465 | River Smallmouth Fishing Report (Early Spring Patterns & Tagging Program)

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Good morning, everybody.

Welcome back to Fishing the DMV.

I'm your host, Thomas Sarans.

And today I have on Clark and I have on Scott Brum of the fish tag.

We're going to be talking about the Upper Potomac River

smallmouth fishing.

Yeah, so first off guys, I want to kind of let you guys

introduce yourself to the world.

So Scott, I'll let you go first.

Okay, Thomas, thanks.

Scott Brum, I'm the director of development and outreach

for fish tag dot org and some of your viewers might know

that I used to be a news reporter on Channel 9,

down in Washington covered the environment

and anything else that happened like the murder of the day.

But anyway, snowstorms, we're going to pick on that on TV.

But anyway, I'm involving this fish tag project

that we'll talk about shortly.

Yeah, and then I'm Clark.

I've been on, I think I was on last year

talking about fish tagged a little bit.

I'm a tagger, so I'm one of the guys out in the water,

putting tags in fish.

And then I'm also taking on some of the social media

responsibilities for this year.

So Scott, you want to get going on what we're all about?

Yeah, sure, okay.

So listen, fish tag dot org is a pretty core group

of anglers who have been tagging smallmouth bass primarily

in the Potomac for it's been five years now.

It's DNR permitted.

It's not a DNR project.

It's our project, but DNR gives us a permit.

And the point of it is to create a data set that's available

like Thomas, you talked about being on a black bass commission.

It's available to the black bass commission.

It's available to DNR state agencies.

It's available to kids in high school

who want to do science projects.

It's available to researchers.

And we've created this data set.

There are more than 3000 tags in the river right now

just with this core group of anglers

who have been putting tags in fish.

It's been kind of a beta project for a lot of these years.

As I said, DNR permitted.

And this year, we've got some real cool people like Clark

working with it.

It's gelled and we're coming out of beta this year.

And we want people to know these tags are in the river.

We know Thomas, you've been in a boat

when a tag fish has come in

and people look at these tags and go,

what are they?

Is this some kind of DNR thing or what is it?

Should we report this thing?

We want the angling community to know these tags are in the river

and when they find them, report them.

Report them because it adds to this data set

that's just got a huge amount of value.

An important thing I want to mention about the data set

is it's not just tagging information, right?

Every time a fish is tagged, it comes in,

particularly if a photograph comes in with a fish.

While that photograph comes in with geographic data,

time, date, place, and we overlay that

with all of the river gauge data that's available.

So temperature, turbidity, river level,

meteorological data from NOAA.

And it's all overlaid so that science folks

who are looking at this stuff can see river conditions,

windfisher caught, windfisher recaptured,

where they're recaptured, how conditions may or may not have

affected that.

We don't know, we're not scientists,

but it's become a pretty powerful data set.

And that's what it's all about.

The final thing I want to mention is that it's also

a STEM science project for a lot of students.

Right now, mostly kids in Montgomery County are doing it.

We hope to expand that dramatically.

But our data being involved with creating it,

being involved with creating the architecture,

including an app, which we'll be rolling out shortly.

It's all been designed by student interns

who are achieving an academic credit.

A couple of these students who are at University of Maryland

with a significant resume already

of essentially creating a natural resources app.

And we've got students on the river helping us

with the tagging effort and everything else.

So this is the year where it goes from the core group

of people who've been putting tags in fish

with the DNR permit to Thomas, you, anybody in your audience,

anybody who catches fish begins to participate in this now

by reporting the tags in.

And we'll probably talk about how you can do that

as we move on here.

What is your story?

How do you go from the news to tagging fish

in your retirement, I guess?

Yeah, I retired.

Yeah, paint this picture.

Well, listen, I was a TV guy,

but I also kind of like in the summer,

despite being married and having some adult kids

in a dog in a normal life.

I'm just on the river, man.

I just love the river.

I sleep out on the river probably three nights

a month in the summer.

Duck hunt, turkey hunt fish.

It's just a place I love me and the dog.

My wife not so much anymore.

She's like, I'm not sleeping on these islands anymore.

Cut that out.

Right.

But I'm a natural resources type,

like we all are here.

And so I got into that.

I was an environmental reporter at WSA-9.

I mean, that translated to my role in the media.

Early in my career, late in my career,

in the middle, it was hurricanes

and the state house and following governors

and stuff like that.

And then, so as part of that,

I was down at Fletcher's, or no, this guy, Mike Bailey.

Okay?

He's on an organization called Friends of Fletcher's Cove.

They're real big on Shad and public access at Fletcher's

and it's a really important organization.

He's doing a lot of good work with the National Park Service

rehabbing Fletcher's.

And Mike calls me up and invites me down

to like see the Striper run at Fish for Shad

and do a TV story about what they're doing at Fletcher's.

And I fall in with this guy

and before you know we're fishing together.

Right?

And then Mike runs in the Clark.

And so there's his character Mike Bailey,

who's, and the guy is like this,

you know, so he turns out, he tags everything.

He tags monarch butterflies.

And he, you know, he's a very successful,

also retired individual, a very successful guy.

And one of the ventures, one of many ventures in his life,

was a weather data project that was run through schools

and public sore in the early days of the internet

when that was kind of really cool.

The first iteration of it was called Weather Bug

and it became a very, very successful app.

And it was all about data.

And he's all about data.

Clark, would you agree?

He's all about data.

Yeah.

I mean, he's all too strong.

So the guy, he's like, and then he's gonna

spit at you and then cyclopedia.

And he's, we were talking today.

He's a, he'll pull up the USGS water gauges.

And he'll be like, oh, you see this here?

You see this here?

That was a, that was a ice dam.

And it came through and you can see the water level change.

And so yeah, he's, you go to Bailey's house.

And he's got a collection of antique barometers.

And he like writes the information at every time.

You know, so, so Mike was the guy

who originally started tagging fish.

But Mike is also a real social, really cool guy.

He knows a lot of people.

A lot of people fish with Mike.

Mike's on a river five days a week.

And, and Mike's the guy who first started tagging fish

and it realized, hey, this is a data set.

And then Clark, what year if you could time stamp this?

Just roughly five years ago is the first tag to win a fish.

Okay.

So they're really ramped up in the last two years

with the addition of people like Clark.

And I don't tag that much.

I mean, I'm so busy like goofing around my boat

and trying to fix the, the last time I, you know,

whack the mud motor prop on a bot.

You know, I spent more time in a river

sticking around than I do fish it.

But I, but I am a tagger as well.

Yeah, I think I've, oh, sorry, one of the, yeah,

one of the other things I just wanted to say about the project

is it's kind of one of those things where it's like an opportunity

for us as fishermen to put our money where it mouth is

and instead of just complaining about the fishing conditions.

Now, you know, we as a core group have been going out there

and trying to actually make an impact

in conserving this river.

And like, this is a citizen science project.

So we're inviting you guys to engage as well.

And we're running out a rolling out

a rewards program this spring to, you know, thank you.

You know, you give us a report of fish to us.

Give us a little information so that we can help the state,

you know, conserve this resource.

And we're gonna, we're setting out gift cards

and stuff like that.

What is, because as a wise man said,

there's overlap between the world's smartest bear

and the dumbest human.

What is citizen science just so you can explain it

to everybody?

So citizen science is just, it's just everyday people

engaging in a scientific process.

So like, I think there's like this whole gatekeeping thing

or around science where it's like, oh, this only happens

in academic areas or in universities and colleges,

state agencies and things like that.

But there is a way for you to still engage

in scientific processes outside of those fields.

So it's really trying to instill curiosity in people

and take interest in things that you care about as well.

And you know, Thomas and Clark,

that was an awesome explanation.

That's exactly like hits an nail on the head.

And Thomas, you probably know,

there was lots of citizen science out there occurring

and like Potomac River Keeper Network

has a network of volunteers.

They do the bacteriological sampling

in a river and a monocacy up and down.

There's an organization called Save Our Streams,

which educates volunteers to go out and do

invertebrate studies.

So they actually keep track of the aquatic bugs

and insects, which are real important indicators.

They have a, they created database.

So there's lots of citizen input.

I mean, you know, I know DNR would love to have

a funded study on all of this stuff all the time.

The reality is they can't.

And this is a way to contribute to that.

Why?

Because we all like the fish, right?

We love the resource, we literally love the place.

And you hit on something else.

The idea of gatekeeping it made sense 10, 20, 30 years ago,

but now the bureaucracy is so big.

It's a glacier that nothing can get accomplished.

This is where citizen science is important

because there's so many things that could be accomplished

when you activate the public,

activate people that are passionate about whatever it is.

I see this with forestry and stuff like that

where they want to do more studies in some of these parks.

And it's like, just get the volunteers to go do it.

There are a ton of people that would love to help you.

So yeah, it's fascinating.

You know, it's important to that.

Listen, science is science, right?

It has to meet minimum, actually maximum standards

of accuracy and everything else.

And that's why the group of taggers

is relatively small operating under a DNR permit, right?

So that we're trained, we're collecting data

in the way that makes sense to them.

Because data is just noise if it doesn't match or profile.

But Thomas, your point is exactly accurate.

You know, it's a new world, right?

Lots of people can flex technology tools

that we all have access to to really do

interesting and good things.

Like, I'm at a boat ramp frequently

in a summer more down towards the Chesapeake

and I'm approached usually by a graduate student

with a clipboard who's doing a DNR angler survey.

And so DNR puts a lot of time and effort

into collecting information from anglers.

An angler survey costs them a ton of dough.

We're providing angler survey data, you know,

for free out of the blue for them.

It's just finding different ways to look at the problem

and solve it.

I know last year, Virginia, actually

used kayak tournament data for certain bodies of water

just to have extra data points.

And it was free.

It was really easy for them to do.

And the kayak guys are more than glad to give it up, right?

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

Exactly.

That one, oh, one thing I want you to hit that on is you

had to get a permit just so people

to understand the whole structure.

You guys just didn't run out there

and just start stabbing fish.

Right.

It's DNR permitted, although it's not illegal to, you know,

this is a public resource, but it originally,

believe it or not, it's not illegal to tag fish.

But listen, we want this thing to be a serious thing.

And so yeah, it's got a DNR permit.

Again, not a DNR project.

They're not telling us what to do,

but they permit us just like you buy a fishing license,

like that.

The thing is real important is that this is not

some kind of like, you know, app where, you know,

we're gonna sell a membership and you can get on

and find out where all the fish are.

This is not like some kind of spot burning exercise.

That is you find a fish this summer and you report this.

This is not about burning where you caught the fish, okay?

It goes on to a spreadsheet and a scientific database.

It's not shared publicly, like this is the hot spot kind

of thing.

And, you know, that's really, really important to us

because we want anglers to feel confident

that by reporting fish, they're contributing something

positive, they're not like burning their spot

or whatever.

Those of us who've been tagging, you know, like Clark,

you know, you know where you, we already know

where we tag the fish.

The interesting thing is when you report a tag,

and I should probably point out there's a tag

right there and it's kind of, there it is, okay.

Say a big tag.

So lots and lots of people, we're getting 11 to 14%

return rates, so we know lots of people are touching

these fish, and that means a lot more people

are touching them and not recording them.

When you catch a small mouth with a tag like that

in a Potomac, scratch the algae off, look at it.

There's gonna be a phone number, a website,

there's gonna be some information on there,

including a tag number, and as you can see,

the color of the tag, right?

Okay, just follow the prompt, go through it.

Text the number, hey, I caught this fish

at this location, whatever, go to the website.

Shortly, we're gonna have an app up,

so those of us who really fish on a river a lot

just wanna have the app on a phone,

you can take a picture of that fish

with accurate measurement information

and submit the picture through the app,

and the data all gets harvested, time, place.

So when you catch a fish, look for the tag.

Look at the information on a tag, report the fish,

and Clark is about to brief you

because when you report a fish,

we've got more than a half dozen retailers now

who have contributed to providing incentives, basically a prize.

You report a fish, you're gonna go into a pool

at the end of the month, randomly draw names.

There's enough prizes in there based on our tag,

return rate pretty much, I can't guarantee you're gonna win,

but we're gonna give away a lot of stuff this summer.

To get people engaged in wanting to report these things.

Clark, run that down, will you?

Yeah, so one of the big things also that I just wanted to highlight

before we get into the sponsors is just the fact that

when you put an accurate fish measurement looks like

to one fisherman to the next is it can be a little bit,

I don't know, hairy sometimes.

Guys are doing fish measurements and everything.

So what we're going with is kind of like

a kayak tournament standard measurement.

So the mouth closed, tail pinched,

trying to get the tail to the longest point possible,

that kind of thing.

We don't wanna see like the mouth open and all this kind of stuff

for this information to be useful for the state.

We just have to kind of hold ourselves to a standard.

So that's kind of that.

And that's gonna be part of the rewards program too,

is like we need to accurate information.

You give the accurate information,

you can, you're eligible for a reward.

And one of these, or a few of the rewards are,

we're giving away Jake's bait and tackle gift cards,

fit lures gift cards, snaggler tackle is on board.

I think there's a couple more Scott that you,

I think District Anglers has engaged hatch match baits.

This guy makes these incredible plastic baits

that are like focused on goby's,

really cool baits actually.

Small little thing, hatch matches on board.

And the premier stuff,

the end of the year, the individuals who report the most fish

then go into a pot for eligibility for a grand prize.

And one of those is gonna be a super high end St. Croix,

you know, like Mike and Clark,

they won't let me touch their St. Croix rods

because I break rods all the time, right?

I got a dog in the boat, whatever.

But I mean, real, a real nice high end rod

and also a rockfish charter trip.

It's, you know, retail value,

I don't know what those go for,

500 bucks a man kind of thing.

So, so there's a grand prize at the end of the year

and that's likely to be tournament type fisherman

who are handling a lot of fish

and reporting a lot sort of familiar with the program.

We're gonna be able to do that.

There is a way, you know,

you can report a fish and opt out.

Yeah, you don't have to win the, you don't have to win.

The only way you win a prize

that you provide enough information

how we can contact you.

So, if you don't want that to happen, that's fine.

You can still report the fish and opt out.

Yeah, you can report anonymously as well.

Like what's the exact information on where it was caught

on size, but if you don't want your name to be known to us

for whatever reason, that's fine, you know,

you can report that way.

That's so freaking cool.

When will the prizes be given away?

Just reiterate just for the time limit.

When's the deadline for people

that want to sign up?

Is there a sign up or when is the deadline

for the end of this event?

Yeah, the sign up is essentially just reporting the fish.

Just, you know, your name,

we need a way to contact you.

That way we can send you the prize

because like if, you know, obviously,

if we don't have anywhere to send the prize to,

then you can't get the prize.

I think it's, we're doing, we're doing weekly,

weekly drawings, yeah, so, you know,

I think you're eligible for one of these smaller prizes,

correct me if I'm wrong, Scott, it's one smaller prize

and then each additional piece of data you give us,

you go into the, you know, it increases your odds

essentially at the lottery at the end.

Exactly.

And, you know, on a good month, let's say we have,

let's say we have nine, you know, good week,

let's say we have nine people report fish.

Oh, well, there are 10 prizes to give away.

Cheezy, randomly drawing, everybody's gonna win.

Right.

So, you know, we'd love to have 100 tags a week come in,

but the reality is, you know,

we're looking at handfuls to dozens per week

and we're gonna have handfuls to about a dozen prizes

to give away each week.

So, I think it's a pretty good chance

if you report a tag, it's likely you're gonna get something nice.

We're also gonna try to, on the,

we're starting a social media account

and we're gonna try to get out information out there

on if case you guys forget and how to,

what to do to report the fish

and then also, you know, announced essentially

who's winning the prizes and stuff like that.

If you want, if you don't want to, that's fine too.

You just notify us.

Yeah.

And then guys, of course, I will promote

or whatever as the social media gets up

and running and to remind people here with it.

Also, I guess I'll do this real quick before we,

we pivot a little bit.

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Tell them, I sent you.

Oh, I didn't build it.

Nope.

All right.

Look at me, try to give you a compliment.

You helped.

Yeah, yeah.

But I'm not the tech guy.

I just want to make that clear,

but don't say it.

So you picked up the colors.

You're on the website right now, works though.

Thomas, you showed the website fishtag.org

or fishtag.com is printed on each and every tag.

You can literally go to this website

and there it is, right there.

You just scrolled up, report a catch.

Boom.

You can click through, you can do it like that.

You can't, we're gonna have a, you know,

we're coming out of beta, right?

So this has worked, it's tested.

There's also a phone number on a lot of these tags.

You can literally report by text or by phone.

Leave a message, hey, I caught this fish

at Dickerson on July 7th, that kind of thing.

But there it is.

You can see all the, there's the input.

And you submit your tag and that point

once you've made that submission,

you have entered yourself.

This is a side feature on a website,

which instead of you looking up every darn,

every darn gauge on the river,

we've got them all compiled

and they update every 10 seconds.

Look at you.

I know a couple of River Laugh Cliff Bennett,

if you're listening to this when this uploads,

I know you're gonna be on this website a lot.

That's awesome.

Yeah, you can just like instead of like going to each gauge,

you can just go on our website,

click the River Conditions tab.

And it's all right there.

Thomas, you ever looked into the conditions

and what you prefer, like what condition you prefer

based off like turbidity, water level,

water temperature or stuff like that.

Do you ever do that and kind of hope for the best?

Yeah.

As I get older, I'm more hoping for the best

than when I was fully autism and tournament fishing.

Do you all sit there and I'll be like,

okay, I want the turbidity below 20.

I want a four and a half foot river

with you know, 43 degree water this weekend.

And you know, I'm like sitting there shaking at work,

trying to get it to all I know.

Well, if you think about the problem is,

if you go down that rabbit hole,

you are already gonna psych yourself out of a tournament

because tournament days it will literally never be

what you want it to be.

No.

No.

No.

Oh my goodness, dude, this is fantastic.

I can't believe you got all this stuff on here.

I wish every single river had this.

This is fantastic.

And this is gonna be, we're gonna have an app shortly.

That's coming out of beta shortly.

It's not public.

And you know, people like you just mentioned Cliff,

yourself, other people who are really engaged with the river

can just download the app on a phone.

And when you catch, when you catch tag fish,

use the app to report.

And use the app to look up this information.

Yeah.

And this is all just a bunch of volunteer guys, you know.

That are good.

Across ag and development.

Across age groups and generations.

And assisted by like STEM students out of high school.

We're getting academic credit for doing a lot of this stuff.

The STEM thing, you know, we haven't talked about much.

Like, we took them all out on a river, Clark, remember?

And only a couple of them have ever even fished.

And it was just fun to like,

run them up from point of rock and, you know,

we had lunch and in hand in a rod with like a net rig on it

or, you know, just straight up, you know,

Texas rig rubber worm and let them fish and go,

this is what this is about.

And they're like, oh, this is fun, you know.

So I was, I asked you first and I asked Clark,

what is the most important water condition to read

in your opinion?

Oh,

the most important one, I'm going to say level

because it goes to boat launching, but it's not.

It's got to be all, it's got to be all three.

It's got to be temperature, turbidity and level.

It does.

I just can't function without all three.

Clark.

To me, it comes down to and water level and turbidity

are like highly correlated on a rise.

And then you'll notice after the rise is kind of over,

the turbidity will drop a lot quicker than the water level.

So like you can have a five foot river on the point of rock's gauge

that's like at 50 turbidity, which is like pretty muddy water.

Or you can have a five foot river that's at like 20,

depending on the timing of when the river rose and everything.

But yeah, I'd say definitely turbidity is the biggest one.

You know, I kind of want that green look in color,

which is like, or chalky.

Yeah, it's like 15 or something like that.

Sub 20, fishing is probably going to be good.

Once you get up above that, you know, 30, around 30,

you can still get a pretty good bite going.

You get up at 40 and 50 and it can get kind of a good bit tougher.

But yeah, I'd say turbidity is definitely the top one I've been

looking at in the last year.

I actually didn't know it was a measurement

that they had public until Mike showed it to me.

I always just, you can do real well,

just going off river level too, though.

You kind of notice which ones you like the best.

For me, it's about five.

I really like a five foot river.

And where are these gauges located?

Are you talking, is this the, I call it the mainstream

of the epidemic from confluence down?

Or is this all the way up towards where I'm at

at the ass into the world?

No, we got Hancock, Shepherdstown, Harpers Ferry.

They go in order downstream.

So I don't, Hancock's error, but I don't,

I don't think there's a gauget way in support.

And it goes all the way down to little falls.

Little falls is a good indicator closer to the DMV

just because it's closer to the DMV.

But it also, you know, it's the totality of the river

once it's done and ready to spit itself out.

And it correlates, you know, once you get below

monocacy, you know, what do you got?

You got Edwards and then you got little falls.

It's, it's wild how the river mixes, you know,

below Shenandoah and then again, below monocacy

and also Goose Creek.

But, you know, there are a lot of times

we'll fish and water is stained on one side

and not the other.

You can experience that.

I'm sure.

Is the monocacy the second biggest, right,

that dumps water into the Potomac?

I don't know, you got, you got Cacapin.

You got South Branch, Cacapin, Shenandoah.

Shenandoah's number one, I think.

Yeah, I don't know.

I don't know.

Yeah, Shenandoah's got to be number one.

Yeah, it's like equal size to the Potomac,

where the two meet, I mean.

Yeah, like, but I was just,

because when you mentioned Goose Creek, I was like,

how much flow, how much flow

you actually comes out of Goose Creek?

We run boats up there.

It's, you run out of water fast in Goose Creek in the summer.

Yeah.

Yeah, well, I can't.

Well, you run out of water.

I mean, monocacy too, like, you know,

it's been really low like this summer.

I could, I could run it up to the Frederick Puppy plant,

you know, even over, even over that old rock dam

at, forget the road there.

Monocacy people don't know.

You get boats up there, up there with enough water.

I, I know people that have run it all the way up to the dam

and plus.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I've had friends that try to, like, hop skip it

over the Connick and Jig, which we talked about off air,

which is impressive, depending on how, how high that would be.

I would hop skip the roller dam on a Connick and Jig.

They've, they put a winch on the front of their boat.

They're muskie anglers and they put a winch

and they, they would come up over the dam, hook it to a tree

and try to drag the boat over top.

They're a muskie on the other side of that dam.

I know I'm gonna get, I'm gonna probably get death threats now,

but I've been weighed fishing before and you see a log

and it's a muskie up above the dam.

So that's funny, you mentioned that.

I'm, you know, a lot of these mud boat guys, like I,

I run a surface drive mud motor on one of my boats as well.

They go that fish, fish for a snake heads down

at mouth of gunpowder on the side of the bay.

And, you know, I'll take a trip down to Blackwater every now and then.

And the, the winch guys are these sort of dug mud boat guys,

you know, Texas.

And no, yeah, we went up in the mud, got to get out, got a winch,

right?

But I'm on a Potomac last summer and I run into these guys

on a nice flat bottom jet, you know, like your rhino, Clark.

And, and he, this guy was running, you know,

you know what the drought was like, right?

This guy's running really skinny water.

And, and he had a winch on the front of his boat

and he starts telling me, oh, yeah,

I'm not afraid to run down here because, you know,

I got a hundred feet of cable or whatever much he had.

I don't know what he's talking about.

But he'll literally, you know, he'll hang up on a gravel bar

and hook this winch up to a log or a tree and drag his ass up.

And it was really a nice boat.

It was like, you know, an all-well, you know,

18 footer with a, you know, three, four hundred pound motor

on the back.

And he was running and I mean like that.

But he was running without fear because he had his winch.

They call that the backup plan.

That is the way I feel of the Lord.

I can't even run, we run so shallow.

Some run, never even put the electric motor.

And I'm on oars all the time because I don't,

I don't have a wide, wide bodied aluminum boat, right?

I run a guide skiff called a Toey.

So I'm on horse, right?

And, you know, so your drift boat

you basically get real shallow.

And it's a relatively light boat compared to a regular jet

set up like most guys run.

So if you do hang up, you can literally get out of the boat

and drag it like a kayak, much heavier than a kayak,

but same idea.

I forget why I was going with that, but.

Do you have pulling a pulling platform?

Because I always thought that would be a such a cool concept

on a small boat is to have that, that pulling platform.

So you can get up higher and down into the water.

I've seen, they make those boats.

I've seen them at point of rocks where you can get on top.

Yeah, they make them.

They put like, what is it, hog island?

I think hog island.

Yeah, I think the guy runs, there's a guy runs a hog island

and he set it up as a stick steer up front.

Yeah, hog island is a plastic boat, but it's real heavy.

And I haven't ridden anything, so I can't pass a judgment

on the boat, but it's taking its knocks on the blogs

and whatnot.

I run a boat called a Toey.

Most people think I'm insane because it's a glass boat.

But listen, the reality is out west,

these trout guys run heavy white water in glass boats all the time.

They drag on the bottom.

It's, you know, it's, it's not like running a glass

on bass boat, it's a drift boat.

They're designed to take hits.

But most, like I said, most people I meet at the ramp

think I'm on, you know, like pretty much need

to be in a, in a state hospital.

But, you know, but in the southeast, these Toey's,

they have the polling platform.

And a lot of guys, you know, Tennessee, Georgia,

they also have access to salt water,

like we do here in the Bay.

And so they'll run up, upland rivers, fish from muskies

and then they haul those boats down to South Carolina

and run the marshes.

And a lot of those guys do have polling platform.

There it is, polling platforms on the boats.

But Clark, you got a poll, man,

to get yourself off those rocks, remember this summer?

That's my backup, man, yep.

I got a big ass poll with like, looks like an athletic sock

on the end to grab the ball.

It's a big long, it's like, I think it's like 18 foot long.

I don't even know, I came with the boat.

It's an 18 foot long, just wouldn't rod

and I'll just stick it up on stuff and push off.

If I get hung up.

Or at least narrow, damn.

Or we have to get up and get out and pick it up

and whatever else.

I've donated a number of phones to the river

trying to get mine.

I feel that.

Dude, you know, Mike, we've talked about Mike a couple of times.

But I have like the cheapest iPhone,

like the oldest one you can.

Typically, in the past I have, because of that reason,

I just, I'm in the water.

Yeah.

Dude, we've got a wall in there.

Not the spot burn, and I'm not going to tell you where it is,

but he's got a hole on the river called Pixel Hole.

Because it's got a couple of Google phones

in the bottom of it, you know.

Because Mike is a drift fisherman largely in a,

he's got a jet boat, but he likes,

really loves running a raft.

And as a result, he's a really social guy.

He invites a lot of people, because rafts

run best with more than two guys or gals.

So anyway, Mike's in a raft a lot.

And so they just are, you know, flick of the wrist.

And you're in these little itty bitty places

that the big jet can't go.

My boat, iffy, kayak, yes, really tight little water.

And, you know, this is guide level knowledge

that Clark and Mike and these guys have

and get in these places.

But one of them is called Pixel Hole,

those of the missing phones that are in the bottom of it.

You know, people leaning over to the grab a fishing clunk.

So I've lost my share.

You guys have been here in the area for a long time.

What have you seen change wise on the river?

I don't like to, well, we end up being hyperbolic

of like, this is the best it's ever been.

And like, where do you think the river is now in its stage?

Is the fishing going up, going down?

What do you think?

Let's do old guy, young guy.

Clark, young guy first.

Run me first.

Okay, young guy.

All right, I started fishing when I was,

well, all right, I started fishing when I was like three years old.

But I started when I was born.

It's all way back tonight.

No, yeah, when I was a kid, I was probably like,

I think my dad got me my first kayak

when I was like 11 or 12.

So that's probably when we started getting on the river

the most frequently.

And it was like one of those deals where you could go out

and catch 30, 40, 50 fish in a six hour trip.

And they'd all be like nine to 14 inches.

And your big fish today be like a 15 or 16.

And I was younger and didn't have the

same level of experience at the time.

So it's hard to say if, you know,

maybe I just wasn't targeting larger fish.

And I do now, but that was then,

and then now post college,

I've been out of college for like four years now.

We've been catching a lot,

a lot more big fish like, you know,

three, four, up to five pounds.

And you can expect to go out and catch like two or three

that are three to four pounds on a given day

and like five or six hours.

Or at least that's kind of the goal now.

That's kind of what I got in my mind

when I go in the water.

So I'd say as far as fishing goes from then to now,

like through the years,

we're catching fewer fish or catching bigger fish.

So that's just kind of, yeah,

that's just kind of what I've seen.

What you've got.

I totally agree with that last seven to 10 years.

I mean, I mean, exactly as Clark says,

I remember those times you're on a river.

It's, you know, you're fishing like beetle spins

because that's what they bid on.

And you're can, you know, beetle spins

and you're catching dinks,

but a hundred dinks.

I mean, just, it was like all day long.

It was super fun.

Lots and lots and lots of dinks.

And it was very rare to turn up a fish over 1416 in those days.

And that started,

I feel like it started changing 12, 10, 12 years ago

to where Clark is now.

I started fishing the river when I was 10, 11, 12 years old,

I grew up in Northern Virginia suburbs as a kid.

So we're talking like 1970, 456.

River was way dirtier.

I remember it clearly.

And at that time, it was all catfish all the time.

I just loved, you know, I'm a kid, right?

I was like a kid and I were worms

and mouth of difficult runs, stuff like that.

That was back in the day when your parents would let you go.

You know, you're like 12.

Not even.

Not even.

Yeah, my, my, my folks like, like I could,

she would, my, my mom would either drive me down there

and dump me off and like pat me on a fanny and, you know,

no phones, no nothing.

You gotta be back here at five o'clock.

So I can pick you up.

I have no idea where you are.

You know, you walk down scots around a difficult run

when I was a kid on the northern Virginia side

and, and, you know, light fires and, you know,

eat baloney sandwiches and catch catfish.

Oh my God, it was great.

But the river was filthy, you know?

And there's still a lot of debris in the river.

I mean, any flood brings every, every little dock

and a lot of, most people around the river

and know, you know, up the, up the Potomac, West Virginia side,

particularly up the Shenandoah, kind of,

achieving a lot of, a monocacy, have lots of stuff

on the bank, but especially on a Shenandoah and a Potomac.

There's lots of little docks, lots of little screenhouses,

mobile homes, campers, and all of those campsites

come with mountains of crap.

So every flood that comes through rips out the dock

and, you know, you're down at the, you know,

you're down on a canal kind of around, let's say,

Riles or whatever and all the stroller, push your moms

are out there and they're shocked, shocked at the chemical

barrels in the river.

You know, the islands are covered with blue barrels.

Well, the blue barrels are the remnants

of whoever in West Virginia just got his dock flowing out

by the last flood.

And, you know, I deer hunt and turkey hunt most of these islands

that are public access available to do so.

And like you get off and get into woods, I mean,

it's thick woods, but you won't believe the stuff

that's up there.

Like every guy who had a refrigerator on his,

in his little screenhouse and his little waterfront property

and outside Martinsburg, you know,

all those refrigerators are down on those islands

because the floods wash them down.

It sounds like you're looking for, you know,

see what?

He's shopping.

It sounds like you're looking for river treasurers.

Oh, well, dude, I keep, I keep blue barrel.

I harvest a few blue barrels, turn them into like trash cans,

compost bins, we have stuff like that,

but they're kind of endless there.

And they're way, like some of these islands,

some of the big islands that you deer hunt on,

you know, it takes a whopper flood, you know,

like a 1993 kind of flood,

but it'll bring that stuff way up on high elevations.

You'll find stuff like that.

So my point is that biologically,

compared to when I was a kid in the 70s,

the river is just, you know, the industrial discharges,

Cumberland and Luke and Shenandoah Valley,

that stuff was, the river was really impacted

and you knew it and the sewage overflows

and all the rest of it, the cow shit, all of it.

The river was really filthy back then

and it is demonstrably cleaner now.

Is there a deer population on those islands?

That's fascinating.

Oh my God.

Oh, haven't you, well, yeah,

you're fishing mostly a little farther upstream

on a summer morning in August, you know, it's dawn.

The deer are just walking across the river,

like it's like they're on the beltway.

Well, you're closer to Loudon County, right?

Cause up here in the West Virginia side,

there's like four deer left.

I mean, it's surreal.

Now, the islands are covered with deer,

those of us who turkey hunt, the funny thing is

the turkeys roost on the islands at night

and you think they're covered with turkeys

and then you're out there turkey hunting

and you, you know, they all go off the roost in the morning

and where they go?

They go over the farm fields over in Montgomery County

or Virginia and you're sitting there

where your turkey call going,

and you know, they're all over in Virginia.

So, I mean, their turkeys,

they're tons of turkeys out there

but they're just roosting on the islands at night.

And anybody turkey hunts and listen to this,

I don't know that I'm full of it,

but cause there are turkeys on the islands,

but there plenty of deer out there

and they swim and move from island to island, no problem.

And in the summer, it's really wild, like upstream

of one year, big weed year, you know,

heavy, that beautiful eel grass kind of weed

and I don't know what it's called upstream

between lander and pointer rocks.

A lot of people camp up there, including me

and I was on one of those islands with a buddy

and we're watching these deer in the river,

dunking down, you know, sticking their heads

completely on a water and coming up

with these big wads of grass and just eating them.

Like they were grazing, which it was a behavior

I didn't know they did and never seen before.

It kind of made me think about a moose up

and like, you know, Canada somewhere.

Well, Scott, they have a name for those.

Those are called West Virginia River dolphins.

It's a rare thing.

Yep, that's what you were seeing out there that day.

That was it.

Yeah.

Right.

You can mention dolphins.

I remember as a kid fishing there,

there used to be ton of river otters.

We'd see around whites vary down below.

They're not seen one forever.

They are, they're pretty rare, but they're around for sure.

I can't think of, oh man, it's so unfortunate.

I found a dead one last winter

along the gunpowder near ball.

I live up closer to Baltimore.

It's still I love the Potomac.

But this bird flu goes around with heavy concentrations

of migratory wildfowl.

And last winter when they grew up once there's ice on a river,

they grew up where there's open water.

And I found a dead otter and spoke with DNR about it.

Certainly not conclusive, but it was highly probable

that this otter got that bird flu.

Because it was jumping species last year.

And anyway, we got off track, didn't we?

Sorry.

Now that's the point of this.

I think you might guess, not an otter podcast.

It's a conversation podcast because yeah,

the gunpowder is fascinating,

especially like the brown trout.

It's fascinating that you have a brown trout fishery there,

but then to get to it,

you might get shot by the bloods and grips

because it's in that part of town.

It's just such a fascinating.

It's come on.

It's a fascinating thing.

I unfair, unfair hit on Baltimore completely.

I married Baltimore, so I can dish it out to them as fine.

But anyway, that's another show.

Because that's the other show,

but listen, gunpowder, incredible trout fishery

because of the cold release of Pretty Boy Dam.

And you get down in that canyon below Pretty Boy

and this is Upper Baltimore County.

It's like you're out west.

It's incredibly high quality river, beautiful resource.

And then down Baltimore.

And then down closer to the bay, right?

Joppa town, border Hartford County, Baltimore County.

It's Snakehead, Wonderland.

It looks like the American Serengeti,

what you're up in those marshes.

That's why I'm running a mud boat.

The sun's either coming up or going down,

ducks flying everywhere.

And it's in between Aberdeen and the city.

A lot of it.

It's just beautiful.

Unless you know about it,

I'm going to say the obvious.

Unless you know about it, you don't know about it.

You have such a natural resource in a beautiful area

and nestled in Baltimore.

It's the same thing when people say like you bast fish,

you know, the Upper Potomac, you know,

near Loudon County, DC.

He's like, yeah, it's like it's such a different world

once you get out on the water.

And you don't realize you disassociate.

This is next to some of the richest places in the world.

There's nothing like fishing, you know,

you float downstream from Penneyfield

and you know, you're underneath Dan Snyder's mansion.

And you know, I mean, you do.

You look up like, oh my God.

And you feel like, I mean, it really is a striking,

unbelievable resource.

I think a lot of people in the world

don't even know the Great Falls exists, you know,

in a normal place on this planet,

it would have like revolving restaurants

and a giant parking lot and a theme park around it.

It's just beautiful, beautiful place.

It's really incredible.

The river itself is a greenway.

Thanks to the CNO Canal National Historic Park

that literally goes, you know,

all the way to the Fairfax Stone

up in a Potomac Islands.

It's an incredible place and you're on the river.

Let's say you launch and, you know,

one side is you can see high rises in Loudoun County.

But there's still ducks flying everywhere.

And, you know, there's lots of people with boats.

God love us all to get out on a river.

It gets heavily used, but it still feels

like such a special, incredible place.

So I wanted to bring up,

because I have you on the show here

and hopefully maybe you covered this.

The Loudoun County issue,

I don't think I'm nuking a spot

because I'm talking and not talking about fishing,

but just the white's fairy debacle

with how they shut down the fairy.

Do you think they'll ever convert the fridge?

Can the Virginia side be used to launch boats ever?

It's a nice boat ramp still.

Like it can get any use on that side at all

or is it just never gonna happen?

I can't speak for it.

I don't know.

I did report on it.

In fact, one of the reports I did,

I put a GoPro on my kayak and launch it white

and, you know, paddled the four minutes across

and then did the math

that if I was commuting and used my kayak

compared to driving in a car.

It's a total TV news stick, but, you know,

both sides of the river, the local government,

so both sides of the river want that thing open.

Mark L. Rich in Montgomery County

and us put a bunch of effort and time into it.

I wish I could speak to the accurate status

where it is right now.

The other side is privately owned.

I have never heard of,

nor do I think anybody wants the owners

on the other side want a public feature over there.

They want to, you know, they wild.

Just don't want to speak for them.

I mean, I haven't spoken to anybody

in this controversy for going on two years.

But it's sad that the, you know,

the ferry is still kind of sitting there

and then, you know, it's a cool thing.

It's a version of that ferry has been there since 1780 something.

It needs to have another story, don't I?

Cause it's just a fascinating situation where, you know,

and people talk about they need a bridge or whatever.

It's more of like the mindset, I would love,

if you guys were listening to it, that owned that property,

I would love to get you on the show,

just to kind of get your heads at like, why, why?

What was your, what was, what do you genuinely believe

about shutting that down?

Um, yeah, I don't know, just fascinating.

Cause I remember as a kid, we would,

cause we grew up in Percival,

we would take our boat across White's Ferry

and launch on Maryland side.

That's what we did growing up.

It was the closest ramp we thought at the time.

Um, and so it's such a cultural impact that that shut down

and how that changes not only the flow of traffic,

but where people can go to fish and, and it's a,

it's a beautiful also shop guys.

If you want to go give them business right now,

the shop on the Maryland side,

cause it's a beautiful little shop there

in these little boat ramps.

Yeah, it's fun.

Go launch your boat there running, get a sandwich and, um,

um, you know, all the bikers, a lot of cyclists get,

you go in there, but it's a shadow of what it used to

because the ferry's not running.

But, you know, to be fair on both sides of the river,

like it's a privately operated concern.

The other side, excuse me, the landing is privately owned

and the dispute was about whether or not the ferry operators

were, you know, posting up the money required to use

that landing.

That's a completely fair debate for property owners

to have with each other.

Unfortunately, it crosses over cause it's a de facto public

resource, even though it's privately owned.

And, um, I don't know where the owners of Rockland Farm

and, um, I don't know where they are on it.

Um, Loughton County got pretty deep into it.

Um, and, uh, you know, we don't know what the motivations are

and to beat, to be fair about what exactly it's about.

What's the favorite story in your career that you take the

most pride in that you covered?

Uh, man, there have been so many.

Um, I remember going to, uh, Haiti after the earthquake, uh, with a

bunch of, uh, folks from, um, uh, you know, Bethesn Naval Center, uh, went

down there largely by myself, kind of operating as a, as a one man

band, cause this way, uh, sort of modern media was doing things

and, uh, seeing.

So they just sent you to a third world country and said, best of

luck. Uh, I got to go as a guest of the Navy sort of, okay.

I mean, I got to sleep on the hospital ship and a bunk and, but I

would dead head, uh, and it was cool because I would dead head over

in a chopper. Um, but once you're on the ground on the other side,

all bets were off, you know, um, but it was incredible to see, um, you

know, uh, uh, it was just such a dramatic moment because of what

it was. Um, I'm not sure I'm most proud of it, but it just

is the first thing that popped into my memory. I mean, core memory,

kind of thing. And the thing, you know, people were, you know,

lots and lots and lots of dead people and lots and lots of people

from around a world trying to assist and set up these field

hospitals. Um, I mean, I literally saw people having their legs

amputated on picnic days. Uh, it was just like, it's just

hard to, um, fathom all that and, um, and I remember, uh, uh, I

actually ended up getting over big fat goofy guy from DC.

And it's like a hundred degrees down there and it was December.

So I went from really cold to really hot and I kind of was fallen

out one day and, and there was no chain, no guarantee I was getting

back on a helicopter because they're taking casualties back.

And so I'm hanging around where they're doing that. And, um, there's a,

I saw this, uh, child was clearly a young person, young girl

getting loaded on a chopper. And about the same time I was

falling out in a young medical Navy corpsman came up and said, Hey,

sir, you're not looking so good. Could I take your vital

science, please? And they took my pulse and are like, they put me

on a helicopter to not back. Anyway, the point, the point of the

story was this little girl had lost her entire family, been dug

up after seven or 10 days and under rubble with a crushed leg.

And, uh, and it was the pediatric part of that mission was a

bunch of people from Bethesda. And there was a school in Bethesda

was involved in sent Teddy bears and stuff. It's a natural TV news

story, right? So I went down in a pediatric bay looking for

this girl and I found this probably 20 or 21 year old

corpsman, right? Medical corpsman in the Navy. And he had to be

Haitian. He was from, uh, you know, Haitian American. He was

from Brooklyn, New York. So he could speak Creole and whoever was

in charge is like, all right, son, you're down there. You know,

take care of those kids, whatever the Navy did. And I couldn't,

I couldn't believe that, uh, compassion, this young adult had, you

know, he was the only thing some of these kids had. And, uh, it

was just great. I'm like getting all misty thinking about it.

Cause it was, it was personal. I was human. And it was an

example of, uh, beautiful, beautiful things the individual

people can do. Uh, and you got me off on a tangent man. But

that's the kind of stories I get assigned to, um, a lot.

So you weren't local necessarily. Well, you were local, also,

local, I was sort of the, the Maryland guy for that was

Haiti, right? So I'd be in Prince George's or Montgomery

pretty much on any given day on whatever story. You know,

sometimes it was a trial. Sometimes it was crime. Sometimes it

was, uh, you know, the heroic dog who found his way home from a

truck stop in Alaska, you know, whatever, TV news, right? It

was a, it was a cool life, man. Real fun. That, that's so

cool. Like you, you, you want to, it's almost like watching one

of his old westerns when you watch something like that, um,

with the old school news media of you, you're a beat person,

you go out there, it just feels like with, uh, technology and

chat, CBT and AI, it's like, is it, are we losing that? Yeah,

you are in some ways, but listen, citizen journalism. So we

talked it, we started our conversation talking about citizen

science. Um, but in the world of AI where, um, images and reality

can be manipulated. Um, it's, it's still like really, really,

really important that there are people out there capturing the

reality that they see, um, and contributing that and professional

media, you know, way you love them, you hate them, they're, you

know, whatever, there's lots of faults in professional media.

But, um, it, you know, information and real information is just

like, just think about just basic stuff like the weather, it's

critically important. I don't want to overstate it, but it is

like, okay, for instance, I'm down at Katrina, okay? And, um,

it's like this horrible disaster and there were literally

dead people up in the attic, so houses where I was and it was

just bad. And I was in this place called St. Bernard Parish.

And nobody got in there yet. And the Maryland National Guard

had been assigned. And I was attached to them to show what

Maryland people were doing because of local TV station. So I'm

down there. And, uh, it was an emotional day. A lot of things

happened. And we showed what was going on. So we're the media

guys. And we're coming out, uh, flooded streets up to the

axles on a tractor trailer. And here's this guy in a tractor

trailer, like with plates from Iowa and Nebraska or someplace.

And he's kind of done nowhere to go. There's no law, no national

guard, no police. He didn't know where to go. And he had, he

had a little relief supplies that like the church in his town

had, you know, and he asked me, uh, you know, where do I go?

What do I see? And I said, well, the National Guard guys are

another mile down the road. I think you can get the truck through

there. I'm not sure we got out. And thanks very much. He climbs

up and I go, Hey, listen, man, you're a story. I just like you

just asked me, what's your story? And he was like, uh, he's

like, ah, you media people all the time. You know, he gave me the

media haters thing and kind of throw a couple of cuss words

at me. It was like an emotional day already. And, you know,

we take that all day long. My whole career is fine. Media is

controversial. I mean, always just walk away. Oh, I'm so sorry.

I'll talk to you later. And that day, I was just like, not

today, man. And I just looked at him and said, how the heck

did you know to come down here? Did somebody like send you a

postcard or call you on a pay phone? No, dude, you saw this on

TV, your community saw this on TV and read about it in the

newspaper. That's why you're here. That's what I do. And, uh, you

know, I probably shouldn't have taken him on like that. But that

that's why media is important just for basic stuff. You wouldn't

know otherwise about lots of stuff. And it builds in even in

this day and age. And the media, you do. It's building a

community, right? There are people who do some of your viewers

or maybe Charles County, they fish bass down there don't know

much about the upper Potomac don't know much about crappy like

Anna. Um, maybe I'd ever get there otherwise, but they know

all about it now because you're creating your media. And it's

building a community and and big media did did that, too, to

some extent. And just having long form conversations, I had a

person from, um, I think it was Oregon that emailed media

their week and said, like, Hey, your coverage at the Potomac

bill, it's the first time we had somebody just talk for 30

minutes about the situation, like no sound bites, no headlines,

like you just worked through a timeline and like that was

really cool. And it's like, that's the one thing I think this

is help this medium is like you can just talk about it. We

don't, there's no time limit. If it takes you a little bit

longer, that's fine. But that way, the facts get out there

about whatever you want. You're a citizen journalist

essentially, you've got sponsorships, you're building a

nice channel, all the rest of it. Some of those things are

going to come into play, but the reality is your guy is into

this stuff. I want people to know about. I want to share it.

And and it's just that's really, really important in the world

we live in right now. I'm deeply concerned about AI, you know,

I've been duped by AI numerous times, you know, manipulating

people's sense of reality and the gravity of some of the

subjects we're dealing with in this world, you know, real

information really does matter. And it really does matter. When

you see something to check it before you share it, just, you

know, I know you might hate the New York Times or whatever, but

ensure media sources have agendas, but the individual facts

they report, they'll give you their checked out. I mean, if I

misspelled a dude's name and did it three times a year, you

know, I'm subject to being fired. I mean, we took that we

took accuracy within the story we're assigned so seriously,

you know, down to spelling names, right? So yeah, it's now

critical thinking is more important back when you had the gate

keepers of three or four big media, now everyone has

information. And there's pros and cons to that, the biggest

thing is like you just have to have critical thinking schools of

double checking the information and looking into it a little

bit more. No, whether that's right, wrong or indifferent, that

is not as above my pay grade, but that's kind of where we're at

right now with AI and everything, man, it's crazy. Clarke,

what do you think about this? Are you going to talk about

small amount of fishing?

I'm just about about media or not.

Shoot, dude, no, I love going down rabbit holes, man, you find

out what people are really passionate about when you sit down

and have to talk to them for a while, you can, it's easy for

people to BS five minutes. It's hard to do that for an hour

past.

Thomas, you're, you're exactly, you know, when I retired, I was

asked on the air briefly to reflect on it. And it was exactly

what you just said. When would I have otherwise met you, right?

And I just, you know, countless stories since I started being a

news reporter in 1980, you know, your job is to call people

interview them. You don't become best friends because the next

day there's another crisis, right? But it's, it's real people. And

I just remember countless, countless times, whether it's a

worst day in their lives or the best day in their lives, being

able to talk to them and say, listen, I just really, really

appreciated meeting you. And, and speaking with you, I don't

know, when I would otherwise met you, and I just really

appreciated it. And I really meant that because it's, it's a

it's a richness in the world to be able to, you know, talk to

people like you like you do with, with this thing.

No, thank you. I really appreciate it. Clark, any closing

words here thoughts, report your tags. Yeah, yeah, I guess

just closed off. Yeah, just send us, send it in, send in the

information on the tagged fish. We're gonna get you guys

revolts going. And that's, that's what I have to finish off

for today. Awesome stuff.

There's a tag. tags right there. Guys, as always, link in the

episode description to everything that we talked about here.

And emails going to be there, fishing in DV at gmail.com, you

got any questions for me, please reach out message me or message

these fine gentlemen as well. If you want to go check out me on

patreon, since I'm in between jobs, it wasn't for patreon, I'd

be behind a Walmart dumpster doing unspeakable things to pay

my mortgage. So I thank and appreciate all of you. And we'll

see you guys next time on fishing the DMV. Bye. You're listening

to fishing the DMV with your host, Thomas Arons.

Fishing the DMV is brought to you by Jake's bait and tackle

located in Winchester, Virginia, tactical fishing company,

and fishing protect located just outside Williamsburg, Virginia.

That doesn't get you jacked up. I don't know what will

will.