Latest / Fist Full of Dirt / FFOD339 : Old Friends & Fishing Holes

Transcript

FFOD339 : Old Friends & Fishing Holes · Fist Full of Dirt

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_09: Welcome to Fistful of Dirt, the official podcast of Mace Oak Properties.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_09: Whether you own a small farm, lease land, or just love hanging in your backyard.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_09: We're all about the outdoor lifestyle and how to get the most from your time in God's great outdoors.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_09: Now here's your host, Ronnie Cuz Strickland.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_05: It's just as hot here as it is wherever you're listening from, I can promise.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_06: Maybe a little hotter.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_05: I saw somebody made a, I think it was a post.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_05: They were having a uh some kind of questionnaire, and they were asking people different questions and about this and that and this and that.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_05: And what was the worst month on our calendar?
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_05: And August was unanimous.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_05: It was like nine to zero.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_06: Thousand percent August.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_05: Because of July, you know, summer's getting here.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_05: It's already getting a little hot.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_05: You got the fourth of July.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_05: Everybody's fired up about swimming.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_06: Kids are out of school.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_05: August is like, okay, I've had enough.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_06: I'm over it.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_05: I have had enough.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_05: I'm tired of mowing the grass.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_05: I want to go hunting.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_05: I want a cold snap.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_06: Okay, first of all, speak for yourself.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_06: I'm never tired of mowing the grass.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_06: But I'll tell you how hot it is.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_06: My red-bone coon hound Dan.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_06: I'm having to put gold bond on his belly rolls because he's got heat rash.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_06: I'm like, this is pathetic.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_06: It's too hot.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_05: But if you run out, there's probably some in my truck.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_06: It's just too hot.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_05: It's bad hot down here.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_05: But anyway, staying in AC, that's what we do.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_05: So anyway, just back, and I'm not gonna elaborate too much.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_05: Scott back from the Hall of Fame induction ceremony at the Legends of the Outdoors Hall of Fame.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_06: Fun.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_05: Started by Gary Mason.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_05: That was awesome.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_05: It was just like when you walk into that room, it's just different.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_05: It really is.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_05: And I got to see Paul Butzki go in.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_06: Awesome.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_05: Ted Nugent.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_05: I was asked to introduce Gary.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_05: I've been doing that for a while.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_05: He's the guy that founded this, and I know him personally.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_05: But anyway, when I was introducing him, I had to tell the Paul Butzky story.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_05: I was like, you know, everybody's here, they have a lot of accolades and they're not going to tell you about them, and that's not why they're here.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_05: But I said, Paul Butsky's got one that nobody will ever talk.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_05: And because he he took Roy Rogers turkey hunting.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_05: He called a turkey up that Roy Rogers killed.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_05: And I just couldn't get over that.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_05: So I kind of told that story and went on.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_05: And when I sit down, your mother, my bride, she kind of elbowed me.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_05: She said, I bet you half the people in this room don't know who Roy Rogers was.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, he was bigger than Elvis.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_05: But anyway, it just goes to show you I should have prefaced it, you know, with Roy Rogers, the biggest TV st anyway.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_05: And it was a lot of people that weren't born when Roy Rogers was on the TV with his faithful horse trigger.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_05: But uh anyway, it was so cool.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_05: And uh Ted Nugent was just on fire.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_05: He was he he own brand.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_05: He reminds me of Trump.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_06: He's always on fire.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_05: Absolute endless energy.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_05: And the minute, the minute that he got there, he just, you know, he came during the lunch break.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_05: He missed the first hour and he came in and people just mobbed him, and he was taking time with everybody to do this and do that.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_05: And of course, he got two awards.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_05: He was inducted into the Hall of Fame and he got outdoorsman conservationists of the year, something like that.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_05: And they auctioned off a guitar there.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_05: He brought a, you know, an acoustic, just a hollow body guitar that had a just a beautiful like portrait of Fred Bear or something.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_05: It went with for ridiculous money.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_05: But at the end, he grabbed that guitar and sang the Fred Bear song.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_05: Oh and I'm tell I don't know if the acoustics were perfect.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_05: It gave me coaches.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_06: I love that song.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_05: He did not miss a note.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_06: I love that song.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_05: He hit every vocal bar, it was perfect.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_05: And that room went so dead silent.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_05: I'm like, man, I'm glad I came up here to watch it.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_05: Nobody knew he was gonna do that.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_06: He's like the king of Imprompt, too.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, when he he got up to do his acceptance speech or whatever.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_05: He didn't have any notes or anything, but I was like, golly, well, he's Ted Nugent.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_05: That's what that's what he does.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_05: So and it's cool to get, you know, recognized by your peers and didn't ask for it.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_06: So that is cool.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_05: Anyway, talking about peers, we got one coming up here.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_05: I'm telling you, this man, he I've been knowing him for it's it's gotta be closing in on three and a half or four decades.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_05: I've got him here because title-wise, he is a fisheries biologist for the U.S.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_05: Forest Service.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_06: Right.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_05: That's a big that's a big moniker.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_06: He's such a like a buddy of the brand and the company and hunting the country and all like I just knew his name and that he was one of our big hunting buddies.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_05: He's so smart, got a master's and all that kind of stuff.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_05: And I and I've got some fishing questions for him about ponds and rivers and lakes and all that, because but I can promise you at some point this is gonna get back to old school hunting the country and turkey hunting and all that stuff.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_05: Because he is eat up with it, maybe worse than anybody I've ever been around.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_05: And he is he's been around and been on the Mossy Oak team for a long time.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_05: But he is a good buddy of mine.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_05: He's a fellow Mississippian, he is a turkey thug, but like I say, his his moniker is he's a fish biologist or fisheries biologist for the U.S.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_05: Forest Service.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_05: So let's go visit with our old buddy who's been on the hunting country show more than once, Mr.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_05: Rick Dillard.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: He's looking at us.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: He sees something.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, he's walking again.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_02: Five minutes, man.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_02: We been here most of that.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_02: You talking about I mean, that is a dead honest dream come true.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_02: You know, most times you wait till hours and hours, and you hope that a big buck comes.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_02: And we ain't been sitting down five minutes and he steps out.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_02: He's big, man.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_02: You called it this spot.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_02: You just said it.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_02: You had a feeling.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: I had a feeling about this spot.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_02: I told you, man.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_02: This is this is a perfect spot, man.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_02: This it's a swamp.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_02: It's a natural funnel.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_02: That little hillside come off.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, man, I feel good about it.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_05: Well, Rick, I did a uh, I already did the opening and it established the fact that uh we've been knowing each other a long time.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_05: You ain't you ain't something like, hey, cuz got some fish ball that's up here.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_05: It ain't like that.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_05: Right.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_05: How long we've been knowing each other?
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, 25, 30 years.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_05: At least.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_05: It may be longer than that.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_05: When you was hunting, because we're gonna talk about it.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_05: One of the one of the questions I got is tell me about your relationship with hunting the country and all that kind of stuff.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_05: Uh-huh.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_05: But I gotta tell you, Rick walked up in here, he's in the Camo Cave.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_05: Thank you for making that drive, my brother.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_05: Oh.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_05: And he had a VHS tape in his hand, still in the bubble wrap, that I had literally not seen in probably 30 years, called Focus on the Hunt, which I did to make a little side hustle money about how to video your hunt.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_05: How did you end up with that VHS tape?
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I met you and your wife Pam at the wildlife extravaganza in Jackson, probably back in the late 80s, early 90s, and uh I was so enthused with you all.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you and and Toxie and Will Primos and the rest of the guys were videoing hunts.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_03: And I was so excited about that, and I was like, I want to learn how to do that.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_03: And so when I walked up to you and introduced myself, and you said, you need this video tape, this VHS tape, focus on the hunt.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_03: And you said, Rick, it's not hard.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_03: It's just focus on the hunt and try to capture the essence of the hunt and tell a story.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_03: And basically I went back and looked at that tape over and over and over again.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_03: And so right before I got ready to come up here earlier this week, I was going through some tapes and I saw it, and I said, I bet Cuz would love to see a copy of that tape.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_03: So I brought it with me.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_05: Man, we've been taking pictures of that VHS tape.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_05: Now, it you know, it's certainly outdated and everything because it's so complicated.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_05: Now they have they have schools for people wanting to get in the outdoor filming, but was nobody doing it back then, and and man, people were real interested in that stuff.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_05: Just like you were.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_05: Right.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_05: We're gonna have a lot of fishing questions because that's your that that's your bailiwick.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_05: That's what that's where you make your money at back in the day.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_05: Right.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_05: And uh, but I first I want I wanna, and I kind of heard some of this.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_05: You were up here when I did Doc and Lou on the podcast.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_05: We hunt too, we fish to, and we went to lunch.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_05: There were some coolest stories you ever heard.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_05: So we're gonna retell some, but not everybody got to hear that.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_05: It wasn't on the microphone.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_05: So I want you to tell me because I know where your enthusiasm level is.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_05: You made it your life's work.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_05: Tell me how and where you grew up, what that was like.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_03: I grew up in a little small town called Potts Kemp, Mississippi.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_03: Boy, I had a lot of friends that that made fun of that name, but I know exactly where it's at.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_03: Potts Kemp, Mississippi, so it's way up in North Mississippi, about halfway between Memphis and Tupelo, and it's smack dab in the middle of the Holly Springs National Forest.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_03: So I grew up with public land all around me, National Forest Land.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_03: Also, I grew up in the backwaters of Sardis Reservoir, so Tallahatchie River and Tippa River that feed into uh Sardis Reservoir.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_03: I grew up in the backwaters of that, so there was core of engineer land around.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_03: So I had an abundance of public land to hunt, and man, we squirrel hunted, rabbit hunted, uh, deer hunted, uh fished, you name it.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_03: And we had private land, but we had a lot of public land.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_03: And so um access is everything.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_03: It's everything.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_03: We had plenty of it.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_03: Lots of national forest land.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_05: And uh, and I know you were good, because I've been knowing you for years.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_05: You we ended up filming you hunting and sending you places and stuff like that.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_05: Right.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_05: But when you was young, growing up and all that, and I know that was your passion and all that.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_05: When did you know that somehow hunting and fishing was gonna be involved in what you did for a living?
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_05: Was there a switch flipped, or you just kind of stayed in that direction?
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_03: You see the smile on my face?
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_05: Yes, sir.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna tell you something.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_05: All right.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_03: I used to get mad at the preacher on Sunday because if he held service for too long, do you know what I missed watching on TV?
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_05: What's that?
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_03: Was Kurt Gowdy and the American Sportsman?
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_05: You old as I am.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_05: I am old.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_05: People, people, I say that people shake their heads.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_03: I absolutely loved Kurt Gowdy and the American Sportsman, and so usually it came on around two or three o'clock in the afternoon, and if I got home too late, I missed it.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_03: But I lived for coming home and watching the American Sportsman.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_03: And I knew that was something that I wanted to do.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_03: I also loved Wild Kingdom uh because I love animals and loved watching Marlon Perkins and Jim Fowler uh doing their thing, but I loved the American Sportsman.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_03: So me and my dad would sit down and watch it, and we dreamed.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_03: And he would say, One day, we're gonna do what those guys are doing, and that seemed like the farthest thing away.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_03: That seemed like they could be the moon away.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_03: I dream too far.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_03: Too far to go elk hunting, to go mule deer hunting, to go pheasant hunting.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_03: And here you got this poor little old Mississippi boy sitting there dreaming that one day we're gonna be able to do that.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_03: But we did.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_03: We did it.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_05: But you you're giving away your age.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_05: You know, I was at the uh uh Legends of the Outdoors Hall of Fame induction this past Saturday, and I intergo I introduced the host, but Paul Butzky was going in.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_05: And and even though I was not introducing him, I had to tell a little story about Paul Butzki had an accolade that nobody will ever have.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_05: He took Roy Rogers and called him a turkey up.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_05: Wow.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_05: And I and and when I sat down, my Pam, she reminded me, she said, you know, three-fourths of the people in this room don't know who Roy Rogers is.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_05: I was like, well, they they'll just have to Google him.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_05: But you know, what I remember about the American sports in the same way.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_05: It was never in the audio, it was all narration because they shot it on film with them giant big cameras.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_05: Now, you were infected maybe as bad as anybody I've ever been around.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_05: So how how did you take that to the next level?
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_05: Where did you get educated?
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_05: Because I've already teated up a little bit.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_05: Tell me about your education process.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_03: So you asked the question a minute ago, how did I know it was something that was deep within me, but I didn't know how I was gonna do it or what was gonna happen.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_03: So I go to college and I have no idea.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I go to Jackson State University for a year.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_03: They have a biology program, so I enrolled in that, but I just kept thinking, this just ain't getting it.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_03: So one day I picked up a brochure of Mississippi State University and it lined out the wildlife program, and it talked about wildlife and it talked about fisheries, and I was like, Yes, that's what I wanted to do.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, I did.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_03: Man, don't get me off on that.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_03: Uh man, I'd come home dripping wet with uh with dew, uh, going fishing before I go to school, but I knew this is what I wanted to do, so I transferred to Mississippi.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_03: So my first semester there, I kind of floundered around and couldn't figure it out.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_03: And so then after uh my first semester, I enrolled in the fisheries program.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_03: And I was so excited because I got to learn about things that I always wondered about when I was growing up.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_03: I always had this thing in the back of my mind.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_03: Oh why?
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_03: And so when I was growing up fishing with my grandmother, Essie Dillard, and she'd carry me and my um my dad's younger siblings.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_03: They were only about five or six years older than me, and we'd go fishing, we'd fish with a cane pole.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_03: What was her name?
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_03: Essie.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_03: Did she know how to fish?
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, she knew how to fish.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, sir.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_05: See, I love that.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_05: And my I didn't know none of my grandparents.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_05: When somebody said my grandma took me fishing, that just that gives me cold chills.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_03: She knew how to fish, and so I I would be so excited going fishing with her, and one of the things she'd do is she'd send me and my uh two uncles out, and we'd go with a shovel and we had to get bait.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_03: So we'd go to the chicken coop or we'd go around the flower bed or whatever, and we would dig up earthworms.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_03: And then a bonus is when we dub dug up a grub worm.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_03: You know what the grub worm is?
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_03: You know, stuck a white worm with a red head on him.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_03: Now he'd bite.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_03: I was scared of him, but she loved her some grub worms because they were good catfish bait.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_03: So we'd go dig up worms and we'd go down to the slough, we'd go to the old river run, or we'd go to uh ponds in the in the community, or whatever, and we'd go fishing.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_03: Uh-huh.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_03: And then at the end of the fishing trip, we'd come back and we'd have uh buckets of fish, a big wash tub of a wash tub of fish, and nobody cleans a fish.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_03: Hardly any more the way we did, but we'd go back and get spoon.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, and we'd scrape all of the, yep.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_03: We'd scrape all of the scales off of the fish.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_03: And then we'd cut the head off.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_03: And she'd fry them whole, you know, the brim and the bass and the catfish.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_03: I was amazed with that.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_03: We'd put them in a a tub and pour hot water on to get all of the slime and the scum off, and then we'd take a pair of wire pliers and we skin them and we'd cut the heads off.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_03: And so that was always amazing to me to be able to do that.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_03: But anyway, I loved growing up with my grandmother and then um my father, which was her son, he took me fishing and he'd carry me to all of these ponds and we'd go bass fishing, and I can remember my first bass.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_03: I think I was about nine years old that I caught on tackle.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_03: ZEPCO 606 Real.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_05: That's high dollar, back.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_05: That was high dollar.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_03: I think I I saved my birthday money, and I think I might have spent 10 bucks, something like that.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_03: It was on, but I was so excited.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_03: Boy, I cast out in the shallow water.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_03: It was like in April, and the bass was spawning, and to feel that tug on that line and you feel that tug, man, it blew me away, and I caught a bass, and I caught another one.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_03: I was hooked.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_03: That's it.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_03: That was it.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_05: Did your grandmother live long enough to see the level you reached in that world?
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_05: How successful you've been?
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_03: My grandmother passed away five years ago.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_03: So she got to see she lived to be 96 years old.
• 18:30
  unknown: Yes.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_05: Yes, you know she's proud of you.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_05: Oh, she was.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_05: That little boy she took down on the creek.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_05: That's right.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_05: She she was.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_05: That's awesome.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_05: That just gives me cold chills.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_05: Yep.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, you know, yeah, I I feel all that.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_05: We used to, we used to.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_05: My dad we'd go down the levee, he never owned a boat.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_05: We'd fish from the bank.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_05: We didn't throw back nothing.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_05: And he had two or three families.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_05: We'd stop on the way back across the Mississippi Bridge, and we'd give them some fish, but everything we took home, we scale with a spoon.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_05: And uh I he knew and this will be way over a lot of people's head, he knew where every cataw tree was in Adams County.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_05: We in the one them worms we we'd go get cut.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_05: His favorite was a katawba worm that's also for catfish.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_05: So I feel you.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_05: Oh, it just makes me smile.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_05: So I want you to uh and I know this story, but the listeners don't.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_05: One of the highest downloaded episodes we ever did, I gave him a a little history of hunting the country and how all that started.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_05: You know, the reason Hunting the Country started from and from my standpoint was Mississippi State.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_05: I went over there to that broadcast school and talked to the dean and all that.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_05: Tell me about your uh association with hunting the country and how all that started decades ago.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_03: I'm almost scared to to share some of my secrets and stuff on what I did, but uh, Hunt the Country After American Sportsman was my favorite TV show.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_03: Sunday evenings, I'd come in and start watching TNN, the Nashville Network, and I love me some hunting the country.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and so I loved watching it, and I was like, I would love to go hunt with those guys.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_03: What can I do to be able to go hunting?
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_03: I had no idea.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_03: So I took just a regular VHS camera and I didn't know anything about how to film the kill or anything like that, but I just took me and my buddy, my best friend Kervin, and we'd go around and and film after the kill and then just show some deer running through the field and through the woods and stuff like that.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_03: I put together a little VHS tape and I sent it in.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_03: And I think uh Troy Ruiz, who worked here years ago, saw it.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_03: I was like, hey, I think he talked to you because we need to send this guy on a hunt.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_03: And so a hunt for Saskatchewan was coming up.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_03: Now, do you know that was my dream hunt to go hunt big Canadian whitetails?
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_03: And to get that call, I had no idea to get that call, hey Rick, how would you like to go on a hunt to Saskatchewan?
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_03: I was like, just tell me when.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_03: I'll quit my job, I'll do whatever I need to do to go.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_03: And uh this was I want to say it was around 2001 or something like that.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_03: And way back.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_03: It was way back.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_03: And and uh I I got the chance to go.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_03: And uh again, this stands out as probably one of the best hunts, the greatest trips of my life to go to a place like that, to see the wilderness, uh to hunt in the cold, and just to hunt those big Canadian whitetails.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I got down to the last day.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_03: I hadn't killed anything.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm beginning to think, okay, it ain't gonna happen.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_03: But the last day, the last morning before we got ready to go, I gotta kill.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_03: And uh Justin Flaherty, who was one of the cameramen, got to hunt uh on camera.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_03: And you all Took that footage and I thought it was gonna be terrible or whatever.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_03: I didn't think it was gonna be a good hunt, and you came back and you aired it on Hunt the Country.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_02: Little Hillside come off.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, man, I feel good about it.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we're right at the pre-rup.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_02: And you you called everything a whole week line.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_02: I did.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_02: I told you before we came in Monday, I said.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_02: It's gonna be a little slow early on.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_02: I said, but the latter part of the week, I said Thursday, Friday, probably for Saturday, I said, it's gonna happen.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_02: I've seen the same thing back home.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_02: The pre-rup, you know, at first the bucks are a little bit slow about moving, but the closer they get to the root, man, they're gonna be roaming.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_02: They're gonna be searching.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_02: And uh I called it just right.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you, man.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_02: Appreciate it.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_03: Let's go down there and look at the And for just an instant, for a moment, I was a hero.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_05: You still a hero.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_05: That's uh I we went other places too and all that.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_05: But that to me, and that all started with Toxie, because he wasn't gonna be the host.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_05: I wasn't gonna be the host.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_05: So we just took people, and I would tell Justin Flaherty and Mike McCloskey and Stephen, all these Stephen Bush, um all these young kids, and I was like, Look, if your hunter ain't talking much, if he's not, you know, hadn't got a lot of charisma, I said, focus on the guide.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_05: And if you can't get the guide to talk to you, go into the closest town.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_05: We're telling stories here.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_05: And now I think that's why I think that's why it it it captured so many people.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_05: It was just different people hunting.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_05: And uh I'm very proud of that.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_05: You know, we before we turned the mics on, we was talking about a couple of weeks ago.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_05: I had Doc and Lou up here from the We Hunt to We Fish To podcast and YouTube channel.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_05: And he called me and asked me, he said, uh, we got a buddy that lives over there, Rick Diller.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_05: Do you mind if we bring him?
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_05: I said, Sure, bring him on up here.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_05: Do you know him?
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_05: I said, Well, I know him a little bit.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_05: And when they sat down, I had that picture from like 1999 over there.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_05: And uh they got the biggest kick out of that.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_05: But it's like it's just it's always been just about hunting and people, you know, I got one thing I'm very proud of.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_05: We finna get to the fishing stuff because that's that's that's your lane.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_05: But uh one thing I'm real proud of, that that show had a fabulous run.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_05: It was number one three or four times, and that and we were against everybody, Bill Dance and Hank Parker and all of them.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_05: We never scored a deer on that show, ever.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_05: And I was like, that ain't you know, telling stories, that's what's it uh that's what it's about.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_05: And uh very proud to have you back up here on the back end.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_05: We don't do it no more.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_05: It's all about social media now, but it's it's still fun to to relive all that stuff.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_02: Look at this dude is huge.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_02: I'll tell you what, these are some really long grand times.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_02: Look at them.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_02: He's got a little character point right there, little kid.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know whether he's been fighting up, but this little lamp's point my pill's been broke.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_02: Man, look at his body.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_02: He is one huge deer.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_02: Man, this week has just been something else.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_02: Grant the glass.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_02: They've been awesome.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_02: They've been putting us in some really good spots.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_02: But things just didn't work out quite right.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_02: We weren't in position just right to catch the deer coming in.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh sometimes the deer spotted us, but each day was some deer.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_02: But we just couldn't get it to work out.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_02: But I knew, getting toward the end of the week, that the rut was kicking in, and I knew it had to happen.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_02: And when I looked at this spot, when we came in and built the blind yesterday, I fell in love with it.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_02: I knew that this would be the spot.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_02: And we came in this morning.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, five minutes.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_02: We were sitting there five minutes, nothing.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: Came right up for that hill, right back there.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, right down that trail.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it was just like clockwork.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_02: You couldn't have written a better script if you had written a script for this.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_02: To do this, man.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_02: This is something.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_02: This dude's big, man.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not gonna be able to drag him out by myself.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_02: I'm about to go get some help.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_05: You know, old timer builds knives with durability in mind.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_05: They also wanted to be a tool that is comfortable enough to work with day after day.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_05: Since the beginning, old timers made knives for those who don't rely on others to get the job done.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_05: I love that.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_05: Old timer built for generations.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_05: You know, there's nothing I love more than teaching my grandkids how to be better woodsmen.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_05: The Onex app helps me do that in a way that makes sense to them.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_05: They're all about apps and that phone.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_05: Using Onex to set optimal wind on stands that should or shouldn't be hunted on certain winds makes it easier for them to understand that, hey, a north wind blows from the north, not to the north.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_05: Using that little slope angle layer when teaching them how to read topographical maps, but the color-coded shading makes it a lot easier to explain to them what tightly static tofu lines mean.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_05: Bottom line, Onyx Hunt makes learning fun for those young ones and still helps me find success in the field.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_05: It's an easy-to-use platform.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_05: Even I can do it.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_05: I suggest it for any age outdoorsman.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_09: You're listening to Fest Full of Dirt with Cut Strickland.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_09: Presented by Mossy Oak Properties.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_05: I promised Lauren I would ask you some fishing questions.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_05: That that's what you studied, and that's what you end up being.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_05: Was it with the Forest Service?
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_03: U.S.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_05: Forest Service.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_05: U.S.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_05: Forest Service.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_05: You were a fisheries biologist for them.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_05: Was it all freshwater, or did you ever have to do any saltwater?
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_05: Freshwater.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_05: It was all freshwater.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_03: Freshwater stuff.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_05: Mostly uh, I guess you dealt with lakes, rivers, farm ponds, all that kind of stuff.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_05: That's right.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_05: That man, I can't imagine the scientific books that has to go along with learning enough to be a fisheries biologist.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_05: How tough was the the education part of that?
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_03: It was pretty tough.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_03: I bet.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_03: Uh but when you love it, uh what you're doing, it certainly makes it a lot easier.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_03: But I had to get a bachelor's degree, of course, that was four years.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_03: And you would think that's enough.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_03: But really, in order to understand how to make all of that work, you got to carry it a little further.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_03: And I had to get a master's degree.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_03: So I had to go another two and a half years in Mississippi State and do a lot of research.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_03: And it's kind of funny, I got to do research on the Tennessee Tom Bigby Waterway right after it opened up.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_03: So they wanted to see how that fishery developed over there.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_03: So I went over there and interviewed fishermen and found out what they were catching and how long they've been fishing and what they wanted to catch.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_03: And also we did studies on the fish population and everything.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_03: So all of that prepared me for the work that I'm doing now.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_05: And you still you're not retired yet, are you?
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_05: Not yet.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_05: Not yet.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_05: I see that gleam in your eye.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_05: Can you see the light at the end of the tunnel?
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_05: I can.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_05: Holy cow.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_05: I can't imagine how many man, them turkeys better watch out.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_05: We're gonna talk a little bit about turkeys at the end of the day.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_05: Okay.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_05: You know, I've never done a podcast on this, I don't think.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_05: And but I learned, I've turned into a pretty good gamekeeper.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_05: I figured out how to grow corn without a corn spreader and all that kind of stuff.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_05: I drill it and I can plant food plots and I'm getting a little better at identifying trees.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_05: I can kind of handle that dirt part of it.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_05: I got a pond out there and it kicked my butt so bad.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_05: I don't even want to talk about it, to be honest with you.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_05: It was the most, it was the hardest thing I ever tried to do.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_05: So uh tell me, tell me I I'm not gonna ask you what I went wrong.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_05: I've kind of figured that out.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_05: But to get a let's say a farm pond, let's just talk about farm ponds, because I don't matter if you're in Mississippi or Maine, a farm pond's got different fish in it, but it's kind of all the same.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_05: People don't understand the work you got to put into it to keep it fresh and keep it right.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_05: People don't have a clue when they go into that, do they?
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_05: Nope, they don't.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_05: It's so complicated.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_05: It is the habitat part just as complicated, but it's all underwater and you can't see it.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_05: How do you figure that?
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_05: What do you do?
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_03: That's a very good point.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_03: So let's let's start from the beginning.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_07: Okay.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_03: So the best thing to do is not try to start out with a pond that's already established, although we can work with that.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_03: The best thing to do is if you're building your pond, you build it right in the beginning.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_03: And building it right in the beginning means you got to take three things into account.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_03: I always call it the three-legged stool.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_03: The fish, the habitat, and the people.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_03: And when you do that and you account for all three of those and they all come together, you'll have good fishing.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_03: Good fishing is not an accident.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_03: It's the result of proper planning and management.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_03: So you gotta think about from the fishing standpoint.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_03: Most farm ponds that are built, people build them for water and livestock.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_03: You build them for uh watersheds, uh providing water for folks' houses and things like that.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_03: A scenic view.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_03: A scenic view.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_03: And and and what they do is that they go out and they they they dig a hole and and they put up a dam and they catch some water.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_03: Ninety percent of the time you got too much shallow water.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_03: And it's it's flat and it's featureless.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_03: Fish like contours, fish like edges, just like if you think about deer and turkey, everything you think about in deer and turkey hunting will apply to fish.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_05: Never thought of it like that.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_03: Think about it like that.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_03: The fish love edges.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_03: And so with a farm pond, uh it's over with after the spawn if you're trying to fish from the bank.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_03: For the most part.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_03: Now, some people can put docks out and things like that and and and try to uh get a little bit deeper, but after the spawn is over with, the fish will move and suspend out in deeper water.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_03: But when you're building that pond, you can give everything that fish needs within casting distance of where you sit at on the bank.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_03: So you find your favorite spot if it's under an oak tree or wherever it's at, and you gotta dig and put the stuff that you need is there.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_03: So you put you some underwater humps, you put you some channels, or you can put you some rock piles, put you some brush piles, some things like that that's within casting distance.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_03: And one of the favorite things I like to do, sometimes again I cut back to turkeys.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_03: Think about a turkey foot.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_03: You see those three fingers right there?
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_03: It all come together.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_03: You dig your three ditches that's coming from deeper water, that's coming up toward the bank, and you want to dig it right up to where your spot to where you want to sit at.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_03: Fish use uh those ditches and creek channels like a highway.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_03: They travel it.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_03: So you're pulling them from deep water up to shallower water.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_03: So fish, especially bass and brown, they wanna they don't necessarily want to be in deep water all the time, but they want to be on the edge where they've got access to the deeper water.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_03: And so you pull them in within casting distance of the bank.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_03: And even during the hottest parts of August, you have fish within casting distance of you.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_03: The other thing you do is you think about your fish, and you know when you put out brush tops, especially kids, but even grown-ups too, you get hung up all the time.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_03: You hung up, you're breaking your line, and but that's where the fish are.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_03: But all you gotta do is put your structure in one spot and then move over about 20 or 30 feet and put you another one.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_03: Your fish are gonna go back and forth between the fish in between them.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_03: There you go.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_03: You fish in between them, and you don't ever have to get hung up.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_03: And you you'll have your fish close by.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_03: So you put your your structures there, so your treetops.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_03: Now, I I learned this uh probably about seven, eight years ago.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um my fellow biologist Larry Clay, I think you met him before.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_03: He lives up in Pondetop.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_03: He was telling me about how fish like shade.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_03: So when you talk to Bill Dance and Hank Park and all of them, they love to fish docks.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_03: But the problem with docks is that the docks are gonna be right up against the bank, and they'll hold a few fish that are there.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_03: But we started creating fish structures.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_03: So we go out and take a four, four by four post.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_03: And this is when we got the lake drained, and we're building a new lake, and we'll drive them in the ground, say uh five, six feet apart, and just put them in the board.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_03: Then we would take a two by six post, a two by six plank and uh lay them across and screw them in.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_03: And we're making sure all of this is gonna be underwater.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_03: Then we lay planks on top of those and screw them in.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_05: Making a roof under the water under the water, that's right.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_03: And and so then you can let your four by four posts come up above the water so you can see where it's at, but you make sure that that platform is three, four feet under the water.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_03: Those fish, this time of year, because they're seeking shade, fish don't have eyelids.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_03: So when it gets too bright for them, they they need some shade.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_03: They'll get down under that shade.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_03: And you just fish right there.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_03: Just catch right at the other side of it.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_03: So it's all about planning.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_05: You know what's going through my mind right now is that it in my pond, it's just been a disaster.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_05: And at one point I had a big dirty hole there dug out, and I didn't ask nobody.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_05: I didn't put near enough structure, I didn't have it just makes me sick.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_05: But anyway, you said the third part of that, we talked about the fish and the habitat was people.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_05: How does how does that come into the thing?
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_03: So again, the people is you want to make sure that they're having fun and that they can catch fish, but people also need to understand uh uh about the pond.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_03: A pond is just like a garden.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_03: You gotta harvest it.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_03: You can't just catch fish.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_03: If you want to keep that pond productive, you gotta remove fish from it.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_03: So the people that are fishing it need to understand that.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_03: But you gotta be able to get the fish and the people together.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_03: Weeds, you got a weedy shoreline.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_03: Um sometimes when you got a weedy shoreline, it will attract some of your best friends.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_05: That right, oh you talking about them snakes.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_05: Oh, I got some snake pond stories, I'll tell you that.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_03: But uh uh you you try to make sure that you don't have any weeds that are that are right there close to where you can fish, and you want your peep people to be able to get to the water.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_03: So that's your people park, and then catching the right size fish and the right amount of fish, that's your people park.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_03: Taking them out.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_03: Taking them out.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_03: It's just like a deer herd.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_03: Just like a deer herd.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_05: And I wish I'd have got you out there when I mine was an old cattle hole all well.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_05: Matter of fact, had a fence going across the middle of it.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_05: And um, I almost died draining that thing.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_05: But anyway, and I've restocked it twice and I ain't had no luck.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_05: But now I do have a pretty good brim out there.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_05: And and you can always go down and catch a brim unless it's in the heat of the day.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_05: But I got a dock that I built on uh barrels, you know, that floats and I can push it out there and I got a ladder, I can get it on out there pretty good.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_05: But uh now talk about acreage.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_05: Somebody's getting ready to because it I learned this, it it it ain't as as as complicated as you think.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_05: You could do all this in a day, and it's cheaper to just hire somebody to come dig it and do it and get it out of there.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_05: I I don't own a bunch of heavy equipment.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_05: What's a good acreage or a size?
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_05: And it's just you, it's just you and your family.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_05: You ain't got to have a 10-acre freshwater lake with a pump out there throwing fresh water, do you?
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_05: It don't have to be gigantic, does it?
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_03: No, it doesn't.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_03: And think about it, the the bigger it is, the harder you're gonna have to work at it to keep it balanced and to keep it managed.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_03: So if it's you and your family, uh two acres.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_03: That's plenty.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_03: That's plenty.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_03: Two acres, three acres.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_03: So think about this, and this is what most people don't don't realize that it can turn into work is if you got a productive farm pond, either if you're fertilizing or you're feeding, or if you're just in productive soil, do you know how many pounds per acre that that farm pond can grow?
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_03: It can grow two to three hundred pounds of fish per acre.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_03: Now, if you want to pull off, I don't know, just say fifteen or twenty percent of that per year, then that means that you're gonna need to um to harvest, I don't know, just say thirty, forty pounds of brim and probably uh 10 pounds of bass per acre per year that you're gonna need, that can turn into work.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah uh that can turn into a lot of work.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_03: So you're gonna need to, so if you got a 15 acre pond, that's a lot of fish to catch.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_03: Then it turns into where just like dough harvest, it ain't fun anymore.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_03: It's work.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_05: A lot of work.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, all of a sudden your friends are like, uh, you know, uh I used to go to film in a place, Mr.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_05: Walker's place, Cottonwood, you know, he started Bill's dollar stores, and he had a rookie and his his place was phenomenal.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_05: But if you got an invite over there, he had the coolest thing ever.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_05: So he had a point system.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_05: And before you could shoot a buck, you had to get a hundred points, and it was like ten points for a doe and so much for a coyote.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_05: And it's like that and I I almost want to do that on my place because man, you kill two or three does a piece, all is like you say, all of a sudden it's just work.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_05: It's worse.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_05: But the uh man, I them them fish sure do eat good.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_05: And I ain't give up.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_05: I'm just at a I'm just kind of at a standstill right now.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_05: But you're talking about most people have their ponds too shallow.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_05: What's a good depth?
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm gonna come at it sideways on on a good depth, and rather than just saying exactly what a good depth is, the first thing to do is to make sure that you minimize the amount of shallow water that you got.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_03: You don't want it too deep, but if you've got acres and acres of water that's only a foot deep, you're gonna have weeds.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_03: And it's gonna be too shallow for fish to use 90% of the year.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_03: So if you're building your pond, if you drain and start over, you want to put it at a three to one slope.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_03: So for every three feet you leave the shoreline going out, you want to drop a foot in depth so that by the time you get nine feet away from the shoreline, you want to be in three feet of water.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_03: Now, three feet of water is the general rule of thumb for if you get get it to that depth, the sunlight will stop going as deep and creating aquatic weed problems.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_03: So three feet.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_03: Three feet at three feet deep is what you want around the shoreline.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_03: Now, here's the other I won't call it mistake, but I'm gonna say waste that people are doing.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_03: People always think deeper's better.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_03: So when they're digging out a pond or they got a lake, they want a uh uh a pond that's 25 feet deep, 30 feet deep.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_03: That's wasted water.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, it's wasted water because when it's 95 degrees like we got out there right now, those ponds will stratify, which means that the cold water will settle on the bottom and the warm water will be on top, and the cold water on the bottom in the summertime won't have any oxygen in it.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_03: So the fish can't use it and they won't use it.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_03: So all your fish are gonna be setting up in the top just say five, six, seven, eight feet of water.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_03: You get down below that, there's no oxygen, the fish won't use it.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_03: So it's not doing you any good.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_03: And plus the deeper that it is, the harder it's gonna be for you or your family to effectively fish it.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_03: So usually if you've got at least eight or ten feet of of water in your pond, you don't have to worry about your uh fish dying in the wintertime.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_03: So say for instance, if your pond freezes over, just the opposite happens in the wintertime.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_03: In the wintertime, some of your water, warmer water is gonna be deeper.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_03: So your fish are gonna go down to where the water is warm enough to where it doesn't freeze over at, and that's where they're gonna have their refuge in the wintertime.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_03: So with a pond, it if you've got ten feet of water, you got plenty.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_07: Hmm.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_05: I did so many things wrong looking back now.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_05: And uh I don't know if I got another one in me because I've redone it twice.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_05: I can tell you this if I redo it a third time, I'm gonna get you out there ahead of time.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_05: We're gonna go deer hunting or turkey hunting or something.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_05: I'm gonna have me a plan this time.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_05: We're gonna kind of stay in the southeast.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_05: And if you listen up north, I'm sorry.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_05: But anyway, I want to know about hardy species.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_05: What's the easiest to keep up with?
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_05: Is it catfish, brim?
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_05: Because I know everybody that's all People that's that's done well and they've got a place out in the country, all they think about is trophy bass.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_05: I'm telling you, I could care less.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_05: I want something to make the grease sizzle.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_05: That's why I put catfish in my pond.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_05: What's a hardy species, in your opinion?
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_03: So again, I'm gonna come at it sideways.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_05: That's the best way to come at it.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_03: That's why you kill so many turkeys.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_03: You go at it sideways.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna come at it sideways.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_03: So rather than saying what's a hardy species is when you have a pond, you gotta think about what we call predator-prey relationships.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_03: So, in order for that pond to be protect productive, you gotta have predators and you gotta have prey species.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_03: And you gotta understand the relationship between the two.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_03: In the southeast, for the most part, largemouth bass and bluegill.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_05: Perfect match.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_03: The perfect match is what makes it go.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_03: Think about this largemouth bass are the major predator.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_03: They're just like the lid on a popcorn popper.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_03: It keeps all of the popcorn from coming out and going everywhere.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_03: It keeps it under control.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_03: It's just the opposite is the bluegill.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_03: Bluegill will spawn multiple times a year.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_03: They're very productive, so they will feed the bass.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_03: So they're complementing each other.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_03: The bass is keeping them under control.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_03: The bluegill are feeding the bass, and you kind of get the best of both worlds.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_03: Now, you talked about trophy bass.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_03: That requires a different approach.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_03: You talk about trophy bluegill, that requires a different approach.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_03: You're talking about a balanced farm pond that's just where you can go catch some fish to eat.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_03: That requires a different approach.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_03: Not trophy bass.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_03: You may as well to just throw catching good bluegill out the window.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_03: Because you're wanting to maximize the forage for that bass to where that bass never goes hungry a single day in his life.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_03: He wants to be able to swim through the water with his mouth open and he's just sucking up forage.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_03: He's growing so fast that he looks like he's about to explode.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_03: He looks like a big linebacker for the NFL and he's got shoulders on him and he he looks obese.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_03: And and and so that's what you got to have to really push trophy bass is to be able to do that.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_03: But to do that means you've got to have hundreds and thousands and thousands of bluegill that are in the right size.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_03: Now, what most people don't know is that a predator like a bass, in order for him to be efficient, he can't eat little bitty brim if he's a five, six, seven-pound bass.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_03: He can't eat a two-inch or three-inch brim and thrive.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_03: He'll stay alive, but he won't grow.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's just like, you know, a person going and just eating a little old small snack or whatever.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_03: Do you want a grid big steak?
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_03: And so that bass can eat, forage, one-third of his length.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_03: So if you've got a bass that's say five pounds, he's probably gonna be about 20 inches long.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_03: He can eat a bluegill or suckers or shiners or whatever, that's all the way up to probably six to seven inches long.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_03: And that's I've I've we'll get into this in a minute, but I've checked lakes and ponds when I'm shocking or whatever, and when I find big cellmate, nine, ten-pound bass, they'll have shiners and bluegill and things like that that looks like it's dirty as long as they are, but they can eat them up to a third of their length.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_03: So you got to keep that forage in the right size to make that bass thrive.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_03: That ain't gonna produce good brim fishing.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_03: Nah, just the opposite.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_03: You want good brim fishing and you want to catch some good hand-sized brim, then trophy bass ain't gonna be in the conversation.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_03: You're gonna need a wolf pack of bass that are 10, 11, 12 inches long, that every time that bluegill spawns and he's kicking out spawn, they're sucking them up.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_03: And so they're reducing the competition so that for the ground, the bluegill that are left, they're gonna grow fast and do well.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_03: And you're gonna have some good-size bluegill.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_03: So you don't want to harvest very many of your bass if you want trophy bluegill.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_03: Now, if you're wanting an all-around pond, you take you some bass out, you take you some bluegill out, and you just keep it balanced, and you're not gonna have trophy bass, but you'll catch the occasional five, six, seven-pound bass.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_03: You're not gonna have trophy bluegill to where you're catching pound, pound, and a half bluegill, but you'll catch the occasional 10-inch bluegill that's three-quarters of a pound or whatever, but you're gonna have good eating-sized fish.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_03: That's that happy medium.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_05: Man, personally, I'd much rather eat a bluegill than I had a what Tom Kelly calls a green trout.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_05: I I'd much rather eat a brim.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_03: Do you know that's my favorite fish to eat is a brim?
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm kind of gotten spoiled.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_03: I gotta admit this, that I didn't like eating fish as much as I love catching them.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_03: I didn't like eating fish when I was growing up.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_03: Really?
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_03: No, because even with your grandma cooking.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_03: Even with my grandma cooking, I didn't like eating fish because I wanted to get a big bite of fish.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_03: And it was like, no, don't let those babies, don't let those little kids eat those fish because they're gonna swallow a bone.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_03: So we always kept a uh a jug of milk nearby and a loaf of light bread for when somebody swallowed a bone.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly the same thing in my house.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_05: Don't get that bone.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_03: And so I hated eating fish because you had to pick the fish apart to get the bones out to eat it, and I hated that.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_03: But when I became an adult, I knew nothing about filleting fish because that was considered a mortal sin to waste fish.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_03: That was considered wasting fish.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_03: But when I learned how to fillet them and do it right, and I could make a sandwich out of them, the worm turned in.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_03: It turned in, and I learned how to fillet them, and now I bluegill and red ear shellcrackers are my favorite fish to eat.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_03: And I won't fool with them unless they're big enough to fillet.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_05: I got some pretty good brim in my pond now, and I think it's because this next question, I want to talk to you about fish feeders.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_05: And um, I got one and it's on my floating dock.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_05: And as the water recedes in the summer, I can push it out, push it out.
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_05: And uh I I I think that fish I've got some pretty good brim now.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_05: I can catch them bigger than your hand and stuff like that, and love to eat those.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_05: But what's what's your thought on fish feeders and do they work?
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_05: That's the main first thing, and then how often, how much, all that kind of stuff.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely they work.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_03: Now, when I was going to school at Mississippi, they told us don't recommend feeding and and uh fish feeders to your clients or whatever, it's a waste of money.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_03: Just tell them the fertilizer is cheaper.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that ain't necessarily the truth.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_03: And I have seen through my experience in dealing with folks or whatever, feeding, especially for bluegill, is the way to go.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_03: You want to get feed about the size of your thumbnail, big enough for them to swallow.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_03: And if you want to put brim, bluegill, over the hump to where you're catching some really nice ones, feed them.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_03: If you don't feed them, you can get them up to eight inches long, you know, maybe a few of them, nine.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_03: But if you want to get some really nice hand-sized bluegill.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_05: Philae size.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_03: Philae size, feed them.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_03: Feed 'em.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_03: So now feed.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_03: Don't do like some folks do, and and and they'll be cheap, it's like, well, I just go to the store and buy from dog food.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_03: Uh-uh.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_03: Dog food is for dogs.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_03: Fish food is for f for fish.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_03: So go to your co-op, get you some high protein fish food that floats.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, that's about a thumbnail, and you put it out.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_03: You get your uh feeder, get it on a timer, and you get it uh set your timer to where to feed them twice a day.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_03: Once in the morning.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_05: That was my next question.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_03: Once in the evening.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_03: And you feed them twice a day.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_03: But don't feed them too much.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_03: Because if you throw all that feed out, they're gonna feed for probably about five minutes.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_03: And they're gonna quit.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_03: The rest of that feed, if it doesn't if it's not eaten, it'll sink to the bottom.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_03: And when it decomposes, you start having all kinds of water quality problems.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_03: So you want to feed, yeah.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_03: You want to feed them just enough, and you can kind of watch them.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_03: You go out and feed them a few times and you'll figure out about how much to feed them to where they'll eat it all up in in about five minutes.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_03: And uh you set your time on that, you do it twice a day.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_03: You want to start feeding in the spring when the water temperature gets about sixty degrees a little bit warmer.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_03: If you try to start feeding before that, the fish are not active.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_03: So start in the spring, say in early April or whenever when the water temperatures hit about 60 degrees, and then you feed them up until the water temperature starts falling right about 60 degrees and below, which is usually gonna be in November, and you stop.
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_03: And your fish will tell you, just watch them.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_03: When they get to where they're not taking the feed, shut it off.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_05: You buy that fish food at the co-op, it's all got catfish pictures on the front, but it's all fish food, right?
• 53:31
  SPEAKER_03: It's all fish food, yeah.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_03: Now you can get some, I can't remember what the name brand of it is, that that will have bluegill on it, but most of it's got catfish on it.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, but don't get to the big size that the bigger catfish can eat.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_03: You want to get the smaller, smaller floating.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_03: Floating that you're that your bluegill can eat.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_03: That's what you want to do.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_05: I made a post one time about fish feeders or something on Instagram.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_05: You know, everybody's a pro now, no matter what you throw out there.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_05: But he's like, if you got a fish feeder, you ain't gonna be able to catch no fish.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_05: What's your thoughts on that?
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_05: Does that make them harder to catch?
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_03: No.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_03: Makes them easier.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_05: That's what I thought.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_05: It gets them up in one spot.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_03: It gets them up in one spot.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_03: So now you want to know how easy it is.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_03: Now, some folks are gonna think this is cheating, but when they're used to coming to that feed, you can take a hook with no bait on it and do it in the water and they'll bite it.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_03: Or a corn kernel.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_03: Or a corn kernel or whatever, you can just throw that out there and they'll bite it.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_03: Now, the other thing that you can do is that you can train your fish.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of people don't know this.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_03: The fish will learn and associate sounds with when food is coming.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_03: So if you drive up in your truck, the fish can feel the vibrations from your truck mold and from that truck coming up, and you'll see them come up and start swimming around that dock like piranha.
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_03: The other thing you can do, you can get your old dishpan and get you a spoon, stick or something like that, and get your fish trained to it.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_03: And every time you throw the feed out, just tap on it, tap, tap, tap, tap.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_03: And they'll hear it and they'll start coming.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_03: Plus, just like deer and turkey will respond to the feeder when it's slinging out feeding, and when they hear that thing going off, they come in running.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_03: Fish can hear it too.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_03: And when they hear that feeder come uh go off, they're coming in.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_03: So they respond to that sound.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_03: So they're gonna come in close and it won't make them harder to catch.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_05: I got a little disclaimer here.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_05: I was kind of late getting my fish feeder going this year, turkey season.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_05: Everybody's busy.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_05: Anyway, I went out there and I had a battery charged up and I put the battery in it and uh set it to one, you know, 6.30 in the morning, 5.30 in the half, whatever, and punched, you know, test and boom, man, that thing kicked off.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_05: I said, okay.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_05: And I put some fish food in it and I set it off again.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_05: Well, the fish food wasn't coming out good.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_05: I knew it was so I just started banging on the side of that thing, and let me tell you something.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_05: I had a wasp nest coming.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_05: I don't know how many times I got hit.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_05: Because uh, you know, it was about five feet to the bank.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_05: I hadn't laid my ladder down yet, but I'm glad nobody videoed me running off of that thing.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_05: So be careful.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_05: They love building a nest up on them docks and stuff like that.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I got one more fish question.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_05: I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about Turkey Huntington before we get out of here.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_05: But I'm always, and I saw something on the Instagram or Facebook because I was like, hey, about a pond, this guy's pond turned over.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_05: What does it mean when somebody says their pond turned over?
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_05: What does that mean?
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_03: Come at this sideways again.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_05: Come at it sideways.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_05: That's why that's where them good linebackers are gonna love it.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna come at it sideways.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_03: So when you hear most pond owners and people talk about a pond turning over, they're basically talking about a fish kill.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_03: So a fish a fish kill can happen two or three different ways.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_03: Now, the way most people are used to seeing a fish kill is right about this time of the year.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_05: Really?
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_03: You get it's really, really hot.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, sun's bright, surface temperatures uh bright, and you get two or three cloudy days with a cold rain come in.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_03: That will cause the plankton that are in the water to die.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_03: And it will cause when all of that stuff is dying, and you got the plants that are still living there that are taking up oxygen.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_03: So the plants are producing oxygen, the plankton's producing oxygen, but when that plankton dies, you got the fish taking up oxygen, the plant taking up oxygen, and you'll get a fish kill.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_03: And right before that fish kill, what you'll see if you walk out to that pond in the morning, because that's when the oxygen is at its lowest, you will see every fish in that pond up on top, swimming around, gasping for air.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_03: They're sticking their mouth up out of the water, trying to get air.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_03: Now I know fish breathe through the gills, but they'll be sticking them and they're all swimming on top.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_03: You're you're right at the brink of a fish kill.
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_03: And that's what people call the pond turning over.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_03: Now, the real turnover happens every year.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_03: And usually it doesn't cause a fish kill.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_03: And that's when we uh I talked about a minute ago that in the summertime your water layers up and you develop stratifies.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_03: So you got your cold water that's got oxygen on the bottom, your warmer water up on top.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_03: Well, every year, as the water temperature starts to cool on top, that cool water starts to sink and it mixes with the cool waters on the bottom, and some people call it a turnover.
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_03: Now, when it happens gradually, your fish scatter, it gets harder for people to catch, people fuss about not being able to catch fish during the turnover.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_03: Now, when it turns over too fast, that's when you get a fish kill.
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_03: Now, I managed this lake up on the Tom Bigman National Forest, just north of where you live in Chickasaw County, Davis Lake.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_05: About beautiful lake.
• 59:04
  SPEAKER_03: Beautiful lake.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_03: About, I'm trying to remember, it was about seven or eight years ago, it was the end October, and I got a call that said, Hey Rick, we got a fish kill up here.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_03: Well, what had happened the night before was we had this really strong wind out of the west that was blowing.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_03: That wind blew right across the top of the water and created a current of water just like a river.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_03: It went all the way from the west to the east end of the lake, and when that water hit the dam, it makes it turn and go under.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_03: And so it creates an undercurrent.
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_03: Or when it created that undercurrent, it pushed that dead, uh deoxygenated water that was on the bottom, it pushed it up to the top.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_03: And when it pushed it up too fast, the fish were confused.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_03: They didn't know where to go for oxygen because they had been used to oxygen being at a certain level, and when it happened like that, the fish sat right there in the and when the ox the dead water came up to the top, the fish sat right there within three or four feet in water that didn't have oxygen and didn't know where to go and they died.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_03: So that's the most drastic case of a turnover that people talk about when they cause it a fish kill.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_03: Man, it don't take much, does it?
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_05: I'm uh I want to answer this, because I I've I've known you for so long and you spent so much of your life doing that.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_05: Fisheries biologists, extra education, that's how you make your living and all that.
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_05: But when we stop and talk, and I ask you something about a turkey hunting question, it's just like, man, that light switch on, your eyes brighten up and all that.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_05: What what is it about turkey hunting?
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_05: You're a fish biologist, you grow up fishing, and you hunted, you had public ground.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_05: What is it about turkeys that just takes people and just turns them into somebody different?
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_03: It'll make you lose your mind.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_05: And your and your job and your life.
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_03: And your job and your wife and everything else.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_05: What is it?
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_05: What what what does it to Rick for turkey season?
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_03: What does it to me is that I love that challenge.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_03: I love not knowing, but I love getting feedback.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_03: Deer hunting, I mean, that's my first love.
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_03: I love deer hunting, but you're sitting there and deer are not very vocal except they're grunting a little bit during the rut.
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_03: So you can have a deer within 100 yards of you and not know he's there.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_05: For hours.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_03: Or for hours.
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_03: But with that turkey, yow! Yeah, he gobbles.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_03: And man, that just sends chills up your spine and you love it.
• 1:01:38
  SPEAKER_03: And so you're calling to him, and it's kind of like a call and response, and you're getting feedback and you're trying to read his temperature, and you're trying to figure out what to do to get that turkey to come in.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_03: And if he came in every time, it become boring and you get tired of doing it.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_03: But a turkey is so fickle he don't know what he's gonna do from today to tomorrow.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_03: Well, he does know, but we don't know what he's gonna do.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_03: But he's fickle, and today he may come into your call and he may not.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_03: And so that keeps you guessing, and you just I I can't explain it, but it's addictive.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_05: It's it's craziness.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, you need to go turd hunting this year.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_05: Maybe I'll get you up there and then we'll go look at my pond.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_05: Sure.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_05: I told you a story when we had Doc and Lou up here the other day about, you know, I I I finally I just gave up and I put all them catfish in there.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_05: They were and I paid some good money.
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_05: I got the biggest ones I could get, you know, and man rocked along.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_05: I was feeding them and all that, and there was a time, it was about a year, that I could go down there anytime and catch three-pound catfish till I got enough where we could have us a fish fry.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_05: Poof, and they just disappeared.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_05: And you immediately looked me in the eye and said, Otters.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_05: And I had I had asked 20 people, and nobody ever said that till I had a trapper out there, and he's and he caught nine or ten in a week.
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_05: But uh, if anybody out there's dealing with otters, I want you to tell them what you told me because it wasn't good news.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_05: If you're dealing with otters eating your fish, what can you do?
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_03: You can try.
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you can you can try to trap them, but you better know where your seed source is.
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_03: And if you got a creek or a river or you got somebody else's lake, and I ain't talking about just a hundred yards away, otters can smell fish from a long way, and they'll travel across dry land to go find new sources.
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_03: But and ain't leaving much sign.
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_03: It ain't like a slide going in and out.
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_03: They are terrible.
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_03: It's an uphill battle, and they are bloodthirsty, vicious little, and they will go find your biggest fish every time, and it's like you put in all that work, and it's it's disheartening.
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_05: It's like they're like ninjas.
• 1:03:55
  SPEAKER_05: They are boy, they are just terrible.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_05: Man, I tell you what, Rick, it's been so much fun.
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_05: I can't tell you what it meant to see the cover of that video right there.
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_05: But I can tell you this the world needs more Rick Dillard.
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_05: We have we have been up the road and down the road, and I appreciate you coming up here.
• 1:04:11
  SPEAKER_05: And it's kind of late in year to talk about fishing a little bit, but you know, Toxie gave me some good advice, and I tried to go by when I bought my first little piece of land and was asked him all these food pod questions.
• 1:04:24
  SPEAKER_05: He said, Look, focus on a pond because that's where the family is gonna gather.
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_05: And you can do it year-round, and you don't have to have you know forward facing sonars and all that.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_05: You got a bobber and a worm and a hook.
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_05: It's one of the most important things you can do for a little kid.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_05: Look where it sent you.
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_05: It's hard to beat just a farm pond for a little kid and a Zebco 202, ain't it?
• 1:04:50
  SPEAKER_03: It is.
• 1:04:52
  SPEAKER_03: Do you know when uh me and my wife Jocelyn, we looked for, start looking for sites to build our house over 20 years ago?
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_03: And I didn't tell her, but she figured it out that kind of way of doing that.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_03: If if if it ain't got a lake or pond on it, I ain't looking at it.
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_03: And so we looked and looked and we found one that that it was about a 15-acre lake, but you know, we probably got a couple of hundred, but this was like a uh a neighborhood association lake.
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_03: But it um uh we probably got, I don't know, a couple of hundred yards of of shoreline on on our, and that's what I wanted.
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_03: I wanted to be able to walk out and go fishing and then let my family and kids and stuff like that come fish.
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_03: And uh that was important to me.
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_03: So it just ties right into what you're saying.
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_03: I needed some water in my backyard.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_05: Well, I'm glad you got it.
• 1:05:42
  SPEAKER_05: I'm glad grandma got live long enough to see how well you've done, too.
• 1:05:47
  SPEAKER_05: That's a that's a big deal.
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_05: Nothing more important than watching that bobber go under the water.
• 1:05:53
  SPEAKER_05: It's something to it.
• 1:05:54
  SPEAKER_05: Well, God bless you, uh, Rick.
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_05: I appreciate you coming up here.
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_05: I'm gonna go ahead and put it on my bucket list.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_05: Mean you need to share a turkey hunt this spring.
• 1:06:02
  SPEAKER_05: Can you get a day off?
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_03: I'll take I'll call in sick.
• 1:06:07
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, whatever whatever it takes.
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_05: We was up here two weeks ago dropping pens for Nebraska.
• 1:06:12
  SPEAKER_05: I was just picking assum about having a day off.
• 1:06:15
  SPEAKER_05: But man, I appreciate you coming up here.
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_05: God bless you, Rick.
• 1:06:18
  SPEAKER_05: I appreciate your time too, brother.
• 1:06:21
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks, cuz.
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_03: Enjoyed it.
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_04: Hey folks, it's Jeff Foxworthy.
• 1:06:25
  SPEAKER_04: You know, when I was a kid, my dad bought back the farm that he had grown up on.
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_04: And I absolutely love that place.
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_04: I knew every square inch of it.
• 1:06:35
  SPEAKER_04: It truly was my favorite place on earth.
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_04: And when you're looking to find a favorite place for you and your family, Mossy Oak Properties can help.
• 1:06:43
  SPEAKER_04: Visit Mossyok Properties.com to begin your search today.
• 1:06:49
  SPEAKER_00: God bless America.
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's Uncle Ted reporting for duty.
• 1:06:52
  SPEAKER_00: My life is a fistful of dirt.
• 1:06:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm a Mossy Oak celebrant of truth, logic, and common sense right here on the Mossy Oak Fistful of Dirt broadcast.
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_00: God bless the Spirit Blood Brothers.
• 1:07:11
  SPEAKER_09: You're listening to Fistful of Dirt, the official podcast of Mossy Oak Properties.
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_09: Find your favorite place.
• 1:07:20
  SPEAKER_09: Visit Mossy Oak Properties.com.
• 1:07:28
  SPEAKER_05: How fun was that?
• 1:07:30
  SPEAKER_06: Focus on the Hunt.
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_06: That was such a surprise.
• 1:07:34
  SPEAKER_05: He walked and I think we talked about it.
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_05: He walked in here with a video I did many, many, many years ago.
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_05: A little VHS tape called Focus on the Hunt, which was a how-to tape that I built myself.
• 1:07:48
  SPEAKER_05: Because way back then not there weren't many people filming hunts, and there probably wasn't anybody doing it recreationally.
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_05: And everybody everywhere I went, it's like, what kind of camera do you use?
• 1:08:00
  SPEAKER_05: How do I do that?
• 1:08:01
  SPEAKER_05: What do I do?
• 1:08:01
  SPEAKER_05: Do you use a trial?
• 1:08:03
  SPEAKER_05: So I put this video together and you know, as a quick side hustle back then and and kind of forgot about it.
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_05: I don't even have a copy of it.
• 1:08:11
  SPEAKER_06: No, it was like a YouTube tutorial before YouTube was even invented.
• 1:08:15
  SPEAKER_06: And I thought I had almost imagined it.
• 1:08:17
  SPEAKER_06: I asked mom, I was like, I didn't imagine that, did I?
• 1:08:20
  SPEAKER_06: She's like, no, but I can't put my hands on a single copy.
• 1:08:24
  SPEAKER_06: We don't have a copy, so to see it was like uh seeing Bigfoot.
• 1:08:27
  SPEAKER_06: I was like, holy cow.
• 1:08:28
  SPEAKER_05: Well, let me tell you something.
• 1:08:29
  SPEAKER_05: If she can't find one at our house, it ain't she knows where everything is.
• 1:08:34
  SPEAKER_05: But it just you know, there's there's no friends like old friends.
• 1:08:38
  SPEAKER_06: That was a good episode.
• 1:08:40
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and he's been around so long, had such good memories.
• 1:08:42
  SPEAKER_05: He talked about us sending him up to Canada to hunt a big white tail and all that stuff.
• 1:08:47
  SPEAKER_05: My favorite part of that was him talking about his grandma.
• 1:08:50
  SPEAKER_06: Yep.
• 1:08:51
  SPEAKER_05: And he held it together well, but looking across the table, he he was getting a little glassy-eyed and starry-eyed, and he's like, How cool is that?
• 1:08:59
  SPEAKER_05: Not everybody can say their grandma was the one that took them fishing.
• 1:09:03
  SPEAKER_06: That makes me so happy.
• 1:09:04
  SPEAKER_05: You know who else had a story like that?
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_06: Tracy Bird.
• 1:09:10
  SPEAKER_06: What did he call Nano Nano or Nano or something?
• 1:09:14
  SPEAKER_06: It was such a cute name he had for her, and she got him into turkey hunting.
• 1:09:18
  SPEAKER_05: Got him into turkey hunting and fishing and all that.
• 1:09:20
  SPEAKER_05: So if you don't have somebody in your life that did that, I feel for you.
• 1:09:26
  SPEAKER_06: But uh if I have to be the one to do it, I'll be the grandma teaching my babies how to turkey hunt and deer hunt.
• 1:09:32
  SPEAKER_05: Oh, your babies are way down that trail, so you're good.
• 1:09:35
  SPEAKER_05: Maybe the grandbabies.
• 1:09:37
  SPEAKER_06: That's what I no, that's what I meant.
• 1:09:38
  SPEAKER_06: Like if my grandbabies want to know and nobody'll teach 'em, you better believe I'll step in.
• 1:09:44
  SPEAKER_05: Well, that was fun.
• 1:09:46
  SPEAKER_05: I enjoyed it.
• 1:09:47
  SPEAKER_05: And we did get around to some uh good habitat, how-to stuff.
• 1:09:51
  SPEAKER_05: I had to make room for it because we had so much else to talk about.
• 1:09:55
  SPEAKER_05: But man, good hearing from people like that.
• 1:09:58
  SPEAKER_06: That's a good problem to have.
• 1:09:59
  SPEAKER_05: It is a good problem to have.
• 1:10:01
  SPEAKER_05: Laureen is working on an absolutely fantastic, very, very, very special upcoming fistful of dirt.
• 1:10:09
  SPEAKER_05: I'm not gonna spill no beans.
• 1:10:11
  SPEAKER_05: Well, don't.
• 1:10:11
  SPEAKER_05: Y'all just kinda gotta watch the calendar and I'll keep you posted when it's time to promote it.
• 1:10:16
  SPEAKER_05: We will.
• 1:10:17
  SPEAKER_05: Also got some good news.
• 1:10:18
  SPEAKER_05: There's a bunch of stuff coming from uh Laura and Colonel Tom Kelly's world.
• 1:10:23
  SPEAKER_06: Nice.
• 1:10:23
  SPEAKER_06: That's exciting.
• 1:10:24
  SPEAKER_05: Can't spill them beans either.
• 1:10:26
  SPEAKER_05: Stay tuned for more detail.
• 1:10:28
  SPEAKER_05: So, from me and Laurene up in the sweltering camo cave.
• 1:10:33
  SPEAKER_06: From Mossy Oak and Mossy Oak.
• 1:10:38
  SPEAKER_06: We'll see you in seven days.