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be hosting. Meat Eater in First Light are going out on the road in physical form and doing the Meat Eater Tailgate Tour, including which includes the stop in my home state of the Michigan Good Lord.
We got four stops.
September seventh, We'll be at ann Arbor, Michigan September twenty eighth, we will be in Austin, Texas October nineteenth at Tuscaloosa, and then we will be at State College Pennsylvania November two. Tell them who they're going to see there, Randall.
So the first the first stop on the tour will be there for the Texas at Michigan game. Then we'll be and Spencer and I will be at that game. And then we'll do Mississippi State at Texas and we might have guys from the Element. We might have Danielle Pruitt. Then we'll be doing Alabama at Tennessee with good old boys Klay Nukeom and Brent Reeves, and then Ohio State at Penn State. Jannis Ptelis will be there. Ryan cal Callahan will be there.
If we do one of these at a power slapping tournament, I want to be I want to be able to go. Not enough brakstailgate before power slapping probably harder than any other sports. Yeah, maybe about following that sport.
I'm not entirely familiar with sort of the fan culture there, but I imagine it's a strange crowd.
So there you have it. The meat Eater tailgate to or meat Eater in first light, going out on the road, check the dates, how do they find info?
The medeater dot com. We're gonna have some banner ads up there, will make it real easy for you to figure out where we're.
Going to be and win.
We'll have good food, good time, and good football games.
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Try that out and love that, and we'll be showcasing First Light's whitetail gear and some of the hardest sun in white tail states in the country.
All right, man, all right. Joined today by I don't want anyone to take offense by this. Not you guys, other people will be offended. This is probably this is the greatest collection of my favorite people to ever be on the show, the highest, like the highest aggregation of my favorite people to ever be here. Tie on, wow, yeah wow, yeah. Pressure's on. Now keep that keep that status. I'm gonna run around. How So we're at our fishack
in Alaska. Jamie Fitzgerald is here, Jamie, I'm gonna I'm gonna talk about how I know you guys when in nineteen ninety lean back a little bit sets people can see fits there in nineteen ninety trying to think I did two years at community college. I did a semester at Lake State, and I think it would have been winner.
Of ninety five.
Somewhere around there. Winter in ninety five, I moved down to Grand Rapids, Michigan, bounced around a little bit, and then landed in a house with YouTube and some other people. Uh it was it was such a house that turnover was so high there that none of the people that lived there. I remember someone realizing that no one that lived there was on the lease like other people, other forgotten individuals had signed the lease and it was or maybe Schmidty was on the lease, was on the.
Least, but he was in Washington at that point by the time you got here.
And that's how I met Fitzgerald and Andrew Radjulowski. Jamie Fitzgerald, r Andrew Ragelowski.
How many years ago was that I was thinking about this almost thirty years.
Yeah, coming up on thirty.
One of my favorite sentences, if I told you the sentence, probably the best sentence I ever heard, was said in that house. Our other roommate who's not with us, Mark Schmidt, was from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and he really liked Sheboygan brats. Okay, he would periodically from his mother get a box the Brons big box. Andy would boil those brots in I think beer.
Beer onions and butter.
Okay, all these brots and beer, onions and butter. He was in culinary arts school.
That's what I wanted. That's the first one.
So he knew this. He knew this trick. Okay, and you the leftovers I'm leading up to word of sense. The leftovers would go into the fridge and the butter would solidify on the roof. On the top, you'd get like an inch of half inch of butter form a rock hard layer, and under that would be beer and brots. Hold that in mind. Okay, we were talking about those are in the fridge, and we're talking about we're having a conversation about ice fishing in the middle of the night.
And Andy then says my favorite sentence I've ever heard in reference to the in the pot and the fridge. He says, if you want to talk about late night ice fishing, why don't you go aug ur a hole through that butter and pull out one of that bloggers.
And that's great trophy brats.
Yeah, that was one of my best sentences ever. Seth's always on the show, you know him. My brother Danny's on the show. And to set the scene here, what year was it that? What year was it that we bought this place? Oh six o god? And then explain to people how you uh explain to people how you came out to the island.
Yeah, I was working for the University of Alaska at the time, and we were starting a new project and in southeast where we were doing some water quality mining or water quality monitoring, mostly related to like timber harvest and mining and that sort of thing. And we had a few meetings in different villages just letting people know what we were all about and what we were doing down here.
And when we.
Went to Cassan, the the village kind of through a little get together and invited folks to come meet us. And Ron Ron Layton showed up with a bunch of shrimp. He's been on the show, yeah, yeah, yeah, and he was very interested in what we were working on and wanted to get involved in help out. So he invited us to come base out of his house here in South ry Cove for a while while we're doing some of the work and offered the motor USTs around in his boat, you know.
And you guys are going into streams sampling of invertebrates.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was some water quality measurements and some stream habitat measurements, some invertebrate sampling, and yeah, we worked on Dan Bugan and I worked on that project for a number of years, all over We travel all over southeast Lastka. It was a pretty deep project. Took taking the ferry around and chartering airplanes and really got to see the lay of the land quite a bit. And the first year ron Ron invited us down for the first year of the project, and then I didn't
This is before I really knew him. We got in some argument over the phone and I'm not used to getting in arguments with like grown men, and I can't even remember what we were arguing about, and things got real testy, and like he hung up the phone on me, and I didn't really know what to make of it, and we just didn't go. You know, we didn't come to the cove that first year. I think that was probably like two thousand and three or two thousand and
two because of the argument. Yeah, I never heard the story. Oh yeah, I just like, Wow, that's not going to work out, you know, Like that guy is fucking crazy.
And he didn't at the time realize that he was just crazy exactly exactly so.
But he calls me up like the next year in the springtime, Hey you guys, you guys coming down this year like nothing had happened, so like, okay, I'll write again, you know. And yeah, we showed up and he did everything he said he was gonna do, and hung out with him and Joan just I mean, absolutely delightful people. He took us all over the places we needed to go, and then the evenings we were running trimp pots and fish and hall a bit and m I've never even
caught a halbit before. Yeah, we'd anchored it outside the cove. And the first hel but ever caught was with Ron and this oh actually no, the first helbot ever caught was that time you came, Steve, which was maybe two years later. That must have been like oh four or five, yep. Yeah, and Ron anchors anchored up and kind of got me into one hundred and seventy pound hell of it. That's the first one I ever caught.
To this today, that's the biggest hell but I've seen come up on a rod and reel okay here, you know. Yeah.
So yeah, we based out of here for work for a couple of years, and then Ron just kept inviting me back to fish and run pots, you know, for a week at a time every summer, and I and him and Joan would say, oh, come for two weeks next year, you know. And and well you came down with me that one year, Steve. And and then after after just staying at Ron and Jones for a couple of years just fishing, you know, after that project was over. At one point he called and say, Hey, that Jack's
were stale next door. You guys should think about buying it. So yeah, the rest is history.
Uh. And Matt Drolls, Uh, we've known each other million years. So we went to the same junior high and high school and I met in sixth grade camp. Yeah, that was that pendlu One camp.
Yeah, we were we were I think we were like we shared the bunk beds.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's because they put your random people because different elementaries all went to that camp and we just got paired up. And that's that's the first time. Yeah, Dan and I met. That would have been sixth grade.
Well a year later he was working there. Ye, such a memorable experience where reliveing. Uh. Yeah, So we grew up together in West Michigan. And man, I mean, in addition to all the normal stuff every high school kids do, like shooting bottle rockets at each other, going out whooping it up and hanging out with friends. We did a ton of very generalist outdoor yeah, very generalist outdoor pursuits everything.
Yeah, if you had to make a list of all the things that we did, like it'd be endless. I mean, you know, ride around, squirrel hunting and you know, on up to squid jigging in seattle like we'd like, you know, kind of ran the gamut, smell dipping.
Smell dipping, yeah, fishing the channel walls for small mouth, stream fish and.
Trout, taking our prime dates to go smell dipping, busting brush.
Set out for dinner, busting brush for cottontail rab yeah, hunting morels a little bit later, tons of bluegill fishing, northern pike fishing through the ice, white fish spearing through the ice.
Oh yeah, whitefish fishing at the power plant river, steelhead fishing.
Yeah. Sure, I could go on a deep, deep, long list of activities.
And then you've been coming here for how long I came? I might have been here the first or second year. Was the first time I was here. And then there was a then you're here for my bachelor party, I think, so yeah, yeah, yeah, And then a couple of times there, but I've been coming back here consistently since twenty sixteen.
And Fitzgerald, you said the other day, you've been here how many times?
I think this is my fifteenth time here? Fourteenth or fifteenth.
Fitz said the other day, he's been to Alaska fifteen times, but he's only been here, never been anywhere else.
What else is there?
And then uh, yeah, and you were introduced by way of your broatworst recipe. So I was going fitz and I were going on just like regular Joe Blow College and you were in culinary arts at the time.
But I did a couple of years at Grand Valley as well. Oh you did some regular college too, And then right at that whole junction when you moved in, that was when I transferred over to the colonial program downtown. And yeah, that house was quite the scene.
The scene, and you were you were making uh when you took pastry class, I think there was you was it you and pastry one or pastry two? And so you'd bring all the pastries home.
Oh, you might be thinking that Mark was working at a bakery slash deli, that he would bring a bunch of stuff.
There was always a fridge full of food for a bunch of broke college kids. We were doing doing hard. But I remember coming home from class.
And there'd be a couple of big old salmon from the river and the or was it steel steelhead?
Uh? Tell tell people about your what you went on to do for your career, which is interesting. You landed out in the San Juan Islands eventually. Uh.
Yeah, after we left Michigan, kind of filtered my way out to the West coast and out to small island, uh, San Juan Island out in northwest Washington, north of Seattle there, and kind of kicked around work for the parks for a few years, which it was a pretty fun job.
Real lighthouse keeper yep.
But then for the last sixteen years I've been working for the school district on the island, which is a small, small community. I mean, the whole district K through twelve is under thousand, undred thousand kids all the way through. But yeah, I built a food program there kind of from the ground up, and it's kind of progressive. You know,
everything's from scratch. I source as much local practice as I can and then kind of go out from there, you know, And I've got great people working for me and find really cool grants to bring in a lot of fresh produce from Washington and Oregon and the surrounding areas.
And when you came in, they were going to scrap their lunch program.
Yeah, it was.
It was failing because they were just doing the standard garbage, you know, food and just didn't have the participation to make it sustainable. So somebody got a hold, somebody got a hold of a little bit of grant money, and my name got thrown.
In the ring.
I had no idea.
I mean, I never stepped foot in the school before, and that first year was a lot of trial and error, and I put a lot of hours in, but I kind of got got the ship righted and kind of stuck with it, and yeah, built pretty successful program over the years.
And how many kids you guys feed every day.
Between breakfast and launch About five five hundred plus.
So he was and he was explaining to my kids this morning, when you guys do pizza, Hm, well, kids helped cook. Yeah.
So I have five classes.
So the way we set it up that and that's another unique piece of the program that we have is the fact that I have like a work based learning internship. And that was kind of the early years. There was very few electives.
In the district.
There was you know, the standard art and this and that, and we just had some kids that just had no place, you know, to land. They weren't doing very good in the classroom. And some of the counselors kind of approached me and they said, hey, I've got these kids, a couple of them that are just lost. I said, zend them my way, you know, and I put knives in their pants. Yeah, great idea. There's a real sharp knife kid.
And it kind of took and from that we introduced an actual class and so I've got five classes full of kids that it's set up as a work based learning internship, so they get credit for basically coming in and work.
It's like I treat it like they've left the building to come into a job.
So each class kind of knows its roll, and through the course of the morning, each class kind of has a different role, but they know they come in. They set up the station with a cutting board and knife, and there's a big touchscreen board that they hit the list every morning. I read a fresh list every morning, and they start knocking things down and they're yeah, slicing, dicing, they're cleaning, they're doing all kind of stuff whatever.
I come in and they just they come in. I just start barking at them.
And so it's like, prepare the lunch.
Yeah, they help, they yeah, they help.
You make them call you chef.
Oh yeah, yeah, they call the chef for sure.
And when you guys do pizza day, you guys are making dough from scratch and rolling up pizza crust. Oh yeah, for five hundred hundreds of people. Yeah, and when you guys make mac and cheese, tell me the about give people just to get a sense. Tell people how you make mac.
Well, I'd make the sauce from scratch.
So that's about anywhere between twelve to fifteen pounds of butter, twelve to fifteen pounds of flour, about fifteen gallons of milk, and then about thirty to thirty five pounds of dried pasta thirty forty pounds of shreaded cheese. But everything, I mean, that's it, and that's all that's.
Is making mac and cheese. Yeah, it's the coolest thing in the world. Now, it's a lot.
And with a lot of kids, it's not.
A lot of them aren't necessarily going into the hospitality industry, but it's for a lot of kids. I only deal with high school kids, but for some of the younger ones ninth tenth grade, they've never had a job before. They don't know, you know, any kind of structure as far as the workforce goes. So it's kind of their first taste of this is what it means to have a job, and this is what it means to have people rely on you every day, because when they don't show up, then.
I've got to do double the work or the other students in the class have to do.
So I treat it as you know, you're on your way to the workforce. This is what it means, no matter if you're in hospitality or if you're in accounting, or if you're whatever you decide to go do. This is what it means to be accountable and have a job and you know, get your head together. And had some kids going to culinary arts. Oh yeah, definitely. I've so said kids all over the place. The Art Institute in Seattle has a great program. I've sent quite a
few kids down there. I've sent one kid might actually the regional kid that started the whole program because he was just a wreck. He ended up going all the way over to the New England Colinery Institute. Yeah, seriously, Yep, that's cool, and then went down and did an internship down New Orleans and came back and started a family on the island.
The whole work. Yeah, this is one of my my.
Success sex stories, very old Rowan.
Yeah, that's cool, that's all. Yeah, well I passed up Matt. Matt, you're you teach? Yeah, high school? Yeah, Andy, and I've.
Shared a lot of stories about this kind of stuff, and yeah, I can't, you know, have to make this an education podcast, but yeah, it's it's just amazing if you can get him in that right situation because I've had the same not as as as pronounced as that, but you know, running a greenhouse and a garden and an alcophonics facility and getting kids those jobs and just seeing kids that are kind of lost in the in what would be traditional and find out something new for
them to do is is. Yeah, it's unbelievably rewarding, and it's it's cool to see it happened and.
It transfers over.
I've had so many kids that just did want to be at school, and then all of a sudden they want to come to be in the kitchen, and then they're there for the day and that, you know, teachers coming on, what are you doing down there? Because all of a sudden, you know so and so is here every day and they're they're actually kind of participating.
So it's Yeah, it transfers down the line.
I think I've had kids.
He's excited about stuff.
They say.
They're kind of a wreck being in the back of the classroom just eating raw. Let us think, and this is the best let us.
I have ever had as you grew it. Yeah, we've plugged it a couple times to tell people about your business. Your side hustle, oh the side of the summertime.
Side Hustle is a mobile bar in Northern Michigan called Romannomi. The know me is Northern Michigan, kind of a shortened version of that. Yeah, we my wife and I and another couple run it and we do a mobile bar.
Usually its weddings and other events. We've done everything from.
Baby showers to graduation parties. But yeah, it's kind of a I think it was a bartending service, but we show up with this cool renovated nineteen sixty nine trailer returned into kind of a speakeasy looking vibe. And so we meet with client. They just what they want and uh we make the order for them. We'll pick it up and then uh coming to their come to their event, ready to go.
So it's a fun fun side us on the stakes care all that you make specialty cocktails.
Oh yeah, we meet with the client and design the cotail they want and and uh yeah, it's fun. It's a lot of fun everybody and you and your wife man, yeah, and another couple.
But uh yeah, but everybody's happy to see it when you show up. You know, you're one of those.
Everybody's happy to see the virol And.
Matt Dross is good at a party too.
So I found my niche teacher by day. Uh, I gotta do a couple of quick things. Well, I got to run one by you. We get people that write in ethics questions. Okay, oh first Dan, you're gonna speak to this, you know about fisheries. Just a couple of
listener emails we got to take care of. We recently had on people from Colossal Bioscience on about cloning the sort of technical challenges and moral challenges of cloning wooly mammoths, and on that show, Callahan got to On that episode, Ryan Callahan got to talk about what is the with all the new work in genetics. In genetics, what might be done about invasives? And a fisheries guy wrote in talking about talking about this work to remove non native
brook trout in the Western US. Are you familiar with this, I'll tell you more. Why why super mail? Yeah? Explain that.
Explain that in Layman's terms, Well, genetics and invasives are neither of the those are my area of expertise. But the gist of it is, I think if you were trying to eliminate invasive brick trout population, you would.
Somehow cox.
H hatchery broodstock to produce why why so homozigous male brick trot right, that then you didn't swamp the system with these why why brick trout? And so every so the male determines the sex, right, so every offspring they're going to have, it's going to be male, and so you're just eliminating females from the population. It's kind of how it works. But I mean, I've never been involved with that sort of work. I don't really know the details of it, but that's the gist of it.
So hay Spur. Here's more in technical terminology. Hay Spur fish hatchery just south of Haley, Idaho. The staff spawns geno typic y Y chromosome males with genotypic y Y chromosome females. Their offspring are one hundred percent y Y chromosome males. You then stock them. They spawn with wild female brook trout and spin off one hundred percent males that also have that same y Y or y Y being male. Right after several years, the entire stream population becomes male or x y being male. Two.
So if you have wild type females, you're gonna they're gonna have x y sex chromosomes, right, So you're you would have some yy males and some x y males Like.
Oh okay, yeah, he says, yeah, They're all springs will then be why their offspring will then be one hundred percent male. Yeah, because each offspring will consist of one X chromosome from the mother and one Y chromosome from the stocked Superman. Eventually they're all males. The males and eventually giving up any excess to make xx females. Right, So yeah, does this standard reason that you'd want to be fishing that spot? Would those males all get real
big or that doesn't matter. Oh, you're thinking that right before the crash. It'd be great birkshop fishing. You know what you're thinking.
You're thinking remember when the state of Michigan was stocking super salmon. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what you're thinking of. So the idea there because they're they only spawned once, right, So the thinking there was that these fish are never going to spawn and die, They're just going to keep growing indefinitely. But that wouldn't apply to you know, a fish that spawns over and over again, like a brook trout. It wouldn't interfere.
Yeah. Do you remember being kids and they would have the salmon derbys. Yeah, and they would go out and tag. They'd catch one salmon and tag it, and it was like a millillion dollars, like a million dollar fish, and just everybody's go fishing thinking they're going to catch that sung bitch over again to get all that money. But he didn't know where in the lake. It was. Okay, here are you guys ready for the Oh, here's here's one. No, there's no thing to say here. But we were recently
celebrating small town outdoor columnists. Who's who's ours growing up? Oh I don't know, Oh shit, because we're Chronicle ch Mark something. Our friend Pat Dirk, and he's sort of the last, the dying breed of small town outdoor columnists. And the guy rode in to have a real gripe. He's got a real bone to pick with small town outdoor columnists because he says that his childhood swimming and fishing spot actually got blown up by an outdoor columnist.
They were in a place under a bridge. They always assume they weren't supposed to be there. They'd swim there and catch a lot of nice brookies. Day guy shows up and they assume he's there to yell at him, But it turns out he's some kind of journalist. Interviews all the kids there, takes a picture of their big stringer of brookies, runs a piece about how cute it is that these kids have this fishing whole understaid such and such bridge, And he goes back there and it's
full of people. Yeah, that's a pretty easy spot to find. Never yet, and he never he never forgave his small town outdoor. What state was that in Pennsylvania? Is it so home? Maybe I'm wrong? Oh no, sorry Washington, d C suburbs. Huh, rural area in Virginia which has been consumed sorry, rural Virginia, which is since he was a kid, has been overtaken by DC suburbs and exurbs. Which is a phrase. I don't think it has ever said in the show. Here's the moral one. Ready, this guy lives
in their neighborhood. The neighborhoods no h o a. All right, even though there's no hoa. His wife is the neighborhood president. I don't know what that means.
He had seven chickens self appointed.
I don't know. Unless he wrote that's when he said we live in a neighborhood with no hoa, he meant to say we live in a neighborhood with an with an h o a, because then he says, my wife is actually the president the US. Is it Kamala Harris? Is this from the future. It's Kamala Harris. The Polsters, Uh, we're wrong. So he's got seven chickens, all get killed? Okay, puts out a trail cam's a fox. He gets himself a he's calling it a humane trap, meaning he's got
a live trap, captures the fox. He in his mind is the thing to do now is to kill the fox. His wife and daughter having none of it, he drives the fox five miles down the road and lets it loose. Against this better judgment. The neighborhood is now an uproar because it turns out they all like that fox. He's got a couple of questions. Is the thing going to turn up back here anyway? Probably five miles? And who's right people that want to see a fox or people that want to have chickens.
I think it's coming right back. You ain't gonna get it to go on that trap the second time. I'm surprised. I'm really surprised he got to go on that trap the first time. There's probably used to eating people's dog food, and he was surprised.
He bathed it with tuna fish. You're surprised he got the trap five miles Now, that's not gonna do it.
When I worked for the parks, we had a problem fox out there that was to the point where it was getting in everything. It was It actually even.
Pulled a bottle out of a baby stroller.
It was aggressive.
Serious. Yeah, and we captured that thing.
We just threw a blanket over it and threw it in the garbage can and drove it thirteen miles to the south end of the island.
And that thing was back the next day.
No, yeah, beat you guys home.
Yeah, to god, he was right back. I mean because it was very distinct. He knew, he knew where it was at.
You know, we used to have a dog that our dad tried to give away a few times. It would always come back.
You know. We named that dog. You know that dog's name Kala. Oh that's right. Yeah, it was some like word for leader. And the dog liked to play fat. I don't even remember these details. That dog liked to play fetch so much it would get green tomatoes out of the garden. It was like a never ending supply of balls, which my dad hated it. Well.
Part of the reason we wanted to get rid of it is because I ate the right to right tomatoes just destroyed tomatoes.
Yeah, if I remember this right, he wound up bringing it like you know, your dad normally brings a dog to a farm. That means he killed it, and that happened with other pets, I'm sure. Oh yeah, but he brought it to a farm literally, And if I remember right, we were eating dinner one night and all of a sudden, there's that dog comes by out the tomato in his mouth, if I remember right, And that's something like a kayla. The leader had come home.
Well, getting back to that fox, that fellow can tell his neighbors not to worry. Uh, they haven't seen the last of that fox. But he should tell his other chickens to worry. He might just want to give himself a chicken hut.
Yeah, but what he said he likes about He likes having him run around, so it makes him feel like he lives on a farm. And he also mentioned that they spent a lot of time in his neighbor's yard. Nothing so this might be a bad neighbor. Nothing more farmer than a fox get in your chicken. So that's
true that uh he was baiting with tune official. Here's a this is the here's the thing that guy wrote in This guy says, Hey, guys, came across your podcast started at episode one and I've worked my way up to episode two ninety four and whenever wherever he's at. Right now, we're spending a lot of time on skunk essence, covering skunk essence. You're talking about a guy, Oh, I know what we're talking about. A couple of people rolled
in where they've used. I was saying one day that if I really wanted to get someone, Remember we were trying to me and Sath, we were trying to we're trying to harvest skunk essence from skunks. I was saying, if I really wanted to get someone, I would take that syringe. We're harvesting them with a syringe, and I would just reach into their car and inject their pulse upholstery.
Oh my god.
Right, yeah, find it. You'd never find it, you'd never find the culprit, you'd never realize what I had done.
Uh so, uh so he's listening to this. There's a guy he there's a guy he knows that went through this really bad divorce, loses the house to the wife, loses his house to his wife, pulled out all the receptacles, electrical receptacles in the house, the junction boxes, and put open cans of tuna in the holes, and then sealed them back up, So all the best money, I'm king know nothing more than well.
Uh So, man should right back in with the follow up.
Yeah, follow up on that. Yeah, someone eventually tore out the drywall and found the rotten tuna. Mm hmm. I wonder if they got in trouble. I'm guessing that the court would not look fondly on that, which leads me to and we're gonna return to our current discussion. Uh So. Media to Radio Live is live, meaning our live show is live h every Thursday around ten in the morning on our podcast network. It'll it'll be later available on YouTube.
But there's a live show that we're doing, co anchored by a lot of your favorite guests, So Randall, cal Brody, Spencer, me Yannie, different group each week and we're doing it'll be your picture of activities in the country. So the live show is field reports from hunters, anglers, biologists, weird people, whatever, a lot of funny segments and jokes, a live show of people calling in reporting from their area what's going on. So you get a live snapshot of the oddest and
funnest activities and whatnot. Story's going on from around the country. It'd be like a new show me eating radio live is live. All right, check it out. With all that said, I want to talk about what, like you guys come here every year, but you've been here how many years?
Fifteen?
Okay? Layout for me? How you you come home with some fish? We call it a cut. You get a cut. Let's we should talk about that first. We fish like communists.
It's cold, it's rainy, there's vodka on the shelf. We're like communists, where all the activities we engage in everything gets pooled, collectivized, collectivized, meaning if even if you're on a work detail, if you got to work, like if you got you if let's say for some day you had to do your normal job for a day, like catch up on emails, or you were like fixing something that broke, or you like had to go get gas, you had to make the dock so it wasn't a
death trap and put some tar paper down whatever. So if people can get a grip on a wet, wooden, slimy dock, that doesn't pull you out. And different activities could be like doing shellfish, going for shellfish. It could be different kind of fishing things, whatever, and everything gets pulled into a freezer, and then on breakup day everything is categorized. There's now a suitcase, the whole piece of papers.
Official record of catch.
Yeah, official record of catch. It's in a briefcase, and there's a tally made and the tally would be how many other packages of whatever? And it gets divided out. The way we kind of do it is adult adult angler. We haven't rolled kids. Kids don't get their own catch. A kids take goes into the adult angler take. The adult angler take is called a cut. And so that's how we divide out. How do you walk me through your Let's go around the table here. We're gonna skip Seth.
He's a newcomer to the cove, and instead of answering this question, Seth is gonna give us an update on the A frame, which has had a dramatic Yeah, I mean a dramatic recovery. Looking good in there, Yeah.
Ongoing, ongoing recovering right now as we speak in recovery.
Yeah, what's your how do you what's your take? Like? What are the things you like to make with your cut? Like? How do you think of your cut? You give it all away? Do you slowly eat it? What? Do you do.
We usually we usually so it's just me and my wife. We don't any kids, so we'll usually kind of stretch it out over the year, usually host to host people, cook for folks, but a lot of it becomes kind of just like a protein staple in our house because my wife doesn't eat meat as you know, red meat, red meat.
She eats fish, eats.
Fish, and so it just we kind of stretch it out really through the year.
So the moose meat I gave you, she's not eating that.
That's your own private I'm working my way through that fifty pounds, and that's.
Your own private Stashy with the fish, he's into.
Fish, he's into and uh, yeah, it's made me a better It's made me a better cook in the kitchen, you know. I mean, it helps being buddies with all you guys, but it's a it's.
It's made me.
I'm more creative than I than I used to be.
What are some of the staples.
Well, some of the things that I've I tried to emulate out of here. I've I've done some of that seafood curry.
Have you done the cod?
I have not? Yeah, I have done the I've done the seafood enchilada yep. And uh. And what I want this year?
I want to do.
I want to I want to dial in my chowder game, my seafood chowder game. I haven't really I haven't really dabbled too much in that. Yeah, we just kind of stretched out. But also like a lot of hosting, I mean, people people love it when you know you cook cook a bunch of halibit that you caught or a part of catching them, right, There's just a certain charm in that that people just really love. So that's how we do it.
What was your uh, what's your highlight from this year?
Uh?
Mechanically putting together that switch.
I need to explain this a little bit. We have a pot polar and there's a junction box for the switch, and because it's the saltwater marine environment, they assemble the wiring and then they inject that box with silicons like fill it. So when you open it up, you're looking into what looks like a bar of soap yep, yep. And contained within that bar of soap when you get all that picked out of there is the junction. And then we redid it and repacked.
It and it worked yeah, it's mechanically that and then I guess fishing, you know, getting into the into the Pacific cod uh, the last couple of days, that's that's the hottest ocean fishing I've ever been a part of.
Yeah, I was I was going to touch on that because yesterday when Danny and I were out diving around, I was telling the kids, the boys about how the Plains, a lot of the planes tribes would have a thing called a year. They had their own word for it, a year count or something like that, and it would take a buffalo hide and the band would they would mark the most notable things from any year. And I think, if I'm not mistaken, they would do it in a
concentric a concentric circle. And when you look at these annual counts, like you'll you'll see smallpox epidemics, you'll also see something so it'd be like a person with spots on them. Some of these annual counts have like, uh, you know, you'd be like, oh that this is like an early encounter with people that had firearms, early encounter with white people. And also just like kind of like weird things like I remember one of them had one of them was like a year that someone had I
found mistaken. It was like a year that it seemed like a year that a bunch of buffalo got struck by lightning. Was like the year that's what happened that year. And I was saying, I wish from the start we had made one of those on a big hal of it hide. That would have been an account yep, right. And if I was in the most notable thing every year, I think it'd be finding like one year would have been finding what turned into like a dramatic shrimp spot,
a profound shrimp spot. This year I would perhaps put the death of that shrimp spot, but I would probably this year. Really what would went out in my mind this year was to be a cod, a big peacod, because the year we bought this, we caught a giant. Remember that we didn't know what the hell we're doing. One of the first things we caught was a huge,
probably a nine pound cod. I got a picture, you're all glassy eyed standing by that old not that sync but the previous thing, holding that big ass cod in your mechanic suit. Yeah, and you'd get them and then you just didn't. They're gone, I mean gone for what eight ten years.
It was the twenty fourteen marine heatwave. They just disappeared. I mean, I think there's like complete reproductive failure and presumably a lot of the older ones died off, because yeah, there was what until last nine years. Until last year, most years we didn't catch a cod. We had three boats out there fishing every day and we would catch not.
A cod, yep, and then a few not it was three springs to go started getting dinks and I don't know, there's I'm sure there's fish moving and all that, sure, but this year, man, it's just like cod galore and yeah, and they're not.
They they seem big compared to what we've caught the last couple of years, but they're they're not big cod yet.
No, but they're keep like yeah keeper fish, yeah, yeah, but no, they're not they're not like ten pounders.
Yeah, they're certainly worth playing, but I mean they get bigger three four or five.
Pounds, yeah, gorging on krill and herring. So I think there's harring eating krill. Yeah you don't. I just saw that kroll when we were diving yesterday. It's clouds of Yeah, Matt, you caught herring and then later he caught a cod that regurgitated a herring and got it. Oh, you caught a cod that regurgitated a still live hairing. But just
a ton of cod. And and like I was saying earlier, it's just interesting to get like such a snapshot because we'll come and fish the same general area at the same general time over the course of a long time, and you see these things come in, things come out, you know, and be like, like, shrimp were fantastic and right now shrimp just sucks, right, Crabs have highs and lows.
But the cod thing has been is the watching the cod be here, be gone, be back makes the shrimp thing less depressing because you picture well may you know, you like normally in psychologically i'd be like, oh, it's over, you know, but you get a it's like probably something will happen and all of a sudden it'll be great shrimping again. Maybe.
And when those cod we're all catching, like they're they're various sizes. It's not like there's like one growth class that's taken over, yeah, or catch the small ones on up to yeah, we've.
Gotten all like ten inches up to yeah, like twenty eight inches.
Yeah, like big ones. So it would seem that this would, you know, barring anything happening, this would last for a while.
Yeah. Seth told me yesterday he's actually glad his house got hit by a large tree.
Yeah, believe it or not.
Best thing ever happened to me.
Yeah. No, it just exposed all the problems that needed fixed.
And if it didn't do that, we'd be kind of chipping away at that slowly forever.
We're observing yesterday that Seth bought his A frame at a very important point in time for that a frame. Yes, you know when you see a house that's just falling down and it's just no, like it's beyond repair. Yeah, if you had waited a year, your A frame would have become a non salable item. Yeah. No, just especially when that tree fell on it. Yeah, because he bought his A frame. And then the porch. I bring us up all the time, the porch. How high is that
porch off the ground? Thirteen feet? Noah, yeah, maybe eleven to twelve feet off the ground.
Well, I was sitting there last night and I noticed how like our porch basically is like level with your roof over here.
And that porch one day actually fell off. Yep, that was the first.
That was the first phone call I got from you with bad news about the place.
You know, there's been several Then a tree fell on it and just stove it to den. Yeah. And if you hadn't bought it, it would be you'd look over there and be like it'd just be another rotten building in Alaska. But you bought it just in time. It was like it was like a heart attack victim, you know what I mean. And right when you hit them with those electrocuters, Zapp's back the life that was your purchase. Fibulators. Yeah, your purchase defibrillated that house. Yep. Now we got them
back on a good diet. He's doing all right. Brand new porch, brand new porch front and back.
Well, the first thing that happens after we bought the place, the porch fell off. Then we had our buddy Dustin replace pilings. And I think that's what really saved our ass when the tree hit the place.
Oh, because it would just.
Because it would have just yeah, the pilings that were under it, which there's still a bunch that needs replace, but like the main ones that were bad all got replaced and they're sitting on these giant crease pilings.
Now that's what the porch is on too.
So but yeah, so we did that and then the tree hit and then we basically rebuilt dustin our buddy dust and also rebuilt and and some other guys he had some help, some other guys help. But yeah, front and back wall on the A frame, replaced a bunch of well all the all the choices that got smashed up when the tree hit.
Fixed that. And then.
We had some skylights in there that were leaking. It's like, no, never skylights leaking Montana hot and dry. Why would you put him in a place in southeast Alaska? But yeah, replaced, God, those replaced and then uh yeah.
Man, when I when I went in when that tree fell out, you know, I was here. Yeah, I went up first starters. I was cutting through your lot, you know, going up deer hunting, and I looked and I'm like, funk, that don't look right.
I remember that there.
Yeah, why would Seth put a tree in this house?
And I was like, I better better into that on the way home, you know. So I went out hunted for the morning and came back. Oh, ship, that is that is what I was thinking it was you know, yeah, I sent you that text.
Maybe I sent Steve, I can't remember. But I went up in.
When I went up in there, you know you had that bed up in your loft. Yeah, because you didn't see the tree when it was there. No, no, I got it out of there. Yeah, there's that. If somebody was in that bed, they would have been fine. But that fucking trunk. I mean it was a big hemlock right diameter of that I don't know, two feet diameter in that trunk.
It was about a foot off of that bed. I asked Seth if it would have killed him?
If I can't even imagine if you're late being in that bed, you couldn't have sat up.
Yeah, you wouldn't have been touched the way. Bring me a coffee. But yeah, I know.
My my brother in law, Bob, who owns the place with us, he's over there right now putting up siding.
So you know, the cutest thing I think about it is that your dad likes coming up so it kind of like brings your family all nice.
Oh yeah, yeah, my dad loves coming up here. It's all he talks about every time I talked him on the phone. He's like, I can't wait for life.
Literally, like just like this.
When he leaves, when he leaves here, or when we leave here, whatever in a few a week or whatever. I guarantee you the next phone call he'll be like, can't wait for Laska next year. That's yeah, he loves it. But yeah, it's it's when we leave. By the time we leave, it's going to be a fully functional, rebuilt cabin with siding and everything.
Yeah, congratulations, thanks, feels good. Over the years, I've said, over the years has been a lot of people, a lot of people that talked about maybe buying that a frame and they would go in there and that would usually end the conversation. Yeah, you're tougher. Name work. Yeah, you were tougher. You had more vision and tougherness. Yep, yeah, it was more toughness. Yeah, it was something I didn't didn't want to pass up.
You.
Uh, Danny, you eat a hugely heavy seafood diet, and you because you live in a last you get a lot of different Uh, this isn't your only seafood run because you guys are all kind of salmon.
Yeah, I fished a lot of salmon around home and then Yeah, I have a few friends with boats that I get out on the ocean waters up in South Central. You know how the wittier homer belts so takes the TIXX pressure off.
Do you remember, Uh, we used to like cheese and chongs. Next movie and somehow his cousin shows up, one of those guys. His cousin shows up. Remember those army Duffel bags. Yea, his cousin shows up with the army, those giant army Duffel bags full of bud. Yeah, and uh, someone asks him what he's gonna do with it all, and he says he's gonna smoke some, party with some and sell some.
Give weird a joke. So whenever we caught a lot of fish, you remember we smoke some party with someone selling and the selling not so much and they're selling not at all, but uh anymore, but you definitely smoke something, party with some.
I thought it was smoke some part of some and give some to your friends.
Us smoke some party some, give some to your friends. Well you do with all your fish? Uh, you guys still dip net and stuff like that.
Then yeah, yeah, I'm kind of missing that right now. Between uh yeah, being down here and just feel work for my job and stuff. So yeah, I don't. I don't have a salmon plan this year. I need to figure something out when I get back home to get some salmon in the freezer because they're pretty scarce around here at this moment. But yeah, I already did some halibit. I already have a bunch of halibit in cod in the freezer. So how do you sequence it out?
Because I find that, Sam and you gotta get like I get, there's certain stuff I just eat or give away right away, Like a salmon, you either gotta do something with it, like in a year. It's not fun.
Nope, Nope. I like to have all that gone by next spring. Oh and all this cod that we're getting, I mean, that's gotta be gone in the next I don't know, six months.
Is about this limit on that in your freezer?
It's a leather yeah yeah, but halibut, man, you can let that alib it sit for a couple of years and hardly tell the difference.
You know what. I don't know if you remember the story, you and me were up here, and it was when I was staying in your guest house and we were up here and we were like bringing a bunch of halibit home. I mean, for some reason put it into a dry bag, yeah, a rubberized dry bag, and then I don't know what how we did with it, brought it home, all of our frozen hal but in a rubber dry bag in a cooler or something. Back to anchor.
You were an an and uh, time goes by and that your gear room just it's so like you can't It's one of those you know, like when you hear there's certain noises, like when you hear a turkey going right, or when you hear a blue grouse doing his noise, Like you know it's there, but you can't tell what direction. It was a smell that it was like, it was a smell. It was like a turkey drummond. You know it's there, but you can't. It's hard to pinpoint the direction.
And you just come in the house and you'd be like what, Yeah, my gear room was also my boiler room, so that's really warm. We narrow in on it's something in the gear room. Yeah, and we systematically emptied out I don't know if you remember this. We systematically emptied out the gear room yeah, No, couldn't figure out what had died there. We thought something died there. We didn't know what emptied out the gear room. Put everything back. The smell gets worse the second time. We do, like a
more thorough examination. Realized that, like in that rubber dry bag, when someone emptied out the rubber dry bag, they left one pack of a halibit in that rubber dry bag, and that's what was the culprit. And so when you're searching the room, you just pick up a dry bag and it doesn't weigh Yeah, and an extra that was a nasty pack of halibit. Man.
Speaking of noises where you can't tell where they're coming from, we're over here fishing salmon yesterday and we get there's like sam and jumping all over the place closer to the bank or back of there. So we kind of like slowly put over there, shut the engine off. And you can hear a bear up in the woods snapping its jaws at us. Oh, just like popping them, you know, like the town they make when they're popping their jaws. Just up there, popping its jaws like crazy.
That's cool. Couldn't see it, but you could hear it. Like that distinct sound. Yeah, because otherwise I would say in my year count blanket. Another option here would be the year of no bears. There's a soal of two cubs that's hanging it out over here. Oh okay, because they're not like running around trying.
To no in the spring when we're hearing the spring bear hunting. They were everywhere just because they come to the covid come to covide A, wait them.
Yeah, they know it's a safe place. Yeah, No one's gonna get them, all right.
There's a story I always tell about my kids being out flipping the rocks and just playing in the inner title zone out here, and I came out on this is well, yeah, I think we're getting a little break from the bears. The last couple of years it just seemed to be less abundant. But yeah, when they used
to always be hanging around on the beach. I remember walking on this porch and my kids were young man like maybe three and five or something like that, and they're out there playing in the flats and I said, hey, guys, just letting you know it was a bear behind you, And they didn't even turn around to look at it. Doing what they were doing like they're just so used to it.
I got a picture in one of my kids on a rope swing that I took that that was video like rope basically rope swinging like out over. And I got another one of my older boy in his underwear shooting a slingshot at one it's like up in the like up by the table there, you know.
Oh yeah, Matt DROs just just gave me a photo that I did not know existed of me hitting a bear with a rock that was causing us some troubles.
All right, Matt, so uh your cut. We'll give me your most memorable Danny got to your most memorable things from this year?
How you'll remember the year? Yeah, I guess that would be. Yeah, get peacod coming back? Oh in that great data link cod fishing with with fits and was the boat with us? Uh Rosemary? Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's just the link hod bite was just on and maybe I don't know if the tide was moving real good and we just timed it right.
And yeah, a bunch of duskies, a bunch of silver rays.
Yeah, yeah, that was some pretty intense fishing, man. That's great. It was one of the things you learned over the years of going to fishing the same thing all the time, is uh, you learned like some general trends and rules and stuff, but we've accumulated a ton of you know, but you also learned there's just things you can't explain like that. You remember one time seth in the spring. We were on a particular feature over by where we set trimp pot sometimes and dropped out was like silver
grays and duskies and stuff. I've been back to three times since nothing happens. It's like some current thing, some food thing, and you'll never replicate it. Yeah, you know, and you can go out and yeah, I don't know the moodiness of fish man. Yeah.
Another one of those changes was, you know, more long term, was just the disappearance of those twenty arm starfish. You know, every shrimp pot used to have one or two of those in it, and then that blight came through and all the star sea stars died off. And I mean, I haven't seen one of those things in years, and I don't know if it's a coincidence or not. But then octopus got real abundant for a while or right after the seastars died off.
Yep.
And then you know, yeah, we had a few years where it wouldn't I mean most most years, I would say, you know, in a week of hardcore shrimp and you might get an octopus. And then there was a year where we get like one or two a day, or for a few years.
You remember Ron Layton, you'd pull every shrimp pot to have a bunch of those on it in it and Ron Layton would make you put them on a bucket. Yeah, so he could move him out of his So you're somehow like you're somehow going to get him out of the areas Like I don't know, we saw sixty today, you think that's the only sixty dollars, But yeah, those things aren't around anymore. That's another big, huge change over time.
And and then the yeah, I don't know, the octopus seem at least by you know, from our trapping less abundant in the last couple of years.
And they only said he's getting out pus almost every day. Oh really, really where he's trimping, he cleans them or pitches him, pitches him. Does he do because he thinks they're so smart? Because he doesn't want to deal with him.
Well, when I was talking to him, I was like, I was like, oh, I love eating those things, and he's like really, and I was like yeah. He's like, well, if I get one, I'll bring it to you.
Okay. So not because they're so smart. I think he just doesn't because a lot of people quit because they're smart. Yeah, we got hot onto that documentary. But yeahs teacher bestly never happened to octopuses. But like I said, I've said it before, I don't know that everything else is that dumb. That's true.
Nobody's befriended the halibate.
Yet if you went ahong all the halb it, you might wind up being not one to eat them either. That it might be a substitute teacher, my teacher. So Matt hit me with your most memorable for the year.
I was just trying to think there's been so many, Like I want to someone that has just been a smooth year, like like mechanical, like weatherwise, unbelievable.
We got one mystery. One mechanical mystery is uh, the one of the motors not charging it's bat and it's not the charging fids but minor.
Yeah, but the cod was it's crazy. I mean, the three of us are out and there was a point where we had triple headers numerous times you wouldn't put down without bringing up a fish. And that's just you know, yeah, that's pretty pretty amazing.
Fishion just steady this year.
Usually it's like you got one or two days that where you bringing ninety percent of the catch when it's just odd, you know. And this year it was just kind of every.
Day was we came in yesterday with I don't know three hal of it and probably ten cod, and we're like, man, yeah, I.
Mean any other year we'd have been oh man, what we got. It was just it was crazy.
Uh.
There's a there's a thing from up here we find is there's like a running joke that if you're if someone's coming up, oh yeah, yeah, if you're getting if you're coming up in a few days, the best thing you could hear is that the fishing sucks. Before I came up, I didn't want to text anybody. I did not want to hear because, like the joke is, if the fishing's good in a couple of days, it won't
be right. And so you want to make sure that right before like three days before you show up, you want to hear that it's a miserable bite and then you're like, well, mathematically that means it's gonna be hot when I get there, because it comes in like days on days off days, and it's not it's not it's not lunar, it's not a thirty day roll. It's a much it's like a smaller role, and no one's been
able to identify it. I think if we had over time been really meticulous about moon phase, moon phase, slash, tide swing, I don't know what, I don't know what all inputs would you put in the wind whatever. If we had made some kind of chart, and it could be as simple as like you fill in five or six variables and then rate the days fishing on a one to ten or something, you might start putting together what it is. But it's not sun, and it's not high wind, low wind. It's not all those things that
you remember the day by. It's like it's like the things that you it's you knows the things you don't remember.
Well, right, well, yesterday we had that day that we're fishing, we had that that current was ripping and then for like five minutes it stopped and everything was straight down and then I looked into something huge.
It got off and then it started ripping again and it just changed everything. Bathing could have been coming by. Yeah, energy for attack, that's what that was. No, it's so much mystery. Oh and then you guys for the first time another thing that like we always know one was around. Who saw the salmon shark?
It was last last year. That was last year, you.
Know, I you had to lay eyes on one.
It was the classic kind of shark fin and the tail tip of the tail just kind of going by like Jaws. It was probably what.
We just kind of happened to turn around.
We all saw it like just swimming by, heading towards you guys.
She was all hot. Another thing about like freak deals. So seeing the salmon shark like all that time, and then you look at there was many many years there was never a sea otter. Yeah, fifteen years of no sea otters, and then now there's the occasional seaatter sighting. The neighbor is out one day and they have like a what in the world is that? And it was a I mean it looked like a several hundred pound oceanic sunfish. Yeah, oh, coming along the surface and just
kind of went right under their boat. And then he took a cell phone video and that fish. He took a cell phone video as it's going under the boat, and that fish just keeps coming and coming and coming and coming as it goes by on to the boat. I think they've never seen another one. I think that was twenty fourteen marine heat wave. It was that summer. Yeah, yep, yeah, yeah, just like the one offs, you know, the one off weird things.
That's what I love about this place. It's like you'd never know what you're going to see up here, really, you.
Never you never know what you're never gonna see again.
Yeah, and every year it's like something different you see or catcher.
It's cool. Any most memorable whatever commentary around.
Oh you know where this is gone.
You're a new griddle. So if you were making a year count, your year count would be your giant Riddle pancakes.
So like, okay, griddle after grill.
And has in our circle, how many years you've been here? Sixteenth straight sixteen straight years? He because he deals not only in except food of exceptional quality, but he deals in food of exceptional quantity. And every year his gift to our friend circle is it. He makes the shopping list, comes in in the morning, turns on coffee at six, makes a breakfast like a good breakfast, facilitates the making of lunch, and then at night cooks usually fresh seafood,
sometimes the stuff we bring from home. Cooks everybody a huge, high quality dinner. They just run through the list of meals we had. Yeah, like seafood we had because the first night here we hadn't caught nothing yet, so we had, uh marin earra and meatballs left. Or for my birthday party, the meat the bag of meat was left. Or for my birthday party. Uh chowder, No, you haven't done chowder yet yet. Seafood enchiladas, cod like fried Coddle's law, curry seafood curry. Uh what else?
Oh, welled salmon, that whole slash king salmon on his new thing hits some tacos fish tacos.
Anyways, he normally has the work in a ton of little pans set on a little stove, but this year he bought a giant outdoor griddle and now can just.
Like, oh, hang with high life, quality of life up here. It's just dramatically because I can do it all at once.
And you can hang out getting it. Yeah, that's a question to the kid.
Yeah.
A lot of times I'm in here as the kids are getting a fire going on a seventy degree day, over four burners in it of it and they're just dripping.
So now be outside hanging out.
Yeah.
Yeah, you should have a picture of Andy stand over there and he's got that kind of wide I look on his face.
Just wiping this round. Yeah, we know. I was gonna tell you guys, there's enough to do that anything we're talking about. But you know how I keep wanting to tell people about this. Uh, you guys know what geo cashes are. You know what everybody does? A geocash uses an animal can. Yeah, because it's like real Comedy's an army animal can for geocash. So my kids have just found not even using GPS, they somehow have found two geocachhes. They found one near when we hunt Spring Turkey and Wisconsin,
we always go. Bubby Dog always takes this cheese place down the road. It makes cheese car Valley cheese. We going down here to get kurds and they're like running around the woods there and they find an ammal can and they opened up and full of all the garbage. It's in a geocash thing, including a notepad. There's a nurse spot where we can't. They just happen to find a geocache can, and they always putting junk in there
and taking it out. So my boy, my little boy has only ever seen an army can in context of a geocash. Two times I have heard him accuse people of having stole a geoc cash box because they have in their possession an army.
He took the he took the geo cash box.
I'm like, no, no, man, those have always been around, you know. No, it's a geocash box.
Got uh?
And then how do you handle your fish and what your uh? When you go home?
You make the same things there, uh, you know, the day to day pull out fish and make for myself. But uh, you know, I tend to find myself in social situations with a lot of people looking to have a good time. And much like this place, I tend to find myself cooking a bunch. So I party with it, you know, smoke some, I smoke some party with some.
No, I share it around for sure, I give.
I'll give a fair bit away too, you know, because I do catch a little bit of fish where I'm at as well.
So my fir when I go home, that one of my first things when I go home is I give fish to my neighbors, meaning like the houses by my house.
Yeah, so anytime there's there's a big get together, Yeah, it's pretty fun to be able to show up with a lot of fresh fish or fresh caught fish and share it around. That's kind of the best part. Tell the stories as you go, you know. But yeah, it lasts me the whole you know, especially being up here for a couple of weeks to come home with a
fair bit it'll it'll last the whole year. I think I got a few packs from last year that I'm just gonna get through right as I get home and maybe change the date and pass those out.
Let me tell you, let me tell you hot to. I don't date anything anymore because when you date it, it starts people start being prejudiced against it, even when I'm out of town. So if I'm out of town right and someone at home, they're like, once you put the dates on there, they're wondering about it.
You're locked in.
Yeah, they're like, oh, that's from. I don't put any date on anything, man, I when I look, I know when it's from, because like, oh that's from. I know, but no one needs to know. And when I give someone a pack it of something, I don't need them wondering about it. Yeah, you know what I mean, because like a piece of deer meat. I mean, this is
a controversial statement. A piece of deer meat that's been saran wrapped and freezer paper wrapped and kept in a deep freeze for two years ain't no different than a piece of deer meat in three months. It just isn't, I agree. Different. Now we're not saying the same thing about the salmon.
I didn't find the limit on red meat though I came across.
Uh.
I came across the roast that had been in my freezer. I don't know how I missed it, man, because I'm really diligent about managing my freezer. But I found a piece of meat that was five years old. Something had happened. Yeah, I just lost track of it, you know, No, I mean something had happened to it. Oh oh yeah, so yeah,
I did a fool proof roast recipe. You know, I just put I put some rub on it, and I seared it in the pan and popped it in the oventil it's like one hundred and twenty in the middle, and pulled it out, let it cool and siced it up and it looked great. But it like the muscle structure, it just like was mushy and it just didn't it was gross. You know, five years got it?
Yeah, So what you should do is go in and label them five years later, eat now from the future.
One thing I do, yeah.
Eat yeah, eat bye, best consumed and mark it out five years four years. Yeah, because when you look at it, when you look at some old ass can that you found out your cab and it doesn't say when they made it, this is when you should.
Eat it by it. Yeah, that's a new way to date.
One thing I do when I'm unpacking, too, is any of the seals that have.
Popped, I go back and reseal and I'll.
Tell you when you reseal a frozen piece of fish gets tight.
Yeah. That's a good tip. When I get home, invariably you got bat bags that. Yeah. I have a bunch of different theories out. My latest theory is something about being in the cargo hold. Oh for sure, in the air the cargo hold in the airplane does something to back like it ruins a lot of seals on back bags. I just cut it open. I cut the top off and stick the bag right into a bag and resapp and oh you keep.
You don't even get rid of the bag, so you reseal it in the bag.
This was let's say this was a back bag. I would just go with a pair of scissors and slide it into a bag. A lot of times the label shows right, you don't even need to relabel it, but you don't label it. No, I'd label what it is. I want to know what it is. I know when it's from names and no names, but not date this year with my cut, I'm gonna do something that I
tried a long time ago. But I tried it with some fish that have gotten skanky, Like like I had some cod, a big cod from long million years ago. I had a big cod that got to the point where I was like, eh, you know, you know you don't want to open it up. You know when you open it up. Another thing about long term fish freeze and get the skin off Oh yeah, yeah, I've been
pretty good about that. If you want it, if you're gonna if you're not gonna eat at megafresh, skin it except for salmon, then you gotta scrape and wash it. You gotta get slam off. Like yesterday I was playing I was playing a king that Luisa caught, and you were saying, scrape. Oh, I forgot it helps a ton and you just scrape all that slam off. I then once you said it, I kind of took my I scraped and took my rubber glove in the hose and just washed him till he was like sand, you know
what I mean. Almost kind of a lot of the scales came off. I was cleaning it. So good to get all that slam off because we used to skin we used to freeze hal but skin on not good. Not scraped, Well that's you've got a lot. Yeah, it even turns brown like the not good skank to link. Oh yeah, some link gets skanky. Last year you're an orange slimy. Yeah, it got real bad.
It all starts here. You really have to scrape and wash them. Slime it transfers down the line.
Another long term freezing thing is on your shrimp when you hit them. You got to clean that mm hmm. You gotta clean that little uh that junction all because I think he's get when you tear it, it get some kind of digestive fluid from the little orange wash that not you pull that shrimp out and that turns brown that face. But the more you remember how long ron late and to make you wash them for it? Yeah, yeah, he's like you'd be out there like an hour and
wash the shrimp. Yeah, clockwise clockwise. That's the wrong way. I don't don't swirl the counter.
A lot of people that freeze them in water. We don't have that luxury here because you don't want to lug all that weight. Well, actually vacuum see them in so they're just in a block of ice.
I can picture that, and they hold.
Up pretty good. But t s they don't like that either water. Uh. Anyway, I tried to support what I was trying to get to is salt cod. So I tried to make salt cod with a piece of cod that was already of questionable. Uh date this year, I'm going to go home immediately and make some I'm gonna go home immediately and make take my cod and make a bunch of salt cod. But I can then re you know, do like the French salt cod preparation.
Yeah, that's an old, old before refrigeration.
Yeah yeah, and then you and I. But I used to order that, like in restaurants in New York. I used to order the salt cod.
Run run dot or like a yeah, it's kind of what is it like mix it with mashed potatoes.
It was an old you bring it back, yeah, you kind of bring it back to life. Or you had a song. Now that it's the year of the cod, I'm gonna, yeah, try some salt cod.
I was gonna point out because I was how I what I ended up doing usually my catch Just how important like this whole process and trip is to like friends and everybody, Like I'm getting texts while I'm here, like house of Shrimp this year.
Just like yeahs you know that's a bad one you liked, but yeah, the idea, like it's definitely.
Like we host a ton of parties and just it's all stuff from here in.
The Northern Northern Mission community. How the fishing in southeast is Yeah.
Exactly, they know they know because of this trip.
So yeah, it's a we do a lot of just hosting parties and yeah, so it'll be good.
Well, I want to thank you guys for doing this. Man goes it out saying and that's generally how in our circle, I think everything goes without saying just how much I have appreciated over all these years, the way that uh, you guys have been so faithful about coming up and hanging out. Thanks for sharing it. Man, it's a place. One of the smartest things, one of the smartest dumb things we ever did, is to uh buy a place and have like a little hangout. But it
means so much. You guys come up all the time.
Oh man, and you know it's corny but true. Man, be'st part about this place is just the fellowship. It's being with you all. Oh yeah, it's the best thing about it.
Make a joke about watching that floatplane leave after we get here, like, oh, okay, now the year starts.
And we were conversation yesterday about just how so many people on the outside, you know, friends at home always you kind of trying to describe this place, but there's there's never a conversation that you can really express what happens up here.
You know what I mean, the.
Day to day that well, that way understands it.
Sitting down at dinner and all three boats are sharing stories about yeah, the one offs and we saw this and and just yeah.
The camarade.
You cannot explain this to people that have never experienced it. It just doesn't transfer to to you know, relate that kind of information and.
Any amount of work too.
Yeah.
Yeah, the highs and lows of you know, we first got here, all right, first day out, and like three boats leave and we didn't get out of the cove.
Oh it's like size and highs and lows to the mask. Somebody's back of the chack cleaned up mink ship. Yeah we get. We get instead of a mouse infestation, we get an annual mank infestation.
They're getting crafty too.
Well. I think I think we got to figure out what's going on. I cleaned up some stuff in here in the spring. That guy, I think, yeah, he he went around the mink barrier. It's a whole long story. It might be. I think it's ain. We've had pine Martin two. Yeah, come in. Yeah, all right, Well, thank you guys, thank you, thank you for sharing. Thanks everybody see us next time. M hm.
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