Welcome to More Outdoors on News Top five sixty klv I.
This is Chester Moore.
You know, I have Paul Fazinski of Aptitude out Doors. It's a podcast documentaries, a good friend of mine, and we had him on. We just talked about our love of the great outdoors and his really intense pursuit of fishing in a documentary he did about the North American model of conservation. Well, we're currently recording this in Estes Park, Colorado,
and we're working on a Higher Calling wildlife documentary. But we have something that we want to talk about, is a documentary that will be out this month, and to talk about this, Paul, Welcome to the program.
Thanks Chester.
Firstly, thanks for having me out here in Estes Part wild absolutely insane. I mean, first thing in the morning, we're waking up, there's elk outside the window. Essentially we've seen everything from bison, elk, moose twice, big ORNs, big ORNs, wild jail and female wild turkey, jim monks, yep, lots of birds, lots of birds for out three species of trout we've caught. Yeah, it's crazy, it's it's it's a wild time out here. This place is unreal Yeah, it's my favorite place in the world.
Incredible, And you know, we're kind of just wrapping up a documentary that I was part of, you know, working on with you called Flying Upstream, Flying Upstream, and we both have gotten really heavily into fly fishing, and we're definitely not the normal what people would think of fly fisher it is. Yeah, and we decide to do a documentary about it.
So I think maybe I introduced you to the iudea of starting to get them filed with fly fishing. It was absolutely your fault, Yeah, flaying you and I You are one hundred percent responsible for this.
Yeah. I we we went.
And did where we filmed this documentary Flying Upstream. We went to Oklahoma previous to going to the hunt Fish podcasts of it. So it came down a few days early with my friend Seth and you were like, we're gonna go to Oklahoma for a few days introduce you to trout fishing. So kind of gotta through some connections, got a halfway decent fly rod through some friends for a decent price, and just spent a couple of weeks in my hear casting it trying to figure it out.
We went out there and that was my first time fly fishing, and that was about six months ago. I think, yes, that's six months ago. Yeah, and I never caught a trout in Oklahoma on the fly rod. We caught many trout out here in Estes Park, so finally caught a trout on the fly rod.
But yeah, it's been a cool introduction.
But both you and I fly fish for basaton, Yeah, and especially our love. We have a similar love of panfish. Yes, there's a language barrier, so let's talk about the language food.
We gill.
I called them bluegill, so it's a that's I think that's just a weird regional southeast Michigan northwest Ohio thing.
I call them brim or perch. But if I actually catch a bluegill, I call it a bluegill.
So I said this to you earlier in the car.
It's like when people down south say I need a coke and they're like, what kind in the North, Like Coca Cola is the only kind of coke up north? You say here's a pepsi and I say, no, thank you, Yeah, me too, disgusting that swell out of my face. Uh no, And so I just haphazardly call everything a bluegill that is a sunfish, whereas you guys call them what perch or broom perch room. So where I'm from, perch is yellow perch, yellow perch only. Yeah, if you say perch,
that's what people think of, you say perched. Down here, it's any sunfish any son, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean even a crop he's called a white perch a lot down here. It all makes sense in the scheme of things biologically, but no, I call them all bluegill, whether it's a readier, whether it's a green sunfish, whether it's.
Whatever, I call them lugo. Well, why was it important for us through this documentary? What do you for you?
What was like to put all the effort you did on the you know, the backhead of all the editing and everything.
What was this important?
Because the reason that I did and want to fly fish, I know, like I was essentially morally opposed to fly fishing for a very long time because, uh, people that are associated with fly fishing, or we'll just say, aren't
the people that I like to associate with. They kind of have that and this is a broad generalization, but they have that elitist mentality sometimes and it's very much the kind of like bow hunting has become with like if you don't have this rod, Yeah, it's real, and that's not every like the average fly fisherman I don't think is like that. But there's a lot of that I see on social media. I could just be a bias on my end, but I just that culture doesn't
appeal to me. And now that I've fly fished and how and you know, you and I both have a way of figuring out how to do this stuff affordably.
Yeah, that's indefinably.
Yeah, I think maybe that's probably the what maybe made us decide to go down. The idea of doing the documentary was like we've come across this from like the blue collar yeah yeah, standpoint, and we can try to let people know that like you can have.
A great time.
And it's really literally doubled my enjoy with a fishing like it totally revolutionized it for me. I'm barely traditional fish this summer because once I figured out you could catch bass on a fly ride, because traditionally, when you think fly fishing, it's always trout. And I kind of have fallen into the culture of the Midwest where I'm from especially north north east Ohio, specifically the northwest of High but northeast Ohio is very much focused around steelhead trout,
small Mountain. They have a lot of steelhead and trout out there, like introduced, but it's a small mouth like up in Michigan a little bit maybe an hour hour and a half for me, and all through the region I live in the Great Lakes is small mouth, and that's become kind of something I've been very passionate about. And panfish is general, I just love catching them. And so it was a weird divide to come here and do trout because trout are very delicate to catch.
Yeah.
Man, it's tough, and it's very much like I'm used to doing big long, double hauled cast with a big heavy streamer.
And like an eight weight ride.
Yeah, And so coming out here and do it like tossing around a three weight which I usually do for panfish. Fine, but I'm still making longer cast. Yeah, I'm casting like four feet. Yeah, so I don't need to cast. You don't even need to be able to cast to troutfish. No, And that's a misconception because I thought you need to be this fantastical caster, I'm not.
No, That's why a lot of these guide services are able to take novices out and just show them.
Like the role casting thing.
We just basically throw it out a few feet, let it go down stream, and put it back where you're at it.
You know, ninety percent of the trowel we caught, we're within arm length and a half of our body reach the river today.
Yeah, So the idea of us being able to sort of fly upstream up current of the you know, the mindset that this is some elitist thing, it was really the impetus behind it, I believe, and just having fun with it as well. And so when people get to watch this, we'll be announcing here the next week when you can check this out, we're going to be doing a lot of fift things on this same premise, involving panfish and other things, but with flying upstream in particular.
One of the neatest things to me was our friend Seth.
You and with Seth history in this, so we're not going to give you all the details on here, but he hadn't fished in a very long time really and then got into this trip with us and watch the journey he took on this trip was really fun.
Yeah, Seth. I've known Seth for a few years now, probably just a little.
Longer than I've known you, and he's he's very much like a nature guy the sense of he loves wildlife photography, he loves being outside, and we'll often just go to the park and look at taking photos of stuff, owls, whatever's round, you know, because we don't have this crazy estis park wildlife where I live.
I mean, no offense Southeast Times or my show ears, but we ain't got this.
Yeah, and so well, you know, we'll try and do some of the hard stuff. Turkeys, beavers are very hard to find where I'm at, so we'll go try and photograph beavers, wild, tiny little bird stuff like that. And so when I kind of put this idea in his head to come and fly fish, he had met you before, and he knew the wrecking ball that is Chester Moore a little bit from the Hunters podcast summit, and it's
like he kind of knew what to expect. Because when anybody that's never been with Chester Moore on a on a multi day experience, it's a wake up go and then you fall asleep at some point in the end of the day and it's awesome. It's almost ten o'clock if we're recording a radio show here while we were together. So that tells you we woke up at like six thirty and hit the road. Haven't stopped. Yeah, well, well yesterday we were like, I figured you're gonna wake up,
kind of mull around, drink some coffee orherever. Chester opened the door for and Elkie's like, we gotta go, and that was our wake up. We like, it was like a fifteen minute endeavor. I was like, all right in the car.
So but that's also ties into what we did were flying up three the documentary is the fact that you know, I have a limited budget. You have a limited budget, and we also have limited budget of time because our families and work, so cramming everything in is just a necessity.
Well, and that's something that I try and push to people too, is like you don't have and that's basically what my whole channels about I have to outdoors, is like you don't have to go on these big extravaging again like adventures. Ironically, we're an access park. Yes, I understand the irony in that, but you don't have to go on these big extrabbing adventures to have awesome time. I mostly fish at a wildlife area across the Turnpike from where I live, and I catch panfish pretty much
at least three days a week. Yeah, I'm about three days a week on bath and panfish at home too, just ponds around the house and bays and there's I've found so many little places that hold a significant number of fish just around regionally, like within fifteen twenty minutes of my house, that I never would have gone to if I wouldn't have just been like, I don't have to go to Colorado to catch trout. I don't go right in my backyard and have just as much fun, be just as frustrated.
We'll talk more fishing, and we come back on More Outdoors. Welcome back to More Outdoors on News Talk five sixty k lv I excited to talk about the new Flying Upstream project that took us from southern Oklahoma for rainbow trout into the Texas hill country for Guadaloupe bass. And my friend Paul Paczinski spend just as much money on fly stuff because we'll lit up texting each other a lot of evenings of the week and you'll send me
a pichere and I'll shoot one back. And I remember a few weeks ago it was like, I'm like, dude, this bear much and pressure is really high, and they're coming up and looking at my fly and swimming off.
You're like, yeah, it's up here too. But that's part of it.
And you know, being from Southeast Texas, we have a lot of fishing opportunity. I haven't really haven't cracked the coat on the saltwater part of the fly fishing thing yet. I've done some cast, some speckle trout and stuff like that, but it's been the Bayou system to private ponds and lakes, and I'm having no I don't have.
As much exact fun as what I caught. You know, my peacock bass on the fly as a.
Dream thing, But in general, I'm out catching these two to three pound bass, these you know, hand sized bluegill and everything, and I have a giant smile on my face. And and I'm a guy who has been to the Amazon, and I'm a guy's fish in Spain and caught wells catfish and been blessed with all this. But I am just as happy out there slugging it out trying to catch these fish. And I think that's what fly fishing does for me, is it makes every fishing experience more exciting.
Well, like a prime example of this is when when you work in the outdoors industry, you you do have to travel quite a bit. I mean, it's just part of the job. You can't get around it. And I went to an outdoor writers conference last two weeks ago, I think in Alabama, and I thought it would be like people would be there showing up with fly rides, be on the beach. I woke up early every day,
went out to the beach where the conference started. I was the only one out there fishing, and it just attracted people.
And it's like.
I talked to every guy there who was a fly fisherman because they saw me out on the beach in the morning fly fishing and they're like, you're that guy on the beaches.
But like it wasn't.
I was like, if I'm going to go to this cool place that I would normally not get to go on my own dime, essentially, I'm going to bring my fly rod.
And it was a cheap flyod combo.
It was a Reddington whatever you can get on Amazon for one hundred bucks out of out door kind of deal.
I threw some saltwater line on it and it went out there and I.
Caught a ton of fish, jack ball, ladyfish, and it's like just it's such a it's so accessible. I think it's more accessible right now to me than traditional fishing because you can carry a.
Fly out on a plane very easily. Yeah, never had a hassle.
No carrying a full four piece fly rodd in a combo kit on the plane. Nobody's ever said a thing to me, even on full flights. You can take a fly out anywhere with you and just buy the fishing license. It's usually thirty bucks. That's what I less than a dinner. And also, you.
Know, you can foldable knit in your you know bag, but you can take a fly box and you get a full tackle box.
You can can have fifty lures and a little big box. It'll fit in your hand. I've taken up to size two flies, which are fairly large.
Yeah, and they've never even went yep, never, So that's a great thing.
I do the same thing, and I have a very you know.
The inexpensive like forty nine dollars Martin with the Reddington reel on it, and.
You know, it's cheap, it's fun.
But you know, one of the reasons I talk more about it in the last few years on Worrow it is only because I do it because when I.
Do, always have someone to reach out. So, hey, I'm thinking about doing that. You know, where would I start. I'm like, start with bluegill, Start with any kind of any kind of perch, brim, sunfish, panfish is a great way to start. And you know, if you're out in those areas with those, you're gonna catch bass anyway.
Yeah.
And they fight so hard, Yeah, they fight really hard.
So that's what I want to talk about now.
I want to spend some time talking about some of the strategies and things that you use when you're fishing for bluegill, in particular, so they're not like a fish, like a bonefish. It's going to like have some kind of very specific thing every day and you have to go or whatever. You don't have to make these shoes double Haull giant cast. But what if you say, I'm definitely want to catch a nice blue bill today, what is your setup?
I would go on Amazon and buy this twenty dollars fly box filled with little It's just a variety boxy.
Yeah.
And one of the things that I love about fly fishing is the is the mad scientist aspect of it.
But bluegill aren't picky, like you said.
You can use anything. You are a big fan of the mini poppers. Yeah, I'm not, you know, I'm just not a popper guy. But that's the cool thing you can you have your I like the little many dry flies. Yeah, honestly, doesn't really matter what color you'll catch some regardless. I think you and I have talked about is do you think they tend to hit the red anything with.
A little red more?
Yeah, any sort of little tiny bug on that that goes top water. Sometimes they like it a little bit underwater. And those things are super cheap online. I've went through. You and I both went through a whole box of them, just breaking off and stuff on, and they wrap themselves around the weeds and they'll.
Wear their weather feathers stuff like that. But but I.
Prefer most of the time in the summer a top water dry fly whatever you want to call it, a little bug looking things, hopper maybe a hopper whatever.
Yeah, the terminology is really annoying.
If you don't fly fish anything that floats on top of the water and it's like a bug, that's what you Yeah, that's the way to put it right. And and sometimes I like a little something that's a little underwater because sometimes they they'll look at the top water, they'll nip at it.
But then we'll commit to it.
And then most like if they don't do that, I go for something or I let the dry fly get wet and sink a little bit and almost do like a mini like strip it in a little bit, very slowly and hit it. But now that we've been trout fishing, they have what they call the hopper droppers set up. It was a floating fly on top and a little weighted fly underneath that you tie off to the hook. I'm gonna try that because then you're double on your chances if they're picky on.
Either of those, I hit one or the other. No, I'm on that too.
As soon as I get home, and you know, I fish the popper stuff from like let's say April into about June or for the for the blue bluegills, and then I have to switch over to something that sinks after that unless we have a good evening bite evening by to go back with the popper. But I fish like midday morning. I'm gonna find something that sinks really slower, is really tiny. Black with red is a great many
naturalistic color for me. And if you're fishing a clearer water, you don't have to have a lot of the fancy stuff like we do in the trout shops. I just take floral carbon, you know, and tie on. So I notice it makes a difference way I use flora carbon.
Yeah, you know, if I bluegill can be very lunge Yeah, yeah, yeah, they can be very lin shy. I've found so there. But it's like they're not a trout. They're not as particular. They are hatchable. That's why I would totally start there. And then if you figure the blue thing out or you get bored with it, which you never will because they're super fun, move on to pass.
Yeah, a little more challenging.
But this is I don't know if I should even say this because down in town, as you guys have that Florida straining and all that. Yeah, when I interviewed so biologist Steve bardon On on on my podcast. He was on this show as well as well. Yeah, he told me that Florida bass can learn lure shade ye, so sometimes they're shy to lures with a lot of this fly stuff. It's very uncommon, especially by both of us in the Midwest and a By not so much by me, I guess with the small mountain, Yeah.
But definitely now by you. Uh.
The flies are like unknown territory, like they'll be like, I don't know what that is, I onna nail it.
They can be tiny flat you caught it? What a six pound bass on a little mini Yeah. So I went with my good friend Brian Johnson. He took me on an area I'm gonna call the Winny Flat.
Because it was really really down low with all of the drought, and we were drifting across with a big wheel. I looked like I was drifting Biscayne Bay and the floors like call the winning flats.
And I fished my favorite.
I fished my black with red and it's about an inch long, maybe three quarters of an inch, and I caught this six pound basketball, biggest on the fly, and Brian looked at me because I caught like five bass that day. And I caught like maybe maybe a ten bluegill, and he said, yeah, you're gonna catch a big fish on that.
Around these places because they just don't know it.
They have, you know, they've had every crank bait, every buzzbit, every spinner, every kind of worm color you can imagine, and here comes this thing with a delicate approach.
You're like, oh, that looks like a real bug. Yeah, it looks like a real bug. And so that's a fun part of it. Now, let's talk about that whole idea of matching the hats. Yeah, you know, when we talk about matching the hats, really, even in saltwater fisheries, sometimes that might be that the men hate and the shad are really small.
So when they use small shad imitation.
When you're bass fishing, like, okay, they're on the crawfish, but this time you have the crawfish a little more brown than a red.
That kind of stuff. We've been in Estes Park.
There is nothing yet to match the hatch for more than the study trauted.
Yeah. It's a it's kind of a pain in the butt, it is.
I' mean, you know, I'm just like very much a rabbit hole kind of person, not a rabbit trail.
Kind of first we had this whole rabbit hole. I followed the three up for a little bit and then it goes you know, a whole all the way.
Yeah, uh yeah, you have to be very particular with trout. Like none of us we're catching world class strout. We're gonna a little tiny shure out, which is still fun.
Yeah. I think the.
Exciting part about catching chart is watching them hit the you can base see them nail. But yeah, you have to this time of the year when the fly shop kind of did some intel and they were like, you need something.
Like a hopper. Dropper is what I talked about earlier.
So we were on the shore fishing today and there were grasshoppers jumping everywhere. Literally a hopper a code word for a grasshopper. So we're using an imitation of a grasshopper floating on top of some grasshopper lands on the water. It's gonna float and on the top of the water and drift along the current with you're not pulling, You're not like you're not reeling it in or and like
you would like a drank bait. You're just letting it float with the speed of the river like it naturally would, and then we tied on a midge below that.
When we come back on More Outdoors, we'll continue epic fishing journey. Welcome back to More Outdoors on News Talk five sixty k lv I talking about fly fishing for everything from rainbow trout to large mouth baths with Paul Pazinski and our new documentary Flying Upstream.
So we tied onto the hook.
A midge is the tiniest hen lord, you can imagine what what's probably an ace of an inch.
It would it would fit on a dime, Yeah, but it would it's smaller than that. Yeah, yeah, like it would.
You could lay it on a dime and it would still be be like it's hard to see.
Yeah, So midges. I just read this Crazy Trout book on the way here on the airplane, and I.
Was like trying to like crack this code in one book with not I mean, it's good to read books about fishing, but uh, it was talking about midges, and I guess they're one of like the trout's main food sources, cause they're just kind of it's just like a variety of little tiny microbugs that you never see matching all the time, all year long, and they just kind of
float and bump along the bottom of the river. So we were essentially having a grasshopper on the top of the water and below that a midge, which is a little tiny bug that lives in the water basically all year round, bouncing around below it, hanging below it from the hook on, and they got to choose which one they wanted that day. Yeah, And like I mean, you could go down forever, you can pick different colors of midges, different bugs of the midge, realm whatever. But essentially, if
you're in that ballpark, you're gonna probably catch something. But that could change in a couple of weeks. That could change in a day the grasshoppers die off or they'll go into their next phase of life. Now the next bug and then that troud are going to eat whatever is available and they can be picky.
Yeah, very much.
If you are into the outdoors and nature, you're kind of nerdy like Chester.
And I are very much into that realm.
It's a very encompasses like the hole of the outdoors, like you see what's around you, fish with that thing, imitate that thing, and it's very much so a direct connection to that fish because you're reeling in the line essentially with your own fingers. Not unreal most of the time. Yeah, I'm not talking saltwater. Those guys are weird. Whole different ball game. It's not like when you go get your red fish in the fly.
Yeah it's not.
I've never done that, but yeah, it's it's delicate finesse, which is not my ballgame.
Well, that's the whole thing. I am not.
I'm not a real technical person. I'm not great with knots.
I'm not. I'm a bull in a China closet.
But one thing that is allowed me to be successful and everywhere ever when fishing is because I know about fish and.
Water and yeah I have, but no, that's so more important.
So if I could, if I could ever like get is good on the rest of the wh y'all will never be.
It's just not who I am.
I get proficient enough at that and then I use my skills of being able. So I'm saying is if you're out there, like, man, I know a lot about fish, but I'm not good with all the technical stuff, don't.
Worry about it. Neither are we.
Yeah, and you can do the same thing and all of that, and you know what you were talking about a while back. Out bow hunting and fly fishing have some links, and I could say, you could learn more about a white tails behavior in the season of bowl hunting, and you can five season a rifle hunting because of you have to get so close to him.
The only I've I've gotten into bow hunting in the last five five years, I would say it's.
Definitely much harder, you know, And then you know, I'm not I don't.
Do I don't like to do things simply just because they're hard, like there's a purpose behind it. Sure, a bow season is longer, so I wanted to learn how to do a bow but the practice is more. If you want to if you want to be an ethical hunter and actually attempt to kill the deer ethically quickly, which I'm very much about, you have to practice.
You just got to practice, and it's more intensive.
Like I know, you should go to the range and shoot your gun into that stuff too, which is also fun. But like being intimate with a deer that anywhere from forty to fifteen yards is pretty intense. But you'll watch that dear watching it for even sometimes days. I'm watching with deer for days, Like the last year I killed, I mean I had this hunting area on a draw for thirty days and I kill them on day twenty eight.
Wow.
So like I was out there watching him a lot, and I kind of what the last last chance I had. I was on him and it all came together and it was awesome. But like it's just so much more Internet. And that's kind of how five fishing feels, you know. And like I don't have anything against traditional fishing or no, I'm going traditional fishing two days after this is recorded. And like when you've seen pictures all one audience for me with the bone fish and a permit and stuff that's traditional gear.
I'm not there yet.
I'm being able to go spend half a day in Biscayne Bay and catch a bone fish, you know, So I did it out of spending give me a seven foot you know, crank baits with drank baits. Adelley still out there with the best.
It's not like go way all of a sudden, but I'm doing a lot more because I'm able to fish. All these open up more opportunities are exciting for me locally in and around the country, and the four years, you know, nine states fly fishing, which is insanity.
But when I that goes back to the travel.
When I go travel for doing something like our wild wishes or something, I'll have half a day before I got a fly out or something I go fishing, you know, and that kind of thing. But we talked about, you know, how we learned a lot from fly fishing. We've also talked about how it opens up a lot new to us.
And you're talking about taking this hopper and midge combo. Well, I'm gonna do the same thing with speckled trout. There was a guide named Jim Onunderdog who told me years ago he had a lot of clients that were fairly beginner saltwater fishermen that were not proficient with a walking the dog type and top water.
So what he would do he would give him a chugger.
I just see it like a chuck bug, and then he would put floral carbon liter and about a foot behind it, he would have a soft plastic, light soft plastic with a hook in it, and most of the time they would get hit, but most of the time it was on the trailer.
So I'm going to take.
And then I am not a hopper, a popper like a bass popper, and I'm gonna rik floor cab hot it and put a midge or something back there, and I have a feel I'll probably catch some speckled trout like that.
That stuff.
Yeah, fly fishing changes the perspective a lot on traditional spin fishing. Yeah, And I think about things from a fly perspective when I'm fishing, And sometimes I even get wrapped up in what I'm doing and I try and cast my rod like like I'm fly fishing. Yeah, my crank baits or something, which is not a good cowbo let me tell you, but the crank bait thing.
And like I like fishing with soft plastics.
I like fishing with crank bas but I just prefer soft plastics because there's a lot more feel to it. There's a lot more you know, you can feel the fish tipping and nip it on it and stuff, and it's fun.
So I was getting no hits a couple like maybe a month ago.
I was fishing on a lake up in Michigan, and I was, you know, just do your traditional drag on the bottom, maybe do like two or three little tugs at a time, just trying to get their attention, maybe lifting it up and let it fall with just a soft plastic on like a shaky head base bare.
Whenever you want. And nothing was happening.
So I cast it out and I just started cranking it in like a crankbait, and this.
Smallmouth just nailed it.
And I was like, it never occurred to me to do that, And I was just like, I'm just gonna strip.
It basically like I would on a fly whole. And it worked. They nailed it.
And I started doing that. I caught a couple more fish that way. They wouldn't touch it on the bottom. They didn't want any crank baits, but they wanted a worm swimming through the water apparently. So it just just makes you think outside the box.
Well, you know, once again, maybe a fish is seeing that worm but never saw it swim to the water like that, So that's a different, different approach for him. And yeah, that comes from light the idea of watching your fly techniques and because you're you know, you're usually shooting way out with a big crank bait or something
and do whatever, and you're maybe pushing mercury or deeper water. Yeah, fly fishing, you kind of eyeball on everything pretty much, so you get more of the visual aspect of it. And the other thing is just not limiting like it is flying upstream documentary idea is still limit your fishing.
Yeah.
Uh. And there's a lot of like, you know, knuckleheads out there that are going, yeah, i'll do it this way, it ain't gonna work and all that.
That's always the voice, you know. I always see those guys.
They're the ones sitting on the banks not catching anything, yeah, because they haven't changed their crank bait in five years.
Yeah. And I think I tell people about watching like social media fees, whether you Intagram or TikTok, and this guy who's always catching these fish. Some of those people are independently wealthy, but all they do is fish. That's literally all they're doing. So don't feel bad because you and out fly fishing and you didn't catch a seven pound brown trout somewhere.
It's it really is.
It's it's relative to where you're at a guide, Yeah, for sure. For sure, it's relative to where you are and and be you know, like you know, be the guy who goes out there and says, I'm going to enjoy this and catch the best representatives best im I can catch well.
And so an example is there's an outfitter a bout me.
I'm not gonna say any names like this isn't meant to be a bad thing or anything, but their their whole Instagram and feet is massive small mouth.
That's what they're known for.
And but like if the guides are taking someone out five days a week, they're only posting one picture of a giant. Like the guy told me, I said, how do you catch these big ones? He said, quarters in the slot. You have to be out there fishing a lot. They're out there five days a week, five maybe possibly ten clients if it's too per boked. Ten people casting five days a week for eight hours, one of them
is bound to catch a giant fish. I went out with that guide two days or for an eight hour day with another guy.
We call it fifty small mouth on the route in one day. But they were all average size.
So it's not like I just that's such just a weird expectation to catch a giant fish. It is like the Instagram thing is cool, and I don't have anything against people who can catch giant fish.
That's a skill that's an art form. That's it.
That's a level of a session that I probably will never have, Like that's amazing, and you know, maybe by lucky when I will catch giant troups someday. But it's just a whole different level of where we're at, and like you don't need that expectation now.
Well, we come back on More Outdoors, we'll talk more about fly fishing. Welcome back to More Outdoors on News Talk five sixty klv. I follow me at the Chester More that's the Chester More on Instagram, Higher Calling wildlfel on Facebook, Higher Calling dot Net, the blog of course, every issue of Texas Fishing Game and our weekly Fishing Game Report email which goes out to like seventy thousand people,
reaching a lot of people with that one. Excited to wrap up our conversation with Paul Fyzinski, my partner in the really amazing project. He did the editing and filming for and I wrote and narrated and helped start in with him flying Upstream. But in the course of this we're talking about fishing, fishing access for the average person, that fly fishing doesn't have to be something for the
rich and elite. It can be for everyone have fun. Yeah, that's the best part us with flying up strings about We're gonna put that out on a different social platforms and things. But this brings us to something that we're gonna do next year that we can't talk a whole lot about. Yeah, but we're.
Gonna do something focused a little bit more on panfish. Our mutual passion.
Our mutual passion for all the panfish out there, sunfish, you know.
You know, Texas is very biodiverse in that realm. The cool thing.
About Texas is like where I'm up in, it's cool to talk about this too, because you and I have different perspectives.
We live in different parts of the country, but we talk all the time.
And so like in the in northern Michigan, our season for these fish to grow in warm water is it is long. Yeah, I'd have to say there's many trophy giant blue yards that caught up in cold water and stuff.
But like in Texas, your warm season.
Is pretty much year round to sure live and mostly the South Texas, so these fish have an opportunity.
They might spawn multiple times a year.
They can get really large, and I'm excited to come down and catch massive panfish with you because the picture where you're like, this is a good sized panfish, I would be like, I would have been like a lifetime achievement for me where I live, you know what I mean. So it's cool to have those perspectives. And that's another thing about trophy fish. It's different where you live. Yeah, there the sizes vary, like.
Well, the areas I normally fish in Orange County, some private ponds, the local bayous system of Sabine River. I'm not a whole lot of over five pound bass, yeah, a lot of like one to three pounders, but I got to go somewhere where there were those big bass and caught ones. So it's sometimes it's going there. And
you mentioned like how Texas is all these panfish. We have all these reservoirs, We've got private reservoirs, we've got bayous, we've got ditch systems, we've got all these different places to catch these and a bunch of different you know, species, So it'll be fun to go out and try to catch representative ones from each each part of the state. Like for example, you know, I have a place in Orange County where I love catching long years.
They're so beautiful.
But you know, we have green sunfish out in the Texas Cevil country.
So you know, those are really cool.
And then we got things like the Rio grand cyclid and all of that, and so those things are great, and I've seen a sort of a renaissance in people pursuing some of these panfish and things like that. And the other part, your favorite part of the pants fish may be eating them. I love do I would take And this might sound I've caught some of the most delectable fish with our friend Derek. We've caught shark, We've gone to Kobe, so much good stuff. We're its amber
jab just delicious. You know, ocean fish. I've't had, you know, swordfish. I've had tuna, delicious stuff. Give me fried blue yale any day. I think the only thing that I could say with top and I'm saying sunfish, sorry southerin folk.
Sunfish, fried sunfish.
The only thing I would top that with is fried yellow perch from the Great Lakes, not southern perch that you call.
I'm gonna go with the crappie. I haven't tried this. Yeah, crappy fall in the sunfish category. Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Yeah, So I'm gonna go with that as my favorite of the sunfish in terms of being able to ethos. But I've caught one yellow perch up in New York. Here's a little bit of guy fishing from a pier on Lake Ontario.
Wasn't big enough to eat, so I'll do him back. So I want to go up and catch some of those with you sometime and a lot of fun. And that's the thing.
If you listen to more outdoors, you know it's all about fun. It's all about family, and it's about being good stores of our resources, and that's what we're promoting. We're excited to debut this incredible I think documentary Flying Upstream and it's a lot of fun. There's some silly stuff on it, but I think you'll smile a lot and learn about taking the limits off of fly fishing. And we will share out that kind of information on various social platforms.
And but Paul tell us about Aptitude dollar Doors.
How people connect with you. Yeah, So Apptitude Outdoors is a video podcast. It's an audio podcast. You can find me on YouTube Aptitude Outdoors. You can find me on Instagram, that's where our most active. We have a Facebook page. I have a TikTok all that fun stuff, or you can listen to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify all that fun stuff.
And we're in a similar vein.
We talk about conservation, we talk about fishing, hunting, and it's more geared towards people who want to learn more, and mine's more yeared, long learning with me as I learned, because not an expert. You know, I catch a lot of fish, I do a lot of stuff I hunt, but it's just a continual learning process for me.
I like trying out fun stuff.
So well, my mentor as a writer was a late great ed holder and he knew a lot of the iconic bass fishermen when that bas has really first started in the sixties and seventies, and someone asked him, ed, who's the greatest fish when you ever met? And they're expecting him to say Bill Dance or you know Rick claud or someone. He said, someone who enjoys fishing.
Yeah. I agree with that one hundred percent.
Yeah.
So thanks for being on the show, man, I love it. Thank you for having me.
All right, Paul and I recorded that Esta's Park, Colorado last week. We're filming a documentary for Higher Calling Wildlife about the outreach that we do with young people, mentoring young people and inspiring them to get involved in wildlife conservation. And we film with one of our wild Wish girls, Juno, and a new little boy come into our program named Alex, and it was just really heartwarming for me and such a beautiful thing and a beautiful place. It's become my
favorite place in the world. Love going there, and of course I love coming back here and being able to get in some awesome fishing. I got to fish over there with Cagun Paradise Outfitters. I got to do a devotional with the Greater Houston Christian Outdoor Fellowship, my friend Jimmy Hassel over there and connect with my good friend Cage and Phil Bristard and you know his son Kevin. Over there runs an incredible outfit and they have a great lodge and a great place to fish we call
Lots of Redfish, had some red Fish. Been a great week for.
My family and my outreach.
I just want to express my gratitude for all of you listeners of this program for so long. Now, so many people come up to me, and it's really weird to get noticed from my voice, but I do all the time now in the store, checking out at Walmart or whatever. Thank you for allowing me to do a great program. It's always an honor to be here on News Talk five sixty KLVI and do something. I think
it's pretty special bringing you some unique stuff. We've had a lot of different stuff in twenty twenty three, some fly fishing centric stuff, some really in depth interviews about like wildlife dangers, like the ones we have with doctor Jack Mayer, and I want to remind you you can go back and listen to the podcast. Go to KLVI dot com click on the podcast link archive. For several years the program. Also, iHeartRadio followed this as a podcast. A lot of people tell me I listened to the
podcast of the program, and that's great too. But the time spent in Nessa's Park was really special and with those kids, and we got to film what I think is some really incredible footage, and you know, being next to a little ten year old boy who has mega health problems and seeing him watch rutting elk bugle lockantlers and hear him do his version of the elk call and have a really big bull elk respond to him and then another ELK responded to that was a special moment,
and that becomes something that inspires me to do more of what we do. And our mission overall is to bring the love of Christ to hurting children through wildlife encounters and higher calling. Wildlife is the conservation expedition branch of that that's done expeditions so far throughout Texas. We done numerous expeditions in Colorado now with then them in Florida, doing one soon in Tennessee. Lots of really important aspects
of what we do. And if you want to help us out and go to Kingdom Zoo dot com you can donate there and learn more about the program. Also, if you know of any kids that we can help. If you have a kid that loves wildlife and is facing a special challenge in their life, connect with us. We love to help them. That is the heart of what we do. That is what keeps me motivated and focused.
I love the wildlife part, I love the fishing part, but I wouldn't be so intense about it if there wasn't a way to connect with special young people, ones who are facing great trials in life. Some have been through Hell on Earth. A couple of times already and to take a kid out and let them experience something like that, and it's a special thing for me and it's the joy of my heart and my family's hard
to get do this. You can learn more about what we do at Highercalling dot net and you can click on the Youth Outreach link and see in depth about the program a video about what we do. And maybe you know a kid that we can help. And I appreciate News Top five sixty KLVI for letting me talk about this on the air because it helps me reach kids that really need a lot of help and I really appreciate that. But thank you so much for listening to More Outdoors and hope you get to check out
Flying Upstreet look up after two Outdoors on YouTube. You can check that also on my YouTube channel Chester More. God bless and I have a great outdoors weekend.