buying used shit off the Internet from people that I don't know because I feel like those transactions are always so awkward. Oh, they are. They are.

And it's weird because people put stuff up for sale and it's like they're excited about selling their things until you actually start inquiring and then they get all like, well, who the hell are you?

And it's like, well, did you put this up for sale, man? And then it gets all weird.

Like no one trusts each other because there's so many scams out there. Are you a real person? I don't know. If you're a real person.

Text me when you get to this 7-Eleven and I'll send you a passcode. I'm like, Jesus, all right, whatever.

But yeah, no, I'll particularly buy discontinued stuff that I can't find. And this is great because we're coming to the end of the line.

We're just about out of time.

And in our end of the line segment today, we're going to be talking about a very old law, been around a long time and it is not discontinued, though it is not popular in all regions of this country. However, let me tell you, if you want to up your. Big brown trout game. Pay attention to this one. It's not loud enough, but today I am paying tribute to the Smethwick rattlin Roeg stick bait.

Now the Smethwick has been around, man. What started as a hobby for Jack K. Smethwick in nineteen forty seven blossomed into a Monster Lure business based in Shreveport, Louisiana. And I kind of find that interesting because hard stick baits are so much more associated with northern fisheries like walleye and pike and smallmouth.

Right.

And if you've ever been to the Louisiana Lowcountry dude, there are so many stumps and so much vegetation in that water, I feel like the three trebles on a rogue would not stay on stuck for two shakes of a rod tip. Right.

It almost would feel more appropriate for the Arbogast hoola popper or Jitterbug to have been the hometown lore of Shreveport.

But ironically, those baits were all made further north in Ohio. Weird, right?

Anyway, Smethwick Southern roots might explain why the rogue became the number one. Go to big trout slayer in Arkansas, Louisiana's neighbor to the north. Now, as the now world renowned trophy brown trout fisheries developed in Ozark rivers like the white and the little red, then good ol boys wasn't out there trying to get a dainty sip on a compare. Idun know what I'm saying? They wasn't flicking a Panther Martin around on two pound test.

Those guys fish just like they did for everything else, simply yet aggressively in a manner that would produce the meat. So if you think back to the earliest days of those fisheries options were limited.

There were no Rapallo baits or Ketek swing impacts on the shelf at the general store in Arkansas, but there were rattlin rogues.

So despite a wide variety of law options today tell you the truth, you will still have a hell of a hard time finding a shop in Ozark trout country that doesn't have rogues if for no other reason than to cater to the older crowd, that just will not waver from their utter devotion to that bait. And I'm a believer in the power of the rogue, thanks to Pete, the big man Cobb, who happens to be one of those old sages on the White River.

You know, Pete had been guiding the white for many, many years, and I think he was pretty used to catering to clients that just wanted to catch lots and lots of trout. Right. And when I was fishing with him all those years ago, I think at outset he assumed that I was one of those people and we had caught so many smaller fish on Tiny Jig's day one, I, I lost count and by the end of it, I kind of lost interest too.

And so had he. But he wasn't going to say that. I didn't know that until I suggested that tomorrow we throw nothing but big stick baits all day regardless of outcome.

And Pete lit up man he was happier than a pig in shit here in that it turned out that Pete was all about swinging for the fences.

And that next day I learned that fishing a rope properly was just as taxing on the arms, as stripping giant streamers for hours and hours on a fly rod. And the sharp angle and width of that lures lips pretty unique. And it creates a lot more water resistance, I think, than similar baits.

And it makes it necessary to whip that rod extra hard to get a rogue to depth fast and, you know, no joke when you're doing it right.

It burns, man. But that steep lip is also what makes a rogue kick to the side more violently slash more radically than a lot of other stick baits.

And of course, nowadays, Smethwick makes spending models, but even the original old school floaters rise very slowly. So when you pause, they suspend beautifully. And that's often when the fatal blow is delivered.

No, I can't say that Pete and I destroyed that day, but the shoulder workout was worth it because we did not catch a brown under 20 inches and a couple of the fish we did catch could be measured in pounds. Right.

And, you know, thinking back, honestly, the rug was not exactly a staple in shops where I grew up in the Northeast. Nobody use them or even talked about them that I recall.

But because of what I learned from PE and fishing them in the Ozarks, the rogue is a staple for me now. In fact, the biggest brown trout I've caught to date on the Lehigh River in Pennsylvania, which is pretty close to where I live, fell to a rattlin. And I've mowed down some big local small amounts and Pickrell on them, too, so it just goes to show you that despite the constant push to rope anglers with new technology, there's a reason why classic shit doesn't change or go away.

So that's it for this week, we hope you learned Laught felt slightly uncomfortable and then came to the realization that laughter is always the best medicine.

We also seriously hope you like Ben so much that you're telling all your best fishing buddies about it. Please take a minute, leave us a review. And don't forget, genuinely, we'd love to hear from you.

Please, please, please direct all comments, rave reviews or concerns to bent at the Meat Eater dot com.

Or, you know, you can just write it and tell us what you catchin. Absolutely. Tell us a crazy ass story. Send us an awkward photo. We might use it just so you know. And drunk emailing is always welcomed and appreciated.

And unless you used to date either of us, in which case. Oh, I don't know. I'm sorry about everything.

I really hope that doesn't happen until next week.

Remember to wet those knots with your own saliva, not someone else's. So you don't get covid.

And remember, fishing isn't about catching, it's about creating Instagram stories that are longer than The Godfather.