Ep. 471: Trout Grease – A Hostile Takeover

00:00:14
Speaker 1: My name is Clay Nucomb and this is a production of the bear Grease podcast called the Bear Grease Render where we render down, dive deeper, and look behind the scenes of the actual bear Grease podcast. Brought to you by to Cove’s Boots. I’m a cowboy boot man and I’ve been wearing to Coves for years. They’re the most comfortable boot I’ve ever put on. Good boots for good times.

00:00:46
Speaker 2: Welcome to the trout Grease Podcast, and this time we are not kidding.

00:00:53
Speaker 3: That’s right. I’m bear nukemb I am Josh Lambridge Spielmaker.

00:00:58
Speaker 4: And we are out on the river day fly fishing.

00:01:02
Speaker 2: A little bit of a little bit of a change of pace from the regular bear Grease podcast.

00:01:08
Speaker 4: My dad usually likes to make fun.

00:01:10
Speaker 2: Of fly fishermen, that’s right, and we’re tired of it, sick and tired of had enough. So today for the extra job, we are out here on the river fly fishing. River’s a littlemuddy today.

00:01:22
Speaker 3: So little muddy it’s we’ve had a lot of rain, and we had torrential rain last night, but we’re going to make the best of it.

00:01:31
Speaker 2: We washed a dude up by the boat ramp just pull out a nice brown trout, so hopefully they’re hitting.

00:01:37
Speaker 3: But Bear and I have done a hostile takeover.

00:01:41
Speaker 4: Hostile takeover.

00:01:42
Speaker 3: Yeah, for those of you who’ve been listening to the Civil War series and you’re a little inundated with history and and all the details of the Civil War, this is a little break.

00:01:56
Speaker 4: Yeah, Trout grease has been a long time coming. I feel like I agree.

00:02:00
Speaker 2: I feel like my dad really started coming around whenever we had Dwayne Haydo on the podcast.

00:02:04
Speaker 3: I agree. Although he’s not out here with us.

00:02:07
Speaker 4: No, no, you catch him out here.

00:02:10
Speaker 2: But anyway, it’s a midsummer fly fishing.

00:02:15
Speaker 4: What are they hitting? What are the trout hitting?

00:02:17
Speaker 3: Well, typically we would be fishing some hoppers, you know, we’d be getting into hopper season right now, getting a little dry fly action. But we’ve had a pretty i would say, mild moderate June as far as rain goes, rain and temperature, it’s not been quite as ope. It’s not been quite as cold or quite as hot as it would typically be in June.

00:02:44
Speaker 4: True, so.

00:02:47
Speaker 3: The terrestrials are not quite popping out yet like they would be this time of year. So right now we’re throwing a couple of streamers, waters are all murky, so we’re trying to well something out.

00:02:58
Speaker 4: There that might see we have I’ve had.

00:03:02
Speaker 2: Earlier in the month, I was doing a lot of creaking, small mouth creaking, and it all kind of slowed.

00:03:09
Speaker 3: Oh look.

00:03:11
Speaker 2: There’s a baby fun right there, little little little tiny fawn. Wow, that’s cool. That joker is probably not even a month old.

00:03:26
Speaker 3: Look at that little spotted fawn.

00:03:29
Speaker 4: Incredible.

00:03:30
Speaker 3: And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why we like to come out here.

00:03:32
Speaker 2: That is exactly why. But what I was saying was earlier in the month, we had a day, well a few days of heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy rain and the river there’s a river that I rafft a lot that I go float a lot, right, and it got to thirteen feet one day.

00:03:57
Speaker 4: It was higher a few days before that, but there was one day or I got.

00:04:00
Speaker 2: To thirteen feet and I decided to go float it because this is the time of year to do that. So I got the pack raft out and there was a little Uh, it’s called a low head dam. Are you on one? There’s that bottle?

00:04:16
Speaker 3: I think I’m home.

00:04:18
Speaker 2: It’s called a low head dam, which I later learned is pretty not a good idea to float. Probably should have done my research before. Actually dam Yeah, it’s like a okay, why it’s well because basically, imagine like a dam that sticks out above the water, maybe eight feet and the waterfall there’s a little waterfall coming off of it. Whenever it hits the water, the water’s going straight down and a lot of times it’ll recirculate.

00:04:47
Speaker 3: Oh and so underneath.

00:04:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, so if you if you drop off that and then the back of your raft gets caught in that circulation, then it can suck your raft under and then suck you under.

00:05:00
Speaker 4: And uh, sound good.

00:05:01
Speaker 2: The other dangerous part about it is that the water’s really errated and that makes you less buoyant, so you’re more likely to sink in your life.

00:05:10
Speaker 4: Check it isn’t gonna do as much.

00:05:11
Speaker 2: But anyway, I floated it, jump jump flow head down, made it out. This is before I realized it was dangerous. But the water was really high and it was probably a Class three, one of my bigger floats that I’ve done. And uh, I called my dad about halfway through the river because my friend wasn’t gonna pick me up.

00:05:34
Speaker 4: But I decided to do more river than I was expecting.

00:05:37
Speaker 2: Okay, And I called my dad and I trust like, hey, do you think you can pick me up in a few hours at the at this bridge?

00:05:47
Speaker 4: And he was like, no, but I could.

00:05:49
Speaker 2: I could go drop your truck off up there, and so I was like, okay, perfect, that’ll work and uh, I uh float the river a couple hour flows get down to the bridge. I walk up and my truck is not there, and I was like, well, we’re on Earth. Could my truck possibly have gone?

00:06:11
Speaker 3: What was your first thought? Did you think, well, somebody took my truck?

00:06:14
Speaker 4: No?

00:06:14
Speaker 2: First thought was he forgot. And I called my dad, he didn’t pick up. Called him, he didn’t pick up.

00:06:20
Speaker 3: Called him.

00:06:21
Speaker 2: Finally he picked up and I was like, where’s my truck at? Did you park it out the wrong bridge? That was my first thought? Was he part of the wrong bridge?

00:06:29
Speaker 4: And he was like, oh, I forgot. He’s sure enough forgot to drop the truck off. Listen.

00:06:37
Speaker 3: I feel like all the and we can say this since we’ve done this hostile takeover. Yep, I feel like you like number one on Clay’s dishing out crap list.

00:06:50
Speaker 4: Huh.

00:06:50
Speaker 3: I would say you would be number one in my hair and I would be number two and so I just I just want everybody to know that this days our day. This is like a we get to dish it back out, but when he’s not here.

00:07:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, well I ended up calling my neighbor and it took him about an hour and then he goes out to his car and realizes the tire is flat, and so he’s like, it’s gonna be another hour, and I was like, no, man, So I called my other daghbor and he swung by and.

00:07:21
Speaker 4: Picked me up in like ten minutes. So well we made it back.

00:07:25
Speaker 3: But now you know who your real friends are.

00:07:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, but that was for a That was for an episode of the Bear Grease YouTube channels.

00:07:34
Speaker 3: So that that brings up an interesting thing to talk about because the Bear, for anybody who doesn’t know yet, the Bear Grease YouTube channel is wildly popular and wildly exciting and if you’re not watching the content, you should be because you don’t and you don’t even have to be an outdoor mean to enjoy it. Bear makes it entertaining for everyone.

00:08:04
Speaker 2: So yeah, the my goal behind the YouTube channel is kind of just to show show how diverse the outdoors can be, because I think anybody in any given place, if they’ve got access to some sort of wild place around them, I think there’s something that you can be doing all year round. I think there’s never a there’s never a time where the outdoors don’t have something to offer. But a lot of times that means that you kind of break outside the box of hunting and fishing. A lot of times that means things like rafting or rock climbing, or.

00:08:44
Speaker 3: The thing about rock climbing is you can do it just about anywhere. You can do that.

00:08:47
Speaker 4: You know, all you need is a root in the city, all you need is rocks.

00:08:52
Speaker 2: And uh so, yeah, we got pretty pretty diverse content. But what the way I view it is, I’m just out there mosying around, mosying around, yep, And so yeah, there’s a pretty diverse, diverse set of content. But the other thing that I’m trying to show inside of it is that the natural world is as relevant to us today as it has ever been. And so on the channel, we are finding relevancy in the natural world, whether it’s through making a bow or eating the food that we catch. It’s a that’s kind of what we’re what we’re after is the relevancy that the natural world has in a modern society to modern people.

00:09:42
Speaker 3: Well, I think that’s I think that’s not just cool, but it’s important. And I think, you know, I’ve known you your whole life and I’ve watched you grow up and just seeing the the things that you’re interested in versus what is popular today. What you’re the stuff you’re doing is not necessarily popular, but I feel like it’s so valuable and people have missed out on the benefit of what’s available outdoors, and I love that you’re kind of putting that for everyone to be able to see and to you know, I feel like you can watch one of your videos and just learn a lot.

00:10:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, that’s a that’s another big part of it. There’s there’s a lot to learn, and there’s a lot there’s a lot that the natural world can teach you. Really, I mean, I’ve learned so much through just being in the outdoors. I’ve learned a lot of very important life lessons. I’ve learned a lot about the actual systems themselves, and it’s kind of inspired a lot of what of what I do in my craftsmanship or really just my life in general. And so that’s the that’s the that’s what we’re showing over at the Bear Grease YouTube, Chante.

00:11:00
Speaker 3: I like it. What’s been some of your favorite videos that you’ve done so far?

00:11:07
Speaker 2: Probably I did a video where I tagged along with one of my buddies who’s a falconer, Aaron Kincaid, and we went down to South Texas and trapped a wild Harris hawk off a telephone pole with a little a little cage with a mouse in it that had some snares on it. Trapped the hawk, and then in six weeks he trained it and we went and hunted with him.

00:11:36
Speaker 4: Just turned around like that.

00:11:38
Speaker 2: And that was pretty fascinating because I do a lot of you know, I do some well, I wouldn’t say a lot. I do a little bit of mule training, a little bit of dog training, you know, trained some critters, and the falcon was a super interesting experience because what I what I learned is that it’s all kind of the same, like the same principles whenever you train any animal, but there’s just different Like there’s certain aspects of a falcon that you need to like ramp up, whereas with the mule you might ramp that aspect down.

00:12:12
Speaker 4: But it was pretty interesting doing that.

00:12:14
Speaker 2: Another another really fun video was I went out to this cave, kind of an old hermit cave.

00:12:22
Speaker 4: I’ve heard it called. It looks like a moonshine cave.

00:12:26
Speaker 2: I don’t actually know what they were doing whenever they built it, but it’s a cave with a rock Oh do you miss one?

00:12:32
Speaker 3: I just missed a good fish.

00:12:33
Speaker 4: Shucks.

00:12:35
Speaker 2: It’s a cave with like a rock wall built around it, little chimney coming out of it. And I went camped in there and turkey hunted off the mule and then only ate the food that I could catch or kill or find out there.

00:12:50
Speaker 3: You did you go home hungry or did you go home satisfied?

00:12:53
Speaker 4: No? I really my stomach did not growl once.

00:12:56
Speaker 2: I mean, like by the end of the trip, it was like, you know, nice to have a good meal. But I was not that hungry because the fish were just I mean, you could catch as many fish as you wanted to eat. There’s greenbrier tips and all sorts of forging opportunities. But that was a fun video taking slow trap out there camping in that cave and turkey hunting. But yeah, there’s been a We’ve got one coming out this week. I went to southeast Alaska, two weeks ago, just got back from that trip and we were on a Meat Eater shoot. So we were filming for a Meat Eater episode for next year. We were bear hunting, and I did a behind the scenes of a Meat Eater shoot, so where I basically I interviewed the producer of the show, interviewed the cameramen, and kind of showed just some of the stuff you won’t usually see. And one thing that I tell people a lot is that the cameraman are usually way cooler.

00:14:06
Speaker 4: Unsung heroes than the people in front of the camera.

00:14:10
Speaker 2: I interviewed a cameraman named Dirt Myth, who is one of the coolest people that I know, has just done all sorts of stuff film for some wild shows.

00:14:22
Speaker 4: And has some crazy stories.

00:14:24
Speaker 2: He told some of them on the video, but that video will be coming out coming out this week.

00:14:31
Speaker 3: Cool man. I love being out on the river.

00:14:41
Speaker 4: Bear agreed.

00:14:43
Speaker 3: This is my happy place. Man.

00:14:44
Speaker 4: Yeah, a little morning fly fishing. It’s hard to beat.

00:14:49
Speaker 3: It really is. One of these days. I’m gonna get your father out here, and he’s been out here. He’s been out here with me once. We had the uh. The previous director of Arkansas Game of fish game and fish, and I brought him fishing, and Clay tagged along. What people don’t know that your your dad doesn’t want to admit is he’s actually he’s got a pretty good cast. Yeah, he’s done it a little bit, but he does.

00:15:22
Speaker 4: He does.

00:15:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, I’ve been doing some some small mouth creaking as many mornings as I can.

00:15:30
Speaker 3: I recently, I’ve I’ve never done much small mouth fishing with fly rod, or with the regular rod for that matter. And uh, a good buddy of mine, Oh man, I just had another hit. Dang, where do you think I’m black zoncre My buddy Chris Graves and I decided to enter a small mouth fly fishing competition and we, uh we fished and and neither one of us are big small mouth guys. We typically fished trout and uh we we didn’t. We weren’t. It was like really slow the water again, the water was real murky, and we were just fishing. There we go, there we go, nice got a fish on there we were fishing, and we.

00:16:26
Speaker 2: Only caught I caught like a little small seven inch small mouth.

00:16:33
Speaker 3: And I was putting. I put him on the bump board to measure him.

00:16:37
Speaker 4: Uh huh and he flopped. Oh dad, gum it dang, just like that.

00:16:42
Speaker 2: No, I had him, I had him in my hand and I set him on the bump board to measure him, and uh he flopped off into the water.

00:16:49
Speaker 3: And uh.

00:16:50
Speaker 2: We fished all day and we only caught about We only caught two other fish.

00:16:55
Speaker 3: We caught a pretty decent small mouth, and then we just thought we were doing terrible uhu. And we got back there. Probably they had two classes.

00:17:07
Speaker 2: They had an all fly where you could just fly fly fish whatever fly you wanted, and that’s what we were fishing. And then they had a one fly where you and your partner could only use one fly of one pattern each, so you had no you had to you had to have the same pattern, but you could both have one.

00:17:24
Speaker 3: So you had two flies to fish all day long.

00:17:26
Speaker 4: Oh dang. So you can’t even lose them.

00:17:28
Speaker 3: Right, And there were probably fifteen teams in each class.

00:17:32
Speaker 4: Uh huh.

00:17:32
Speaker 2: And uh we got back and they oop sorryberry, they started announcing.

00:17:39
Speaker 3: The winner. They announced the winner. Uh, they announced third place and that was my third place was like had like twelve inches of fish.

00:17:51
Speaker 4: Uh huh total total.

00:17:54
Speaker 3: And then they they announced second place and they were like land Bridge, and we’re like what because we had we had twenty one and a half inches of fish. And then they announced first place and first place had twenty three and a half inches. So if I hadn’t lost that seven inch fish, we would have gotten first place.

00:18:16
Speaker 4: Oh wow.

00:18:17
Speaker 2: So anyway, I uh, I got a new appreciation for the small mouth and small mouth fishing.

00:18:23
Speaker 3: It was a lot of fun.

00:18:25
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:18:25
Speaker 2: The the other fun part about smallmouth fishing is you catch all sorts of other fish. Catch a lot of sunfish right now, those little long eared sunfish look like something straight out of the Amazon.

00:18:39
Speaker 3: They do they do? They look tropical almost.

00:18:42
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, it’s pretty wild.

00:18:45
Speaker 3: Gorgeous fishing. You know, I heard somebody told me fishing with a spin rod is like reading the gospel.

00:18:56
Speaker 4: Okay, fishing with a fly rod.

00:18:59
Speaker 3: Is like sitting in Jesus lap while he tells you the stories himself. And so I I just love catching everything I possibly can on a fly rod.

00:19:10
Speaker 4: Yeah, I’ve never heard it described like that.

00:19:15
Speaker 2: I would compare it to compound bow is like fishing with a spin rod, I would agree with that. And then flyer eye is kind of like switching to a trad bow and I’ll tell you what I one day want to get into is going to the self bow of fishing, which would be making your own bamboo fly rod.

00:19:34
Speaker 3: You know, I’ve I’ve thought about that myself. It’s it’s such a it is such a craft. I mean it is. It’s it’s an art.

00:19:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s just not as simple as just like getting a couple of river cane switches and taking it exactly like you gotta like split on and.

00:19:54
Speaker 3: It’s made for pieces six different pieces of bamboo that are like precision planed. Yeah, and you got to use a jig that that makes the taper and so it’s yeah, it’s definitely quite an art.

00:20:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, one day I would like to make a fly rod and then maybe maybe I’ll get hooked. Who knows, no pun intended, none taken. Yeah, well, I’m glad we’re able to to Uh. I’ll tell you what I just I’m standing here watching bar newcom fish and that man has a very nice cast, very pretty. I’m glad we could bring people along.

00:20:44
Speaker 3: It’s about time. I mean, Bear Grease is great, don’t get me wrong. You know, I’m the producer of Bear Grease, so I’m all in on Bear grease, but to be able to go out in the field, be in the s s land Bridge here fishing and giving it to them straight and giving it to him straight. That’s right. This is pretty pretty great. So bear on the Bear Grease channel, like, what kind of stuff is coming up? Can you give us a sneak peek of anything cool that you got?

00:21:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I’m gonna be showing the full video about how I trained Slow Trap my mule, okay, and then I’m gonna show part of a trip we did in New Mexico with him last year, which was kind of like a rite of passage trip for him. And then I’m gonna take him on a bigger ride here in the Ozarks and do kind of a mule camping, maybe some squirrel hunting. And so that’s that’s coming up, the full full video on how I trained Slow Trap. I’m also doing another kind of survival video you could call it. But I’m taking my dog oce Age, yeah, and taking my Danger Ranger with the rooftop ten and we’re gonna go overland for three days and we’re gonna eat only what we catch and kill.

00:22:12
Speaker 3: Okay, We’re gonna.

00:22:13
Speaker 2: Squirrel hunt, fish forage and I’m gonna be kind of progressing towards a destination that is a waterfall way down in this valley, thick as can be to get in there, and you can float it. It’s a little creek and you can float it. Whenever it’s just pouring down rain, that’s the only time, and I’m gonna be I’m gonna be floating it trying to jump the waterfall. Yeah, it’s probably a ten foot waterfall.

00:22:52
Speaker 3: Any bowfishing stuff coming up, I don’t think so. Man, I love the bowfishing. Do you I like watching fishing stuff.

00:23:00
Speaker 2: I’m kind of I’m kind of always on the bowfish. But the thing about bowfishing and YouTube videos is nighttime.

00:23:07
Speaker 3: Content is just really a part of a film.

00:23:10
Speaker 2: It’s hard to film and just like not it’s it’s hard to really show what’s going on.

00:23:16
Speaker 4: Yeah, so I do some of it whenever I find a good opportunity. We do. We do these segments called cooking with Mom.

00:23:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, where well I’ll go catch something, kill something, bring it back, and my mom will show me how to cook it.

00:23:32
Speaker 4: We did.

00:23:32
Speaker 2: We’d got a big old grass car, forty two pound grass car, biggest carp.

00:23:36
Speaker 3: I’ve ever shot, that.

00:23:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, I shot it with a self bow too, and we cooked it up and it was not that good.

00:23:43
Speaker 4: I’m not gonna lie.

00:23:45
Speaker 2: I mean, when you fried it, it was all right, But it it actually did kind of meet up to the reputation that it has as a muddy fish, which I was kind of surprised by it because I feel like a lot of times people make reputations like that for critters for based off of like one poor experience, and I’m not giving it that reputation. I’m just saying on my experience, because I have also had a good experience the grass carp eating it. Yeah, I baked it one time and it was really Yeah, it was like a really nice, flaky meat. And I’m not sure what I did right that we did not do when we fried it. But uh so, I’m not saying grass carp’s bad. You need to go figure that out for yourself.

00:24:30
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that’s important. Get out there and grass carp folks.

00:24:33
Speaker 2: Pull the flyer up yep or or or if you can’t catch them, just shoot them. That’s kind of what I resorted to after a while.

00:24:43
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:24:45
Speaker 2: Well, beautiful morning, beautiful morning, looks like the sun’s wanting to come out now. Yeah, I feel like I’m wearing a sauna in this rain suit, so yeah, by time for me to shed some layers.

00:24:58
Speaker 4: Same. Well, thanks a ton for listening to Trout grease.

00:25:03
Speaker 3: Yeah, and let us know, send us some comments, let us know how good this episode of what is and like, if you want more.

00:25:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you want more random trout grease, that’s right, twenty thirty minute drops.

00:25:16
Speaker 3: And we’ll keep doing them. We’ll talk the powers that be into letting us do some more. So thank you guys for listening. We appreciate you. Appreciate you guys listening to bear grease.

00:25:28
Speaker 4: It is.

00:25:29
Speaker 3: It’s a joy that we get to do it, and we hope you guys enjoy it. So keep the wild places wild because bears like trout.

00:25:39
Speaker 4: That’s right. Oh and you know what we say on the YouTube.

00:25:42
Speaker 2: Channel, what’s up, Moseyon, mosey on, mosy on, get out there and mosey on.

00:25:48
Speaker 3: Thanks folks,