Crafting Memories on the Fly: Tim's Journey Through Fishing, Reels, and Conservation

Join us on a captivating exploration of fly fishing with Tim, a master craftsman who's been creating custom fishing reels for nearly two decades. Discover the artistry behind his creations as Tim shares how balance and symmetry elevate the fishing experience. From his humble beginnings in bass fishing, influenced by legends like Larry Dahlberg, to his passion for chasing muskies in northern waters, Tim's journey is a testament to the enduring allure of the sport. Listen in as we reminisce about early fishing trips and transformative encounters, such as stumbling upon double-handed fly casting after a serendipitous accident.

Relive the nostalgia of fishing adventures and the thrill of pursuing muskies and smallmouth bass in lakes and rivers. We dive deep into the intricacies of muskie behavior, discussing the unique techniques and strategies that make fly fishing for these formidable fish an exhilarating challenge. Personal stories abound, from Tim's first fly fishing setup to his accidental discovery of double-handed casting, painting a vivid picture of a lifelong passion nurtured through friendships and shared experiences. The conversation also touches on the innovations in fly reel design and the personalized approach to crafting reels that cater to specific fishing styles and needs.

The episode wraps up with thought-provoking insights into conservation efforts and the balance between human impact and preserving marine ecosystems. We discuss the challenges posed by invasive species in the Great Lakes and the critical importance of sustainable fishing practices. Tim's reflections on the fishing community's evolution, bolstered by technology and global connections, highlight the dynamic nature of this beloved pastime. Whether you're an avid angler or a curious listener, this episode promises a wealth of fishing stories, techniques, and insights that celebrate the passion and innovation within the fishing world.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Fly Fishing Reel Building & Memories
• 6:53 Early Fly Fishing Memories and Techniques
• 13:56 Custom Fly Fishing Reel Building Guide
• 24:37 Muskie Fishing and Lure Building
• 40:07 Fly Tying Tools and Techniques
• 53:19 Steelhead Conservation and Fishing Practices
• 1:04:28 Salmon Conservation and Overfishing Concerns
• 1:20:17 Invasive Species and Muskie Fishing
• 1:31:30 Muskie Fly Fishing Techniques and Gear
• 1:41:50 Muskie Fishing and Behavior
• 1:47:40 Custom Fly Reel Sizing and Options
• 1:58:29 Innovations in Fly Reel Design
• 2:11:12 Fly Fishing Adventures in Newfoundland
• 2:27:08 Newfoundland Fishing Stories and Memories
• 2:38:56 Chum Salmon Fly Fishing Discussion

Transcript

Tim Pantzlaff: 0:00

You know you get into an area in a river where you get into a you know a spot where you can't really have too much of a migration of fish or everything kind of just gets penned up in a little area. I'm pretty sure like those muskies could actually eat everything in the river and now they're just waiting for something to fall in the river so they could eat it. You know, so a lot of times we're beating the bank, that's. You know they want to be in that shady area where there's deep water with structure to relate to, where they can either duck underneath or be the first thing there to jump on something. If it jumps in the water like a frog or a snake, comes out of the book or a mouse, anything that gets in the river, I mean shoot, they'll eat anything. Baby ducks the baby ducks get absolutely devastated. On my parents' lake we would actually make it. Oh, it'd be like mom would come by with like eight little baby ducklings.

Andrew Barany: 1:00

Welcome to Deadlyirt Drip Drip Society. Welcome to the podcast, tim. How's it going? Good man.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:23

Thanks for the kind invite. I'm glad we could make this work today.

Andrew Barany: 1:26

Yeah, well, we made quick work of it, quite literally, because it didn't take long, totally flexible.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:33

All I do is build fishing reels and you know so I get lucky enough to set my own schedule. You know which is great and podcasts are. They're just a great way to convey information these days, 100% and like we were saying before, just being able to connect with people all around the world via the internet web it's amazing.

Andrew Barany: 1:57

Yeah, I mean, you know what a week and a half ago we had never talked. You know what a week and a half ago we had never talked? Quick message there. You know little conversation here and there all of a sudden, here we are.

Andrew Barany: 2:14

This is actually, I guess, welcome back to me too, because I've been, I just kind of dropped off the side of the earth. Nothing bad was happening to me, it was quite the opposite but I was overwhelmed. There was a lot of good motion towards what I wanted to be doing, so I kind of buckled down on it and it was just yeah, I needed a break, I needed to rethink what I wanted from the podcast and if I wanted to still keep going with it and stuff. So it was. There's a lot of reflection, uh, but every scenario I ran. Without it I wasn't as excited. You know, there's a there's a form of excitement with this. I mean talking to people and all that.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:58

So yeah, I loved talking to every single client about the reels. I, you know, I prefer it because now I can get a feel for exactly what their intentions are to do like rods, the fisheries, you know, and again, just I don't know. Just today, I mean, I talked to guys in, you know, quebec, and then california, and then canada, and now another guy in canada, I mean just today, you know, which is awesome, and a guy from massachusetts. He was interested, he ordered a reel. So then we started again. He ordered a 3.5 and upon further reflection he was thinking that the 325 would be a better option.

Tim Pantzlaff: 3:47

So you know, it's just nice to be able to talk to the clients first and get an understanding. You know length of rod weight, you know what they're going to be attending to do with it. It makes a big difference. Otherwise you just kind of get a stopped reel. You know, I don't know it might not fit the needs, exactly what you want, because I have so many options right.

Tim Pantzlaff: 4:12

So how do you get you know, how do you, how do you describe it all? And you know, and like for someone to come in from the outside and be like, well, that brass one is pretty, but I mean the brass one I built for a. You know it's like that balancing point for those longer rods and so, yeah, it's a Spako, balanced symmetry. You know it's what I like. Nothing is better to have like a rig that's perfectly dialed up for you. You know what I mean. It just fishes better, it feels nice in your hand. I think the cast is just more enjoyable when the rod's nice and balanced out well, it just seems just the casting feels better to me. You know, if it's super tip heavy or super heavy in the reel just doesn't, I don't know. I don't say it probably performs the same, but it's just a you know preference what. Yeah, 19 years now, man Building fishing reels full time Insane.

Andrew Barany: 5:19

You know, I want to kind of get into how you got into all that first. Obviously fly fishing, I'm going to assume has been more than 26 years since you went.

Tim Pantzlaff: 5:31

I tell you so I did a little math there.

Tim Pantzlaff: 5:35

Yeah, well, I'm 51 now and I don't ever remember not wanting to fish. It really started with bass fishing when I was really little. Not wanting to fish, it really started with bass fishing when I was really little. I think that the first fish that I you know like little panfish or whatever, but the first fish that was really memorable. I caught a decent sized northern pike and chose probably eight. And yeah, I got a crappy fly rod when I was maybe 11, and that was just kind of from like farm and fleet. It wasn't very nice, it didn't cast well and I didn't know how to use it. But then, well, it goes right back to Larry. I don't know if you know larry dahlberg from the in fishermen. Do you remember that guy?

Tim Pantzlaff: 6:28

the dahlberg diver no, well, he's from wisconsin, he, um, he was on the informational fisherman, the in fisherman. That's kind of really where I learned there were really was, you know, my brother fish. But you know where to really learn, really learn. I would learn off the TV. On Saturday morning I'd watch the fishing shows more so than the cartoons.

Tim Pantzlaff: 6:53

When I was a kid and chasing muskies around, my parents had a cabin up north Lake, had muskies on it and all the river systems up there have natural reproducing muskies on it, and the well, all the river systems up there, have natural reproducing muskies. So that's all we did is just river rat around, catch smallmouth bass and muskies all summer long, right. And um, I just remember larry, when I was really little, casting those big, huge white flies and catching northern Pike and I'm like I was on these muskies and I knew they're there, I had them. They were, you know, like in the springtime the muskies kind of gravitate toward the shallow water up in the mud flats and they sit there and you can literally just pull or drive around with a trolling motor and spot fish them. And the problem that I was having with the conventional gear you know they're sitting in two feet of water. Well, you know you'd have to get too close to cast a certain style of bait and you cast too big of a bait and I made it too splashy or it would sink to the bottom in the mud real quick. And um, I just kind of thought, man, a fly would be the the ticket. So drove back and bought a fly rod from bob's bait and tackles. They gave me the reel, like an old plastic portland reel and some demo line that they had, because I mean, I didn't have much money and grow back up I had some success. Man like tossed my fly at the muskie and it ate it. And then it was just well, I wonder what else I can catch on it. And chased smallmouth around on it and, um, happened, stance across the summer run steelhead and then it was really game on man. I you know, after I got that big summer runner it was. That was pretty life-changing big fish. It was largest fish I ever caught, actually, believe it or not, but it was 30, 39 and a half inches, which was amazing. This old dude with the dog I always remember it like it took me down a few pools and obviously it was pretty tense and the guy came over with his dog when I was letting it go and he was like saying, well, that's the largest steal that I've ever seen. It's going to be a long time before you catch another one like that. Gosh, was he right? You know, it's been seemingly forever.

Tim Pantzlaff: 9:28

I was probably 16, I suppose at that point because I had my car and, you know, once I had the van rolling I was unstoppable. You know, now I can go and explore. You know, there was no Internet or Google Maps, so I just bought aisconsin gazetteer and a michigan gazetteer and I would basically just drive and check out spots and make notes inside of it, you know, like a circle, certain access points, and maybe jot down a few notes what I got the fish on or didn't get the fish on and, um, yeah, but like I said, today it's so much easier being able to use google maps to find locations and find the good water. And you know, plus, I've been doing it for a pretty long. I know quite a few spots around, you know. So it's just nice, you know.

Tim Pantzlaff: 10:25

But yeah, that's how I got into it was actually muskies man, had nothing to do with salmon and steelhead and and I fished like a fool until I literally hurt my arm. I I had crashed a three-wheeler really bad on the. We lived out in the country on like this farm farm at type of thing and I crashed the three-wheeler and busted up my right arm pretty well and the regular single-handed flat you know fly casting, well it's, it was hurting really bad. So my buddy, marty, the guy that's told me my first real fly rod was just like here is a bruce and walker double hander that he had gotten from england with this old jw, jw, young and sons line and I mean it's jw's, young and sons real and this like line that looked like literally like clothes line. It's clear, clear and you could see the tweet going through it. It was the worst line ever and but it helped. You know, like I now I could fight the fish and what I was just doing is overhand casting with a double hander. You know, because I didn't know how to waterborne cast.

Tim Pantzlaff: 11:34

I was just guessing, you know he didn't know, you know, no, no one was there to teach me, so I was just, you know, doing what I could and ended up um one day and like, ended up running into um John Lee. He was um, uh, lived up in Marquette, michigan at the time, and he was running the hospitals up there, the heart specialist and, um, when he was in school in New Brunswick, a guy taught him how to spay cast, and I just kind of sat there and started watching him fit, you know, seeing how he was casting, how he was doing this, and then he came over and we chatted a bit. You know, obviously we became good friends over. You know we just wanted to fit together all the time over. You know they just wanted to fish together all the time and uh, yeah, and I don't know if you know John Lee's, that he, he just won masters the second year in a row in San Francisco. He's a really good caster dude, nice guy, great fishy dude too. Um, but he moved out to, um, uh, vancouver, washington, um, quite a few years ago now. You probably, I want to say around 2008 2009 time frame. So he's been out there and and competing and fishing. You know, great guy. But yeah, that's kind of where I started.

Tim Pantzlaff: 13:00

And then I don't know when eBay first came around, like I was really bad at computers, like I said, I really didn't know how to turn one on or what to do and I wanted to get a, you know, a new Spareal. And at that time you know, if you could get on eBay, you could pick up some of these old. You know, if you could get on eBay, you could pick up some of these old click and pulse reels for next to nothing, especially on eBay UK. And there was a JW Young and Sons reel I really wanted and I kept on getting out bid and had put a few bids on and I just couldn't win because I suck. And my buddy was just like, yeah, they probably got a sniper bidder on him. And I'm just like, well, how am I ever going to win this, trying to compete against, you know, 400 guys?

Tim Pantzlaff: 13:56

So I just started to go on fishing trips, man, I, you know, sitting back, we were going mouse fishing at night and it's about an hour and 20 minutes to the river from where we were and I'm I'm jotting down in a in the thing and they're like what are you? What are you writing? I'm like, well, I'm designing a fishing reel. I think I'm just going to build them myself. I can't seem to win them on, you know, on eBay or whatever. And you know they kind of laughed at me. They don't say it now. But I remember being in the car and they're like, dude, you can't just build fly reels, you got to know how to do all this stuff.

Tim Pantzlaff: 14:36

And, yeah, man, just a lot of perseverance, a lot of people helping me, you know, just a lot of hard, hard work, relentless hard work. You know, that was probably well, it was over 20 years ago because I was only planning just to build them for me. Right insured, a small machine shop and they had a manual lathe and a little knee mill with this dynapath system on it, real rudimentary cnc path, and the rest of it was manual, you know. So the I don't know how many built the reels. I built manually at first. I, you know quite a few, and you know, then, um, they had gotten a cnc machine and and then, I think we, we entered in the spools. First, we tried the spools on it. It was, it worked pretty well, you know, and um, and basically I just kept on building more and more and it's been a full-time job, more so than a full-time job, cause I'm still the only person that truly runs and builds and makes every part that, all the shipping, obviously, all this show, social media and advertising, social media and advertising and, um, I mean garrett's uh, victoria's son's really been helping a lot. Um, get the website, the new website I've been going, which is greatly needed because I've still been using my blogger from 2007. You know I updated it in 2014 but I haven't done much with it since then because I don't just moved on to different avenues to promote and sell the reels and, like I said, I prefer having the clients call me anyway so you can just chat about it and you know.

Tim Pantzlaff: 16:40

Because how do you get to the bottom of all the options? You know the options are there because weight, aspect ratios, and you know I kind of designed the reel around specific rods in mind. So I'll, you know, start with, like a Thomas and Thomas, nine foot five weight or whatever, and put the. You know. So I built a reel to balance out a nine foot five. I kind of started there and then, as the rods go up to maybe a sixth weight or a bit longer and those type of things, then you start adding in the brass, um, typically to add in all the weight.

Tim Pantzlaff: 17:20

Right, it was my neuroses at first. I'm like, do I want to build reels that are brass and do I want to build reels that are, you know. I mean, like I was like well, I'll just build them, all you know, because they're both beautiful, so why not utilize that beautiful material? And then I, like, my original plan was to have removable weights on the inside of the reel, and but that seemed arduous when I can actually just do it on the outside. I was going to do like a screw and brass type of thing that could go in, so you could have a reel that weighed from, let's just say, 10 ounces to 14 ounces and just being able to add and subtract weights and stuff in the inside, which is kind of cool. But I can get to the same top of the mountain just by building finish. You know, I might introduce something like that too, cause it I don't know, it'd be kind of fun, it's just.

Andrew Barany: 18:17

I have had that idea with, uh, other reels because I have one like it's an old blank Um, other reels because I have one like it's an old blank, um, but I have a rod that's quite heavy and so it's like a six seven weight um, and I got a 910 reel on it and the reel still like maybe you could use, I don't know, but definitely like it took.

Andrew Barany: 18:44

It took a while to get to a reel where I was like finally, when I put it on I was like, yeah, that's the one that's, that's the best kind of fit I've felt from it but it's also it's a rod that can like I've pulled on very big fish, so it, like fish, is like an eight, it's like an everything rod.

Andrew Barany: 19:02

It plays small fish great, you know, not super small, but you know a good size. Brown feels amazing on it and then I pulled in coho and um, a couple of not super fresh springs on it, so it has. It has the uh, the meat there. But getting a reel to that rod took a bit because it wasn't, you know, I guess, the norm.

Tim Pantzlaff: 19:27

Yeah, yeah, yeah uh, and it even almost every rod and every way the fishermen grip it. But what I've come up with, like I got the directions kind of on the website. I came up with this forever ago because the online consensus was too non-scientific for me. You know, it was like one guy would say, oh, I got that rod, I have an 11 ounce reel on it, and the other guy's like, oh, no man, I got that same rod, I need a 14 ounce reel. And then the other guy, it'd be it's all over the place, five, six ounces in every direction. And I'm like, like, how are we going to get to an exact weight? So what I came up with is you basically take a reel that's too light Before you attach it to the rod, take a sandwich baggie, put that in between the foot and the thing and put it together and then just add nickels, dimes, quarters, pennies, whatever you want in there, bolts until it balances out nice on your hand. And then I just tell them relay that information to me, whatever that is. And then I usually can get it within about a half ounce of that, and I usually tend to go a half ounce to an ounce plus, because really, an ounce in a reel it's really not as much as you would think it. It's almost indiscernible between the two, especially when it's on the rod, maybe in hand, if you're really good at it. But you know, you almost have to weigh them at that point because that actually is pretty minor. It's not much weight, you know, but the backing weighs one ounce per 100 yards by math. So even calculate that in there too to try to get that, get that, you know, because the rest of everything else is in the water. You know, I just wanted to balance across those four fingers with maybe a little bit of tip lift, right, you know, you just want it to be floating up slightly. So it's good. Uh, you know.

Tim Pantzlaff: 21:20

But you know, people are all kind of all over the place. Some of the Scandinavian casters, they like to have a really tip-heavy rod. I'm not exactly too sure why, but that's what they tell me. Sometimes they like to have it tip-heavy. But again, I can still address that by just building them a lighter reel, you know, which is no big deal If they like that tip. Lightness to it. You know, there's no big deal if they like that tip lightness to it. You know, that's all good. You know, got an option for that. But, um, yeah, then the customer and dan loves, and, um, hood river, uh, washington, or yeah, it's hood river, washington. And um, in Hood River, washington, yeah, it's Hood River, washington.

Tim Pantzlaff: 22:07

And he got me started on the different colors. He's just like you know, I really want it real, but I want it to be black and blue. And then, you know, it just opened up a stupid floodgate of all the different colors and, oh my gosh, of just all the different colors and oh my gosh, these I mean just so many different colors and combinations now that I offer. So I figure, why not, you know? And just down my reel, at that point it's really kind of built some strange ones, man, pink and purples, and just you know. Then I got those artisan face plates too, and Dan kept on utilizing that as well. Like you know, promotion for his, um, his coffee company.

Tim Pantzlaff: 22:55

We made a really cool reel, um and uh gosh, I'm trying to think what the name is right now it's eluding me. But um, yeah, and then it just allows itself to build family heirlooms too with things that are really really special. Um, store people, you know, I really I kind of dig reels like that, that kind of have a special meaning and are building reels that have the kid's name on it and I've been doing this for so long, like Dad would call and say, hey, I just had, you know, my son, romeo, was born and I want to put it on my fly reel. And I'm like, oh, that's cool, you know. And now Romeo is a young gentleman and a deadly salmon fisherman, right, and he gets to use the reel now. So it's kind of cool. You know what I mean. Right, and he gets to use the reel now. So it's it's kind of cool, you know. I mean, it's so cool, that's really. I love that.

Tim Pantzlaff: 23:49

Um, I've just so many special things for people and that the internet's a. It's a beautiful thing be able to connect with people all around the world. You know, without it, we I don't know, I don't think a company like mine could really survive for this long without, you know, without internet, you know, without being able to have like for them and um, uh, you know, but it does take. It takes all my time, which is great, because now my life is completely centralized around.

Tim Pantzlaff: 24:37

Exactly what I love to do is fish. All right, it's what I've always loved to do. Now I run into I remember I'll remember this forever like I run into a buddy that hasn't seen me since high school. He's like so, tim, what are you doing? Man, like, and I was like I'm building fly fishing reels and most people you know like that don't know me or whatever they'd be like oh, wow, that's different. You know like, I love it. He's just like oh, oh, dude, that makes sense. You know like, so you do. I'm like that's all I love to do is fish, even you know, all through high school. And um, yeah, and so fished all over the place.

Andrew Barany: 25:18

It's great man it's a sweet story. You got there. I mean starting from just like fishing watching, you know, shows.

Tim Pantzlaff: 25:32

Fishing shows instead of cartoons I don't think there's many cartoons too, man. I mean, when it was on, yeah, yeah, that's good winkle and oh yeah, right, yeah, that was a mainstay of key man, and that would have been some stuff.

Andrew Barany: 25:52

Yeah, there's, it's. It's crazy because you can totally like there's a certain point like a lot of your cartoons would have like translated over um close to my age, like key man and bullwinkle and all that, but after that now you can actually tell someone's rough age by what cartoon they know you know, I mean drop a name and they would be like never heard of that and I'm like, oh man, that's so sad that you didn't get to get yeah, cartoons and stuff I mean looney tunes were great, tom jerry, you know all of it, right, I mean, that's so good.

Tim Pantzlaff: 26:30

You know that time period and, like I said, I I lived up and lived in very rural areas so we only had 3d tv channels and then we got 26 and 32 and 38, and those came in, I believe, uhf or whatever it was at that point. So then we got these three new channels and Saturday morning was cartoons and fishing shows. You had, you know, in Fisherman and Roland Martin, let's see Bill Dance, um, let's see Bill Dance. But obviously in fishermen reign supreme because it was informational, science-based, uh, educational. I mean the other, they would teach you to bass fish, but it was more of a Southern style. So where maybe all the the clogs really wouldn't fit with me locally, where the end fisherman was kind of a more brother from minnesota, uh, they covered muskies. You know northern pike feeding habits of small bass and you know, and really if you just paid attention to the experts, you know and what they were doing and try to apply that. You know that running gun technique or you know slowing up in the spring. You know, and I wanted to bring that muskie presentation even slower Now muskie fly fishing is extremely popular now you know back then it was, you know to most people they would be just like you know back then it was.

Tim Pantzlaff: 28:04

You know, to most people they would be just like you know. Whatever ludicrous to try and I'm like, well, they catch tarpon on them and they don't. Muskies really don't fight all that much and they're not, you know, but a fly for them in the springtime, in that post-spawn period, man is deadly. You just you see them is deadly. You see them, you can ask right to them, you can see how they react to the flyer if they don't relax and you just kind of leave them alone and you come back at them later in the day in the hope that the sun warms up and the female wants to come and eat your fly. And if you have time to wait them out, you know, especially locally where you know you can go over there every three days to go visit her. Well, eventually, if she's still sticking around in that same location and usually they do they stay in a pretty relatively close location.

Tim Pantzlaff: 29:01

It's not like they're on a nest. They, they muskies kind of swim along broad shorelines in like groups. There'll be a big female maybe with two or three males and they kind of snake in and around each other and the males bump into the female or they'll bite at her and kind of knock out some eggs and then they spawn on them quick and they kind of just swim up and down a shoreline. Then the males don't have any whatever. They just kind of slide out into the deeper water and kind of kind of become you know whatever they not out into the deeper water but they kind of they don't seem to sit up in the super gallows as much as the females do, I think just recovering from dropping all the eggs, and then they sit up in there and get warm, right, and the warmer the water temperature is, then more digestion. They kind of you know they're feeding on crayfish and frogs and you know she kind of runs up and down the shoreline or cruises around cleaning up the area, killing things that might be potentially eating the eggs, and so that that post-pawn you know that that post-pawn period is pretty key catching them on fly.

Tim Pantzlaff: 30:15

But you know you can obviously all summer long on the muskies that are stuck in river situations where they don't have a, a lake to fall back in. Then they'll sit and just kind of habitate the river and, um, you know. So then fly fishing for those is, you know again, it's work but it isn't too bad. You know, um, just uh, beating the bank and trying to get lucky. You know, fly in front of a fish and most times the river muskies are pretty, you know, aggressive style muskies, you know, different than the lakes where they're aggressive, but you know they may be, um, um, well, they're just deeper and it's harder to really a hundred percent understand where they're going to be sitting.

Tim Pantzlaff: 31:20

So I always liked rivers so much because the structure was always very, you know, it was defined, it also changed, you know. So there's just rivers seem to have pots and crates that fit better and I just always had more luck. And the fish fight harder too, especially the smallmouth and muskies. There's no comparison. A a river muskie, they, they hit hard, they jump, they still strip out, line you. It's a force to be contended with where you know a lake fish, you can kind of I mean they'll bulldog you, but it's really not a, I don't know, they fight, but just not as much as the river one, same with the Mossback.

Andrew Barany: 32:07

Everything I've ever seen muskie fishing at the boat side on a lake is like they hook it on the figure eight and put it in the net and there it is. Yeah.

Tim Pantzlaff: 32:19

Which.

Andrew Barany: 32:20

I'm not saying is you know that's still hard? I'm not, but like the fight is well you know, yeah, With conventional gear you'd be like easy to hold them there.

Tim Pantzlaff: 32:35

Right. So 80 to a hundred pound test, you know, pretty much a broomstick rod. The rod isn't really has nothing to do with fighting the muskie, it's like 99.99 delivering those huge baits and being able to carry that grain load of a, you know, a 12 inch long bucktail or you know, just being able to keep up with like the actual vibrations you know. And when I was a little kid for sure man, like conventional spinning gear for muskies did it all the time. Man, just fun. I said I like to make lures too. So I'd always make my own musky lures and I did a lot of diving when I was young and what I would do is just basically take the pontoon boat out and I would anchor it and then I would swim up and down the shorelines where I'd want to fish, to see where the fish were, kind of where they were. And then, as I was swimming by, I'd be like, oh, there's a sweet bait, and I'd dive down, I'd grab a bait that got stuck in the logs or whatever. And so a lot of the baits I had I just would. I know there was like a tornado that came through and dumped a whole bunch of people's boats over. Well, they, you know, they collected the insurance money and I went around with my little 12 foot boat along the shoreline collected all the lures. Man, I was just throwing them in the, throwing them in the boat, throwing them in the boat. And yeah, then my dad always had, like we had cut down a whole bunch of cedar trees when I was a kid and we had them all stacked and curing and then I just, I don't know, I just kind of started whittling them out and making them and, you know, painting them. You know my dad had all the woodworking stuff a kid would ever want and he had a job in, you know, a guard design. So he worked with stainless steel and lexy polycarbonates a lot. So I had all the diving bills and he'd bring the metal home and I would bend up blades and, you know, make the bucktails right from scratch. And yeah, I still have a lot of those baits. You know they're. They're pretty rudimentary, cause I was just a kid, right, but it was a lot cheaper to go and pick up a bunch of hooks and uh, then it was to actually buy an actual muscular has always been expensive, you know, probably. You know probably. You know, back in the 80s like that. It was probably eight, nine dollars, even that right, and now these baits can be 35, 40 bucks a piece, you know.

Tim Pantzlaff: 35:13

So if I still use conventional gear, guaranteed I'd be making my own baits, you know I just, you know like I like to make stuff, you know, but yeah, must be used, I love them. I don't get to really, you know like I like to make stuff, you know, but yeah, muskies, I love them. I don't get to really, you know, it's like I like you know I spent all the summer up in newfoundland. Now, I mean not the whole summer, but you know that june, july is a pretty good time period. But you know, twist firearm fish for atlantic salmon instead of the muskies. I haven't fished smallmouth, it's the same. You know, muskies are pretty good into the fall though, so it's all right. But you know, smallmouth bass I really like those two. They're a lot of fun to chase around.

Tim Pantzlaff: 36:00

Good surface eaters. And you know, obviously in Wisconsin that's all we have is well, we got everything with salmon and steelhead lake run ran browns and inland browns, but we still have all you know warm water species as well, which is cool, got some pretty good trophy water for sure you know, um, a lot, a lot of people like to come to wisconsin, I mean the for the spring creeks. Now that's kind of the new big, big push from fly fishing down in veroqua area where guys want to come in, and spring creeks, the great lakes, basically lake superior, superior and Lake Michigan, add a lot of pressure and it pushes underneath the state and then it flows into the Mississippi River on the other side of where the glaciers skip and some wonderful trout fishing. You know all natural reproducing and the water temperature stay ideal year-round. You know like what trout like?

Andrew Barany: 37:09

yes, so this was actually what you're playing with right there is, uh, oh yeah is what really? Sparked my interest and once I realized I was like what's that noise?

Tim Pantzlaff: 37:22

and then I was like oh, oh yeah, no, oh no, I'm sorry, I just didn't pay attention, I didn't know you could hear it. I'm sorry.

Andrew Barany: 37:28

No, no, it's all good, we'll get back on the muskies. I had some questions there, but that dubbing spinner and we'll cover this in a bit. But the dubbing spinner is what really intrigued me. When I really intrigued me, when I saw that, I was like, oh man, because I I made a non-electric.

Tim Pantzlaff: 37:52

Okay, I'm caveman compared to that thing, but I made my own out of a doorknob and bent up some.

Andrew Barany: 37:55

Bent up some wire because I was like I looked at it in stores and I was like I asked my buddy that worked at the shop. I was like, well, what is a dubbing spinner? He's like it's a heavy weight that you can spin and I was like, all right, I, I got this.

Tim Pantzlaff: 38:11

So yeah, there's a lot of people that built. You know like I've seen guys that have built them out of bolts and um. I I built a lot of the ones like the conventional ones, for Olympic Peninsula Skagit, like OPST, like their X1. Um, olympic peninsula skagit, like opst, like their x1. Um, I make them for them. I've been doing that for years and and those are cool.

Tim Pantzlaff: 38:30

You know, the conventional ones are all right, but the powered one you get a faster rpm, it's got a lot more power to it. That doesn't stall. You know, you ever spin something. You need to spin it multiple times to really get it to go tight. This thing you kind of just crack the button, it's like and it'll suck up. You know, I don't know if you saw that mouse that I had just built on there. I mean, that was a. I was talking to garrett about that just this morning and the only thing that's holding me back from doing more material on there is actually the size of my work. Holding the chip clip that I use to put the material in is only so long, right? So if I had a chip clip that was eight inches long, I could spin eight inches of deer hair with it, you know.

Andrew Barany: 39:14

I've been using. You just inspired me to look into a chip clip because I'm assuming it's basically like a CDC clip but a larger scale. What is that thing? This is like a CDC for trying like nymphs and such. Oh that's just. So I I've been using this like grabbing hackles, and then I can cut it and put it into my dubbing loop. So what's?

Tim Pantzlaff: 39:37

a chip clip. I'm actually my um. Well, you know like, uh, a you know chip clips for putting on um chip bags like dorito bags and stuff you know like, but the one I found okay I thought it was some lingo.

Andrew Barany: 39:54

I know what that is.

Tim Pantzlaff: 39:56

Yeah, no, no, no, yeah, okay, okay, yeah, you're talking to, like you know, when we drink our soda pop and then we run over to the water fountain, man past the park I'm like what the heck is this chip clip?

Andrew Barany: 40:07

I have never seen it in a fly shop. It must be super new man. What is it? Tell me, it's super old yeah and mine's.

Tim Pantzlaff: 40:16

Mine's really cool. I found it in my dad's workshop. It's an old metal one. It's kind of blue and it's super heavy duty. It's not like like a lot of the normal chip clips to me don't work all that well because they just don't. They don't quite have that flat surface that you really need this one. It's similar to that thing. That thing's pretty sweet. Who makes that?

Andrew Barany: 40:44

Swiss CDC, swiss CDC, swiss CDC. Yeah, I don't know, it's just a CDC clip. It has even like measurements on it, just so you can like follow patterns because, like, I don't know how many nymphs you've tied, I'm sure you've tied a few. I don't really nymph at all, man ever so that's why you don't know about that.

Andrew Barany: 41:09

I eat chips, so I should know about chip clips yeah, that's great man yeah, the CDC clip works pretty good, but because of how close everything is, when you have hackles that are longer than where the pinch point of the CDC clip is, it obviously gets disrupted. So you'd have to do a little extra work to clean things up. But you know that's not really a new thing.

Tim Pantzlaff: 41:43

Yeah, I saw Lewin's got a really super cool like man. It almost looks like a. I don't know, it's a different, it's a work holding. You know, I would say something like a. It's just hard to describe, but it seems like it can hold one heck of a, a long string of material. You know, um, that Lewin makes it and, uh, I was considering getting one of those. So a couple dudes using that, um. But yeah, this would be okay if I move over here for a little bit. I gotta, I gotta walk around a little bit. I. Thankfully the blood clots in my legs are not causing an issue, but I gotta kind of walk around a little bit every now and then. You know, no worries, man, um, you can hear me, okay, right I can hear you.

Andrew Barany: 42:45

It's come through nice and clear, so no issues no issues on my end.

Andrew Barany: 42:50

Cool, um. Yeah, the tools, man, you know, and if when you take a look at fly tying, it's not overly complicated, especially if you get a really good foundation going, and I I don't just mean like thread wraps on your shank, but if you really understand, you know, which takes a lot of time I'm not there yet but understanding the different materials and then how to get them on so they do what you want. I mean spay, you know classic spay flies or you know like it's. It's pretty incredible, and just having the right tool for a certain job can make your day that much easier. Yeah, man.

Tim Pantzlaff: 43:35

And then I mean think of the time that we're living in like. At any given moment, you can pull up like davy mcPhail's YouTube channel and watch a master spin it up exactly the right way and see all the different little techniques and stuff that guy used. Have you ever checked out his website or his YouTube?

Andrew Barany: 44:00

No, man, as much as I really need to get out there, man.

Tim Pantzlaff: 44:05

I do a lot, he's great. Yeah, I do a lot, he's great.

Andrew Barany: 44:08

Yeah, I do a lot of my fly tying on my own. I rarely look at things. I like to just like I don't know. It's funny because you're you know you came from a time where there was like not a ton of information that was readily available. And now and then, I'm in the opposite where, like, all the information is right there, my fingertips, and I like, I'm like, no, I'm doing it on my own yeah, I don't look at other people's fishing reels dude, so I can totally relate with that.

Tim Pantzlaff: 44:39

Okay, you know I don't like to look at other people's work, you know. But like, I don't think dave, really I don't think davey, um, I don't think he production ties. I think he he just does demonstrations. He's a. He's a world-class salmon tire dude. He's he might spin up flies. I don't know that for a fact. I mean, if he does, they definitely would be worth it or whatever. But yeah, I mean, he's like you know, yeah, I think he's from scotland. I sold a reel to him back in the day and followed him on Facebook and he moved off Facebook and started up his YouTube channel and it's been a really big success. I mean it's awesome. There's so many amazing tires out there. Man.

Andrew Barany: 45:20

Oh, it's incredible, you know, and even I have a friend that I started fly, uh, fly fishing a little bit before him and I was tying flies. I started like I tied flies before I started fly fishing Um, basically just jegs, because we're out ice fishing and I happened to have bought my fly tying kit when I was out ice fishing. So that's just how it kind of started. But cool, yeah, you know, I taught my friend some stuff and he went home and worked on it himself and slowly but surely his flies started becoming like immaculate, um, but by then I already had like two years into fly time. So I just taught him what I knew at that moment and he surpassed me quick because he didn't that, like I already explained, like you know, you do your wraps like this and you go over back you're locking thread wraps.

Andrew Barany: 46:18

I'm pretty, um, I do things very the same way. Once I find a pattern, it usually takes like five flies to get to that pattern where I'm like content whether it swims or not. That's another option. But I tie a lot of nymphs, um, so we know those swim very well, they drop.

Tim Pantzlaff: 46:36

but yeah, story reminds me a lot of alex. Like you know, I sold them a reel and then we became friends and I kept on telling him I'm like dude, those flies are okay but you really have to start making your own flies. And so we started kind of fly swapping back and forth. I'd send a few photos. He had sent some few photos and it wasn't too long, like he just had an eye for it was kind of like a savant, you know, like his color combinations and it's interesting he's, like he told me he's using a color wheel so I was kind of wondering about his color matches being so beautiful on like a lot of his scanty wings. And he's got a really kind of bunch of cool techniques in the way he layers, you know, or layers the wings and just makes them swim nice, but the colors that he mixes together are always really awesome. You know him and his super kick-ass wife own a garden, you know, like a florist, and they do weddings and stuff up by Mackinac Island. So he's always working around mixing colors together, you know. So you just always had an eye to. You know, if you want to make a hanging pot look beautiful, you can't put a bunch of colors that don't match together. You have to match the color hues. And so he started using a color wheel, which I thought was a really cool tip. I got to get one of those. Um, it's uh, you know, I, I, this other bait maker that I watch on youtube a lot marlin baits he also pointed to that color wheel when he's airbrushing, right, right, and he's just like this thing is key and the guy's a, you know, a master painter. I mean I was just watching he built a peacock bass today out of wood, out of Tupelo, right, makes all the diving bills, but his painting skills are, I mean, it's just legendary. I mean it's a you know how beautiful peacock bass when you can make something, uh, you know, a foot long bait, look proportional. You know, um, but yeah, that that color wheel thing is pretty cool.

Tim Pantzlaff: 49:02

But yeah, I don't nymphs. I, I have one style fly, I like the swing that would be considered a nymph. Um, but that's in pretty specific times and pretty specific locations. Um, you know, like the newfoundland ones aren't nymphs, but I guess they were. You know, they're more nymphy because I was used to building like musky and small moth and steelhead and salmon flies, where they're inherently much larger. But once I started doing this hosting thing and you know, helping manage the lodge and going up there, you know now we're talking size six being a big fly and a site all the way down to a size 14 turdic and all, and I mean that's pretty extreme.

Tim Pantzlaff: 49:50

But you know, really not off base man, like some of the flies that I was catching fish on, it was nothing more than two wraps of brown hackle and you know, maybe three or four hairs of squirrel and that's a whole fly. You know they, somehow these salmon can find this little tiny bug man, it's so amazing their eyesight. It's like my buddies, like john lee told me we're sitting out, I'm like how in the world can are these salmon seeing such this little fly? And you know we were using relatively large flies. You know like nothing. You know we were using relatively large flies. You know like nothing. You know super small.

Tim Pantzlaff: 50:30

And I always remember this. Like the swallows were feeding on the pool and they were eating caddises, you know, and we were just taking a little bit break, giving the spot a little bit of a rest to make another couple passes through or whatever, and the swallows were feeding and he was just like, yeah, they're. Just like they're masters of their domain. They're just like those birds out there eating those and like, see how quick they move. The salmon are the same way. They see everything you know. And I always remember that I mean, I was pretty much just a kid but some of those things kind of stick out and be like, oh yeah, I suppose they are complete masters of their domain. Kind of stick out and be like, oh yeah, I suppose they are complete masters of their domain. They can, you know, and some of those nymphs that you guys use, I mean, shoot man, those things are tiny, you know, and those trout prefer that, right. So it's pretty cool.

Tim Pantzlaff: 51:20

You know, fly fishing and fly tying is really interesting because you know all the entomology and you know, I don't know again, I'm not any type of aficionado, I just kind of like that aspect of it. I always liked bugs in general and now I'd be able to build something that's a simulated ant or you know something that maybe looks like a bullfrog or maybe looks like a certain type of, you know, like a hex nymph or you know some of the natural type of stuff or a muddler that kind of has a caddice type of look. I just think that's cool and it's very important. Never really thought that color mattered all that much, but the more photos I see of a steelhead with a fly sticking out of its mouth, that's the same color as the gill plate. There's got to be something to that.

Tim Pantzlaff: 52:27

You get what I'm saying, like the gill plate of the fish. And like next time, pay attention, you see a steelhead or someone takes a photo of it and they still have the fly in the mouth. You blow it up big and you look at the gill plate color and you look at the color of the fly. They match, you know, like, um, so now, like like during the winter time, like now our water temperature can get all the way down to 32 degrees Our steel had kind of turned like this beautiful, they're chrome, but they get this like beautiful iridescent, purpley type of color to them. So I kind of use, you know like I use a lot of olive and pink, but then once it starts to get into this time of the year, I find that like that, that purple, black, pink combination seemed to really, you know, they just seem to work, you know.

Andrew Barany: 53:19

And kind rainbows, they're not steelhead, we just call them that because it's tradition, I suppose, because they don't have access to the ocean, they go out to the Great Lakes, not many people would say that, because I'm on the West Coast and the biggest issue with that and I've thought about this a lot not that it actually like, bothers me, but I think the main reason is like you know, let's say they're like oh man, you know, all the white rhinos are almost dead. And then someone on the other side was like oh, dude, we got like 5 000 of them over here. It's all good, but those were never wild, like those, weren't true? They? Someone painted them, you know, or like.

Andrew Barany: 54:11

So there's that like because over here they're not doing great. So when people are like you know, oh, there's more steelhead. So I think it's almost like you know a little less about calling them a steelhead, but the fact that what we have here is so precious and we've got to watch them that if we dilute the pool of the main public thinking, oh, there's tons of steel, they brought in the McLeod strain from the Sacramento River in California by Redding.

Tim Pantzlaff: 54:54

And when they were building the railroad they were just dumping them in the rivers as they were going through and doing the stocking program program. So those, you know the steelhead at that time I think those were sheer rainbow and then the department of natural resources started stocking, you know, a steelhead strain and a lot of times we call them steelhead because we also have trout as well. So I mean, a rainbow is a rainbow, but our steelhead kind of define, you know like we'll call them like a skamania or a ganarasca or a chambers creek and that kind of dictates the time of the year when they're wanting to be entering the river and uh, but I mean they're not a real, true steelhead because they don't have that ocean transition. They'll go out to the lake, which is fresh water, and then they'll come back into a fresh water, so they don't really have that real big stress on them.

Tim Pantzlaff: 55:57

And the natural ones, the ones that have naturalized, you know, because we have a lot of rivers that have natural reproduction of the fish, rivers that have natural reproduction of the of the fish and um, those tend to run in the fall, um, not always, but um, you know the fall strain. They'll come in in that september through december time frame, winter over, until you know april. Essentially you know a April. Essentially. You know a broad stroke, because that can kind of change geographically because the region's so big. You know, like Lake Superior, it'll take 20 hours to drive around Lake Superior.

Tim Pantzlaff: 56:38

You know that's just the one lake and you start talking about. You know just all those areas and all those different river systems. You know they can be spawning almost. You know three, four months, right, typically I wouldn't be out of the question at all, depending what region that you went to, having fish that are going to be entering the river and either we pre or post spawn you know, but yeah, a lot of that bugs me too, because everybody's like, oh well, that's what the dnr puts these fish in, that's just all put and take.

Tim Pantzlaff: 57:20

So I'm I'll go take, because they're just going to put more in, not realizing well, if it doesn't have an adipose clip, you should really let that fish go, especially the ones that are running up in the river to be coming up to spawn. Yeah, the last thing you want to do is be killing a nut. You know the fish doesn't have a clipper on it. You kill a female fish. That, I mean, that's pretty, it's just selfish, right Selfish. Just those fish have to go back. You know, and that's what I've always believed.

Tim Pantzlaff: 57:53

I've only killed a couple fish, like you know, and I still kind of remember, you know, like one steelhead just didn't do well in the middle of winter, like this, and it just kind of went, it died on me in the middle of winter, like this, and it just kind of went, it died on me. And then we were fishing mice, you know, mouse fishing for browns, and I had a nice beautiful inland brown that just broke. It was big too, it was like 23, 24 inch long, just a big, fat fish, and just flick it in the eye, dead man, it was nothing. We tried to revise it for like 20 minutes and it just wouldn't go. It would kick and then die. Maybe it had a heart attack or something, I don't know, you know, but it died in the fight. I got it in quick. I mean it was summertime but we were fishing a spring creek so the water was freezing cold. You know, there was really no reason for it, but yeah, that was kind of a bummer, but at least that was a male, you know, and the other one was a hatchery fit anyway. So, man, it probably wasn't hurting anything, but it was kind of strange.

Tim Pantzlaff: 59:00

And then, well then I did have one summer run fish die on me and that kind of taught me that you can't fish for them during the summer when the water's too warm. But I was a kid then, I was probably 17 or so. I had one hooked to Skamania and it made a couple of runs and jumped out of the water once and I thought the fish came off and I was just, all of a sudden I just cranked it in and it was twirling and all this blood was coming out and I was just like what in the world, you know. So I mean, I took that fish and talking to Marty at the fly shop, he's just like oh yeah, the water's way too warm. You know, if you want to fish for them you got to go closer to the lake where the water is more temperate.

Tim Pantzlaff: 59:47

So we just kept on pushing further and further toward Lake Michigan where the water would be cooler, because we have a real quick tide, man Like it's some areas that'll last for like an hour and then it flows out for an hour. You know, not like an ocean tide tide, but it's just a real quick tide. In some areas it can last up to four hours. You know, between the bay, green bay, through death's door, into lake michigan. You know it's a pretty big point point and you know a massive to 40 miles wide and it's got to be. What is that? 360 miles from south to north, right, and all that water's got to flow back in Lake Michigan.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:00:44

But yeah, the tide movement moves in cold water and if the, if we have westerly winds, it shears all the warm water pushes out to the middle of the lake and then the cool water comes close to shore. And that's typically when the you know, when the steelhead want to come in close to shore, do some feeding. Some of them will run up in the rivers at that time, but the rivers in the summer can be drought conditions and very warm and there's nowhere for them really to typically go, if that makes any sense. So they'll kind of get stuck in that estuary, watch and sit down there, and it's relatively safe to fish for them out there because the water is usually colder.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:01:30

Lake Michigan is a pretty cold body of water. It usually keeps everything pretty comfortable for the fish, you know, and they wouldn't be, you know. But I see dudes that'll go up. I usually just wait until the water starts to cool off and then I'll go after them. I can patiently, you know, but all guys aren't like that. They'll go up there and start throwing spoons at them and stuff. It's like scatter, you know, so funny.

Andrew Barany: 1:02:00

Yeah, and I mean education. You know, I definitely didn't handle every single fish in my life properly you know, there is. There is a lot of. You know, when I before I did any form of fly fishing, I would go do power bait and worms at the dock and, uh, most of those fish would always die anyways, you're hooking them in their throat. So I'd keep like every fish and then I was eating all of them and then eventually I got to the point where I had a few go bad or like freeze or burn.

Andrew Barany: 1:02:38

And I was like right then, and there I was like, well, I'm not keeping anymore. So I kept doing it, but I kept killing fish. And so I was like in this like pickle, like what's what's going on. And that's actually when I started, um, that's like right around when I started fly fishing and I was like, oh, I could just put them back. And then I did commercial fishing and I don't have, I have no want to kill fish anymore.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:03:06

Wow marshall fishing. That's a rough job, dude that was that was something, man, yeah, yeah it was something it did it didn't, I would never do it again.

Andrew Barany: 1:03:18

With what I know now and with all the you know, out here we got our salmon. Um, that that's the big ticket out here. I mean, yes, for fly fishing or for fishing for fun, steelhead but like, our rivers are known for our salmon and, yeah, our west coast ecosystem needs them, so bad, um, and the amount of you know, half dead salmon that I had to throw back because they like did some kind of closure for a little short time to let fish through. But of course you're still fishing, or allowed to fish, but then you're of course, catching the ones that you're trying to let through, but you just have to let them go dead or like try to. You're supposed to put them in tanks to revive them. Um, you know, I guarantee no one's doing that, or very, very select few people, people that love the fish, would be doing that, but people that are out there for a paycheck aren't trying to revive.

Andrew Barany: 1:04:24

You know 50 fish that just came up a line. Just, you know what I mean. So, like the waste gill nets, you know they could be like, oh, spring salmon's closed. Well, if you gill netted and you got a ton of spring salmon back in the ocean they go, so like at the amount of waste just had me right away I was like I will never do that's wrong, do that again and that's that's just how it's always been, aside from when it was wild wild west and they didn't tell you what you could and couldn't keep. You could just keep whatever you wanted, but even then they probably kept high ticket items more than they would keep you know.

Andrew Barany: 1:05:02

You know. So the greed the greed for money is is really one of the biggest things for our salmon. You know they were doing the fish farms, our wild salmon. We're starting to get diseases, you know everything it's just like. But we did have an amazing return of chum salmon. But we did have an amazing return of chum salmon. Yeah, the only thing that's that stuck out for our salmon this year, I think, is maybe some closures that happened up in Alaska so that let a lot more fish through, which is good. So hopefully this is a consistent thing that we see the numbers like this, because it described by this older guy.

Andrew Barany: 1:05:49

He said to me that it looked like how he remembered the rivers being when he was younger in the bountiful amount, because there was basically like a hundred thousand more chum salmon that came into our river, so there's sections that were just like carpets across the whole thing and he was like it was beautiful.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:06:11

I was like yeah, it was crazy, oh, that's, that's you know, like it was a really good run across the board, like, um, uh, the west coast got a great run of steelhead from bc all the way through Washington this year. The Clearwater saw really really good numbers of fish. So you know, let's hope that, um, you know, some of this stuff is sticking because I, you know, I, the commercial fishermen, they don't want to go out there just to wreck something, because that's how they're making their living, you know. So it's not all of them, you know, and there might be a select few, and I think a lot of the US and Canadian boats are probably, you know well, not probably. They have more rules and regulations and they're highly regulated and they'll get fines for doing the wrong thing when it's not like that everywhere else in the country or in the world, I want to say right. So you know, I don't want to, you know, like, call out any countries, but you know some of them, they don't care.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:07:20

Yeah, dude, they just take them all. Let's take them all, it'll be fine. Just take every, take every, everything that gets in their bottom trawling. Yeah, and it's, you know, again, feeding the planet. And obviously that's an important thing. And I'm not about to look at, you know, someone living on an island out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and say, well, you shouldn't fish out in the ocean for sustenance, you know, but there's a big difference between that and industrial. You know industrial fishing when you see these fish pulling in hundreds of tons in each net and they have processing stations right there and it's all about just bringing in. I don't, I think some of them just fit around the clock, dude, and boats come and take, take supply off, bring supplies in and they just stay fishing forever. That's what they do. It's a floating factory and uh it is.

Andrew Barany: 1:08:25

It's uh, it's something that know. Even the little brief moment that I got to see into the world, um, and to hear the difference on how the fisheries, did you know, from now versus 40 years ago, when my captain started, um, you know, he was like, yeah, it's just night and day difference. So it's like and we know this as humans, we've like, we've experienced these things before where we've overfished areas and there is nothing left, basically, and then it bounced back. So it's like it, you know, as long as it's not like there's legitimately not one salmon left in the world, yeah, there could always be salmon. Same with steelhead, you know. Yeah, steelhead are a little more finicky, I would say, if without real knowledge on it, but I would assume they're a little more finicky, but yeah I think what we're facing is a lot of like, you know, obviously, overfishing, overharvesting, a lot of habitat destruction.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:09:34

You know, overtaking and waste is obviously a big problem. You know, the oceans seem to be warming. You know, um, we're definitely getting to the edge. You know, the end of the of an ice age. You know, do kind of believe the earth is warming and the. The temperatures are accelerating faster than what's normal. We've seen warmer temperatures than this on the planet previously. Is kind of what some of the scientists are saying.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:10:11

But usually the fluctuation isn't so abrupt, you know, but there could be all sorts of environmental reasons. I mean, I mean, obviously, chopping down all the rainforests and everything is just a bad idea. Chopping down all the rainforests and everything is just a bad idea. You know, everybody knows it's a bad idea. But you know, I mean it could come from. You know, the the sun also has a 14 year cycle that we go up and down on and you know, um, there might be other environmental things that we're not understanding. You know, I think that's just kind of the cycle that the world goes through it. You know, we're coming out of a time when probably got blasted by a meteorite which blocked out the sun, which, you know, turned everything into a polar winter. You know, all the way down through North America at a sheet of ice, you know they stay a couple miles thick, you know, and that's what kind of created the Great Lakes. I mean, those are only, I don't know, I think they say like 10,000 to 15,000 years old, you know. So they're not even that old of bodies of water in the grand scheme of things. So I mean some, you know, the water had to get up super high at that point to basically have the polar ice caps slide down and grow to that lard. I definitely take global warming over global cooling. You know global cooling would be harder for us to deal with than global warming, but any of it's not good, you know any of it's not good, you know Any of it's not good in my opinion, you know. I just I think that's what we're facing more than anything Like stripers are marching north, you know, but as the seas are warming, you know areas like the Miramichi and those areas that didn't really have a decent striper run, now there's tons of them.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:12:13

You know Maine and Nova Scotia they went through a pretty, you know, had a great heyday of Atlantic salmon. Now they're trying to reintroduce them and they are getting a run but's not a a fishable run of atlantics, um, but I mean they got to run a gauntlet of, you know, 20 to 40 pound ocean stripers that are pre-spawn. You know how is? How's the smoke gonna make it through that gauntlet of bassman man, you know, and I know that, I know that has switched.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:12:50

I've talked to some buddies. Well, yeah, I mean, I've talked to some buddies, dude, and they they're like wow, stripers and the, you know there was never any stripers there 35 years ago. Well, there is now, you know. So species definitely find their niches and things, right, you know. And salmon and steelhead and Atlantic salmon, they like cold right, never going to completely eradicate them because you know they'll just keep on pushing further and further north, finding the cold water. You know, I'm sure they're doing that now. You know changing, you know I'm not sure exactly. I know they say a fish will come right back, but I, I don't know, I I still think that some of the fish wander and go in other places because oh, I vouch for that.

Andrew Barany: 1:13:43

100 at least with salmon. Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, they want to spread. You know, genetically they have to right, you don't want to be with your cousin your whole life Exactly.

Andrew Barany: 1:13:58

But like, how would we have gotten, you know, 100,000 basically extra chum this year if they always went back to their home river? Is it all from us? And then, uh, we got a hatchery as um spring um or a king salmon hatchery on the uh cowogen and they have uh groups of people that come up and down the rivers, spawn boats and they collect the carcasses um they've cut it.

Andrew Barany: 1:14:26

They've cut it out. Their heads open, um, and there's I don't remember what the organ is called, but it's basically their, their ear. They have a way of like stamping it or lasering. I don't really know how they do that part, but they're able to tell like oh, this, this spring salmon came from our hatchery, or no, it didn't.

Andrew Barany: 1:14:47

Oh, wow and whether that's like every single one. They're capable of doing it too as fry, or if they're just, like you know, guessing, guesstimating or something. I'm not sure. But um, yeah, and then we have um pink salmon runs. That's stronger every second year, I believe it's on the even year or the odd year, I don't remember. Anyways, I don't get to go fish those because I'm out guiding by that time, but they fluctuate.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:15:21

The pink salmon got accidentally introduced in the Great Lakes and they're doing tremendously, man, you know, we actually there were some areas that the DNR and the MMR had to actually weigh up the quota to try to get the numbers back down to reasonable, because they were just breeding out of control. Man, you know, like, literally, I remember going to a few spots below like a waterfall, where I had to walk a couple miles down from the waterfall just to find a spot in the water where I could cast and not snag a fish. Every single cast, that many fish in there.

Andrew Barany: 1:16:08

Um, like, so that's yeah yeah, that's what we experienced this year was there are certain spots where it'd be like you cast out. You snag a chum salmon, get it off, break off whatever, cast again chum salmon, cast again chum salmon. So it was like I was talking to my friends that went down to fish it and they're, um, they're like, yeah, we didn't get anything on on uh streamers today we got one coho on a spoon, but it was amazing that that coho was able to find the spoon in between all the the chum salmon. They were like layered like across the river, you know, bunk bed style on top of each other so, yeah, that's what they were like.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:16:55

With that they you would see a chinook and then there was just pink salmon, like layered deep, literally, would swim up and over the top of the chinook and some of these areas up in here. Man, they actually crossbred naturally and made a new species called a puna. So it's half pink salmon, half king salmon, because the spawning such close quarters, you have thousands of kings and thousands of pink salmon and they crossbred. But you know, I mean, again, it's just the great lakes, uh, we have, yeah, a whole bunch of inbred fish. You know, that's really what it is.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:17:34

You're talking about the gene pool not being able to to move. I mean, you know the department of natural resources has been using, you know, same old tired stock, I mean they, they gather them from. You know, like same old tired stock, I mean they gather them from. You know, like the Barua River strain and there's some natural spots over in Michigan too that you know that Little Manistee, that's one that they use and stock those all over. But you know, again, they're moving around the gene pool that way, you know. But it'd be great to get some thrift stock, you know, but a lot of the areas by us. They don't want natural reproduction because they feel like the numbers can get out of control if they're just left and there isn't enough fitting pressure.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:18:22

And you know, like in 2008 we had a pretty big collapse of king salmon and snook and all the fish throughout the great lakes got real small, real skinny numbers were way down. It took a long time for lake to now the lake has bounced back and we've been seeing much larger fish, well-fed fish. So we just kind of went through some weird cycle. I don't know if it was a cycle or if you know if that VHS disease spread into our. There was a disease called VHS that actually came from the Wisconsin hatchery. I remember Tammy talking about it a long time ago that there was some strange disease, that they didn't know what it was and they were, you know they. I don't know if they were closing down a hatchery or if it was closed for cleaning and, yeah, again, I no one really knows, but they're right around that same.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:19:24

We had a massive bait fish collapse and then one of my buddies he's a fish biologist from Ontario and he was saying that the salmon that they were finding dead because we had a huge die-off, believe it or not, these salmon were stuffed with fish but were deemed that they starved to death. And he said that the nutrient value had gotten so low in the lake because of the guava and zebra mussel that it was like asking a salmon to live on celery, because you can only live on celery so long before you'll starve to death. So I thought that was extremely interesting. So I thought that was extremely interesting. You know like I don't know, but we face new invasive species here constantly. Most of those were introduced back, you know, back in the day when they didn't care, right Back in the 30s, through the yeah, but they were still coming through. In the 90s, man, we got these gobies that came in around that time. Those are not good, you know like.

Andrew Barany: 1:20:40

What's a goby?

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:20:42

It's like they call it a round green goby. It comes out of the Atlantic Ocean. I mean, if you look at the actual infrastructure of the Great Lakes, like you have the St Lawrence Seaway and then you make your way up to St Lawrence and then you hit Niagara Falls, well, that was an impenetrable barrier. Nothing from the ocean could co-mingle with the Great Lakes. After a certain point, when the ice shelf came down, it actually crushed the Earth's mantle and it's still springing back up. So lake superior is, you know, technically getting, you know, shallower. I mean, it's 1500 feet deep but it's, you know, it's eventually going to be 1400 and 80 feet deep. You know it's just going to spring back.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:21:29

But when that crushed down, that's how you know, we got the brook trout, uh, lake trout, the grayling got in that way, and then, as that ice shelf came down, they probably had access to Ungava Bay up through that corridor, through there, and they could potentially get underneath through there and they could potentially get underneath. And then, um, and obviously, once it jammed and stopped where it did, when it was melting off, it made rivers that would flow then into the mississippi river and my theory is that's how we got the, you know, the northern pike, and we got, uh, you know, muskies, the sheep's head, catfish, all those Gulf of Mexico style of fish that have made their way up and, you know, basically populated the Great Lakes at that time. So you know, like I said, the Brookshere, and you know pretty much every river has brook trout in it, and the Mississippi also has brook trout in it as well, I believe, but probably not like the Aragosha. You know, those are that's a little, you know different, because we had a strain called the holster brook trout which is very, very large, similar to, like the orphan run brookies that out in newfoundland. Right, you know, so they're, they go out to the lake, they, they only enter the rivers to spawn and they'll, you know. You know I'm not other, you know I don't know what the.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:23:12

I think the world record came out again I'm 13, 14 pounds somewhere around. There could be wrong, but it was in that realm. You know we have big lakes, growth, big fish. Everything that gets up in the lakes gets big. Our muskies get huge, 40, 50 pounds, and you know so. It's an awesome body of water. Nothing as cool as the pacific ocean. But you know, I don't know it's a big body of water you know there's things going on, man it's, it's a really cool.

Andrew Barany: 1:23:48

I haven't got to fish out that way at all, but I don't know, you got a friend out here.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:23:53

Man, you can go out and fish, there we go.

Andrew Barany: 1:23:56

Musky in the river sounds like my jam, so I've never really had him.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:24:02

Oh yeah, you love it, dude.

Andrew Barany: 1:24:03

Have you done one on a spay rod, have you? Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely yeah. Oh, man Are you tossing freaking massive flies at that point as well.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:24:15

Yeah, I got my own style of flies that I kind of make. I'll be making a video and a demo on on those pretty soon. I got um, I've just been kind of working on the, basically the storyline for it now. But yeah, I what I do is I take up. Well, I mean, I don't know if you've noticed that on any of my time videos I pretty much do everything backward you know, I want everything to be in reverse.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:24:42

So I just tie it in reverse and then fold it back, um, but one day I was hanging out by Alex's house. We were gonna go steelhead fishing the next morning and all of a sudden I just kind of sprung off his couch and went I have an idea. And then I took the b10s hook or the A-Rex hook or whatever he had there and I put it in the vice backward and I pinned the hook point tying essentially a dullberg diver or a buford style fly where I got the long, you know, medium long, light long and then I spun, you know, almost like a gigantic mudler head I suppose, and so, and it looks really weird, you look at it, you're like, well, what the heck? The hook's sticking out the wrong way. But once you fold that fly back it makes this big hollow route and you can cast those pretty nice on a double-handed. You know, I usually like a use like an 800 grain with a real short stout sink tip right to 60 pound floor of carbon right to the fly. So it is about as compact as you can get.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:26:02

And, uh, the muskies come up out of the uh, you know out, they up into their spawning rhyme and they, they feed similar to like steelhead at that time, you know, they're kind of I don't want to say sitting in such like. They'll feed, like kind of like a winter steelhead. They're in that water. Where it's not, it's swingable but it isn't necessarily super fast. If they're near the fast water they're usually right on the edge of it and ambush, you know, so that we have a lot of death coming out of the river in the springtime. So they kind of push below these dams on the Great Lakes and they'll run up and they'll get a feeding station and they're extremely aggressive because they're coming out of the cold lake which at that time can be obviously freezing cold, I mean 40 degrees maybe, maybe 41, I don't know. And then they could run up in the rivers where the rivers, all of a sudden, in the springtime they can be much warmer. So they'll go through a 10, 15 degree temperature swing, just coming from the lake running up in the river. Well, 10 degree, 8 degree switch in water temperature and they put the seed heavy, you know, before they spawn, and then they'll go through a, you know, a about a three week spawning cycle, I suppose, two week, you know, and um, then they kind of just put their way up into the stallows and they kill and they, you know, they let the sun beat on them and they warm up and then really, once the bugs start to hatch and I think they get start getting bit by a bunch of bugs, then they kind of get pushing themselves out deeper and deeper and then the great lake strain or the clear strain now they'll go out into the bay and they get basically locked in the in the shuffle. You know they'll chase around big schools of white fish or you know, and so they aren't really typically relating to too much structure until I don't know really, by maybe one by the time august.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:28:10

Then there's a few fish that spawn in around certain areas where they, the fish will start to concentrate, where you can have a prayer to catch one, you know, otherwise it would just be happenstance, because you know I mean 30 miles wide and being such a big region, even if there is, you know, yeah, I don't know how many they the Department of Natural Resources since 1970 has been putting 120,000 fish in stocking every day. So that's a huge amount of fish and they're already a viable baby muskie and our habitat's pretty good and our food base. We have a huge biomass of rough fish and shad. Those Golby things get just absolutely devastated by those muskies too, you know, like whitefish, cisco, smelt, alewife, you know, those are all on the walleye, I mean, but a muskie, lily, anything that just gets in their way, man, lily, ducks, baby ducks, rats, muskrat, snakes, I mean, especially in a river environment, anything I mean. Imagine you're a 40-inch long fish, right, you're a big predator and the mouth opens up, big and it's just razor-sharp teeth.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:29:45

You know you get into an area in a river where you get into a, you know, a spot where you can't really have too much of a migration of fish or everything kind of just gets penned up in a little area. I'm pretty sure, like those muskies could actually eat everything in the river and now they're just waiting for something to fall in the river so they could eat it. You know, so a lot of times we're beating the bank, that's. You know they want to be in that shady area where there's deep water, a structure to relate to, where they can either duck underneath or be the first thing there to jump on something. If it jumps in the water like a frog or a snake, comes out of the book or a mouse, anything that gets in the river, I mean shoot, though you know they'll, they'll eat anything.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:30:33

Baby ducks they, the baby ducks, get absolutely devastated on my parents lake. We would actually make a joke. It'd be like mom would come by with like eight little baby ducklings. Then, you know, you'd kind of get used to the markings of the female ducks so you could kind of tell them apart also. They come through and there'd be seven. They, a couple days later come through and there'd be six, and then by the time they end, you know, there'd be maybe two ducks left, or the muskies would eat the rest you know, I've seen a pretty cool fish.

Andrew Barany: 1:31:04

I've seen a video and it's it's kind of heartbreaking to watch. He was like, oh yeah, the mom's trying to attack the water and like what do you do?

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:31:13

yeah, I, I've actually seen it once in person. This is the greatest story ever. So we, you know like, obviously love fly fishing and whatever else. But you know, sometimes getting a six pack of beer with your buddies and going out on the river catfishing is a lot of fun too. So I was fly fishing to catch bait, right. So we were kind of floating down the side of the river and I was, uh, tossing a big streamer up kind of hoping to catch some bait, and, uh, so we could cut it up and we cut basically a big, huge fish about the you know about. You know, cut into the largest chunk. You can put it on a circle hook and throw it into the massive pool and let it soak in there, hoping to get one of these. And throw it into the massive pool and let it soak in there, hoping to get one of these gigantic flatheads that we had. Well, anyway, floating down, my buddy's sitting there and he's just like man, just once.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:32:06

I'd like to see one of those little baby ducks just get taken out by a muskie. And here comes these little ducks along the shore and right as he finished that story, there was this big splash, all the duck they took off or whatever, and we were kind of laughing and we were, you know, thinking it was like grass carp or some crap. I'm like no man, it was a muskie and I tossed my fly over there and it hit the water one strip and that muskie jumped on that leech and uh, you know, it was pretty good size rabbit strip or whatever. So I guess leech rabbit strip and had it up to the boat no bite guard on. But that was really cool to see that muskie going after those baby ducks.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:32:46

Man, obviously it wasn't successful, except it had a mouthful of duck and it went to eat my leech. But I mean, man, that leech hit the water, man, and it was like I grabbed the fly line and stripped and it was like I grabbed the fly line and stripped and it was almost like I stripped it into the muskie's mouth. It was literally that fast, you know. So it pounced on, I added up to the bow and it was smaller. It was maybe only, like you know, 42, 43, 44 inches. So it was a good one, but it wasn't super massive and with no bite guard, know what would bike guard be?

Andrew Barany: 1:33:20

I don't have to worry about that yeah bike guard.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:33:22

Well, I mean like wire again, not to bring up larry again, but what he taught me in his his pike video. Uh, berkeley makes this like this strand braid where it has like a meltable nylon over the top of it and what you do is you fold it over, you stick, you know. You basically fold it over to a? U and you pinch it, put the line through, wrap it back on itself, put it back through the hole. You cinch that down. One overhead knot, one way, one overhead knot, the over the back way. You tighten and cinch that all down. It's called like an improved Albright. And then you go up to the fly and you put it through and then you twist it and you kind of hold it on something like you know the side of the tackle box and you hit it with a lighter and it melts itself back together. So then you don't have any clasps. Um, another technique I mean, if you want to have like a little more of a stealthy bike guard, some of the new modern uh fluorocarbons are strong enough to land a fifth, you know, maybe in that 60 pound category, and I like using the, the non-wire bite guard. I just been using the 60 pound straight to the fly, you know, because I they aren't shy. You could probably tie the fly right on the end of the sinking tip and they wouldn't even shy away from it. They're that aggressive that it's just like you know line. That is meaningless.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:34:55

These fish, you know uh a. A pike feeds at uh 1.5 the speed of sound. So that's one and a half times the speed of sound when they accelerate to eat. You know pike and muskies that that is their acceleration rate. So they go from zero to I don't know how many miles. That is an hour. But it's so fast that you can't even really see it. You know what I mean. This is even frame rate. You know, a lot of times they'll come on that thing so quick that they I think they kill things faster because it's safer for them. So if they hit it real hard, chances are it's going to be stunned because they always have to swallow it head first.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:35:48

And I've seen muskies in the springtime swimming around with dead suckers in their mouth and you can see them. They've taken the sucker in but it's sitting like a T-bone and you can see them there. They've taken the the sucker in but it's sitting like a t-bone and you can see them swimming around with it and they're just, they're basically swimming around until the thing stops kicking and bleeds to death and then they uh, you know, they somehow orientate it head down. I've never actually seen that happen, but I've seen fish swimming around with other fish that are too big for them to really just swallow in one bite. Right, we're talking a sucker. That might have been, you know, 18, 19 inches long, or like a baby pike. I've seen that as well where muskies, will you know, kill baby pike just because they're there, you know, just because it fits down their gullet, you know so aggressive, 60 pounds.

Andrew Barany: 1:36:43

What would you do if you had to break off like if you snagged a tree? Yeah, well, yeah it.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:36:51

Yeah, it's an issue. Break the. You know, typically you'd break the stinking tip.

Andrew Barany: 1:36:56

Yeah that's what I'm thinking is when I, when I, uh, did king salmon more, when I was well, not that long ago anyways, when I was doing king salmon, I told myself I'd never fish with more than 15 pound tests because yeah, you know, but I guess you know you get out to the salt water, that's probably needs to go up. You go get musky, that needs to go up. So there is a time and place.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:37:23

But um, yeah, you know, and when I'm on that point too, that's. That's a great point. I don't want everybody thinking that I'm using just straight 60 all the time. But when I'm swinging for them, I I am, and usually 60-pound and 30-pound. A lot of times the hooks will bend. I'm using usually B10S Yamagatsu hooks, so those will usually typically bend before you break the line. Or you can take again that same type of situation where you can put the 60-pound bike guard on and then I'll use something like you know, 40-pound Berkeley big game. You know something that's way overstout. But again, it's always a risk.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:38:13

Muskie, fishing on the fly is very hard on the equipment. My musky rods, they all have, you know, coated guides. They don't really have steel or titanium tripping guides. These are, all you know, almost like a spinning rod in the way where they have the no say. It's not cubic cicorny, that's the wrong word, it's a PVD style coating. So it's a ceramic coated ring right, and then that won't eat through the guides, you know, because it's just like I said, it's very hard on trying to strip that big of a fly. You're going to cut through something and you'll get runners on there. So then he you know I had a, I guess, chippewa rod company. He builds like a one piece. So I got my, my 12 weight, and then I have a another 12 weight, thomas and thomas, and a 10 weight that I use, and obviously a nine as well, because there's sometimes in the spring you don't need to use such a a massive rod, a nine weight would. It's more than adequate because you're not having to cast far.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:39:27

The flies are not gigantic, they're a little bit more reasonable. You know six, seven, eight inches long. But you know that's pretty, actually kind of a still a pretty big spring flop. You know the double reverse ones in the spring might even be too much of a presentation for them. Sometimes I've gotten them on like little frog poppers that are maybe only three, four inches long. You know they don't always want that gigantic meal because it's dangerous for a fish to eat such a big meal. You know it's what the again, what the infrequent said. There's certain time periods where they don't want something gigantic, it's just too much of a risk. So they they're feeding on that. You know that, that four to six to eight inch one, and do it several times a day. You know more so. But you know again, you get a 50-inch fish and you know the wrong prey item gets in there, it's going to take down a big item.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:40:31

You know, my nephew works for the Fish and Game and I believe it was him that was telling me that he was part of the shocking program. They'll go in and they'll shock lower river systems to study the sturgeon population and stuff. And they shocked a couple muskies that were larger than the world record, apparently at the mouth of this one river. That I don't really want to say, but yeah, they uh, and they were two separate female fish that were larger than the one that were taken out of the St Lawrence in the, I believe in like 1920. So that's kind of encouraging, you know.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:41:22

I mean it's definitely a big body of water. The biggest one I've ever heard of taken on fly was my buddy Eric got one On a Spako, mind you, it was pretty cool. 56 is the biggest one I've ever heard of, ever seen. That's the biggest muskie I've ever seen taken on fly. But yeah, pretty, I like it's kind of synonymous with Wisconsin too. We're known for our cheese, the green bay packers, muskies, you know, musk launch and small mouth bass. I suppose that'll too. Yeah, green Bay Packers, muskies, musk Launch and Smallmouth Bass. I suppose too yeah.

Andrew Barany: 1:42:03

Now that's 56 inches man Dude, they're. That's actually insane.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:42:12

Yeah, and the ones that live it's over 4 feet.

Andrew Barany: 1:42:15

you know, that's like that's over 5 feet. You know that's like, yeah, that's over five feet, is it? Yeah, yeah, it is Holy moly.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:42:24

Yeah, and the things they got shoulders to back it up, I mean that can be a 50-pound fish as well. Yeah, they get big man, Like I said, the biomass that they have the feet on.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:42:36

It's insane said that the biomass that they have the feed on is. I mean once a fish gets over, you know, the. Once the trout get over five to six pounds, they don't really have any real predators. But the eagles I mean a muskie could, you know potentially take down an eight pound fish. But I mean once the muskie gets to that seven, eight, 8, 9 pound range, they're, you know, they're pretty much good to go. What's going to kill them?

Andrew Barany: 1:43:03

right, that's true heck, if a muskie that size got an eagle in its mouth, it would kill the eagle. Oh, absolutely, dude. It might not eat it, but it would drown it, or something like oh yeah I mean like if that's yeah it.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:43:25

Well, I mean, an eagle is a pretty powerful bird. I don't even know if I've ever heard of that happening, but you know no more.

Andrew Barany: 1:43:34

So, though, if musky actually got a mouth on the eagle, oh yeah, musky would win for sure, I believe.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:43:42

I think so, man, they're, they're, mean they got tons of teeth. Um, yeah, and, like I said, in eating so quickly, you know, it almost seems superhuman to say an animal can feed in a burst acceleration scene one and a half times the speed of sound. It doesn't even sound logical, right, I mean, how does a fish do that without raking its spine or whatever? But these are, they're kind of like gators, you know, they got they're all, they're all. Tail, you know, you got the tail. A big adipose, a big pectoral fin, I mean they just have big fins and they're. You know they don't, they can't swim quickly for too long, but they have that burst of speed similar to maybe something like an alligator. It's a similar, you know, or it's just about that burst speed.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:44:37

And yeah, I mean, like sometimes, when you you talked earlier about them and that figure, eight, man, they, they do, they'll just come out of nowhere and all of a sudden you have a fish. You didn't even really you're just, you know, you do the figure. Oh, by the boat, obviously, you just because muskies, like, change the speed, change the direction and change of depth. So a lot of times when you cast it out and it hits the water first trip. You got them. There's a you know there's a discernible splash and then a movement. They rack on it and they hammer it. Then you know you usually with a sinking line, you know like if you're stripping through always a sinking line or intermediate, you know either, uh, you know a triple density or, um, intermediate line or something with a heavier sink tip that's kind of short and stout, so you can really chalk up on that and you know so the fly is kind of diving as it's going through his movement.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:45:40

All of a sudden you're like you see them, now you can strip that fly up to your tip. Well, now you have a, you know, basically a nine inch, a nine foot long rod where you can change depth, aim, speed, come around the corner, dive it down. So you got all those different triggers and they follow it really fast. You know, as you're going down you a lot of times when you come around that corner, that's when it's kind of it's as fast as point. It shows the profile to of the side of the fish to it for that second and they, they, you know they hit it right at the head almost every time. They want to hit that bait at the gill structure, head structure to crutch it till it and and obviously I would imagine, get it closer to the head, going down the gullet first, because you can't swallow a fish from tail first, because all the tines will stick in right. So they got it orientated head first to suck it down so everything can actually go down for digestion.

Andrew Barany: 1:46:39

Um, but yeah, it's like a snake, yeah, it's just like a snake it would, it would, it would play with it until it got it to the right spot.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:46:48

Yeah, I'd imagine they could probably, once it's dead, they could probably cough it out and grab it again and then put it around a little bit, cough it out and grab it again, and then put it around, a little bit, cough it out and grab it again. You know, but they, you know, I think they clamped out on it if it's bigger. And, like I said, when I saw those fish swimming around in the fallows, one I saw with a little baby pike, but you know, probably 20 inches long or so, and then the other one was a big sucker, which was pretty, pretty great. You know, to see that twice, I mean it's, it's pretty neat. You know, it's definitely mutual type of shit. You know, like it's, it's fun. I don't know, I love fish, as you can tell. I could talk about it to the end of time, dude, you know, I just Well, let's um hop back on the spay reels for a second.

Andrew Barany: 1:47:40

Yeah, man, um. So let's say I was someone that uh was looking to buy a spay reel. You said that you like to communicate with those people. What are some of the questions you normally ask, like you're trying to find out details to better suit them to what they're looking for.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:48:02

Yeah, so I I make a three inch reel, um, again for that bamboo nine foot, five weight graphite fight. The next size that we jump up to is a 3.25. You know that's in that. You know that 567 style range single hander uh has some bamboo applications. And then we're kind of getting into like what I consider being a spade shrouding size reel. So it's kind of nice to put on like maybe like a 10 and a half or 11 foot, 3-4 weight. There's a real typical spade trout style. Then we jump up to my 3.5. You know again, that's stilla trout reel. But it's got enough room where you can get steelhead carp 7-8 size. It's kind of sweet on like a 5-6, 11 foot switch, real cool, real. That's kind of what I developed it for was a five, six, eleven footer.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:49:04

Um, then you got your next golfing demographic. You know that's golfing and and fishing are very similar. You can't just go with a putter. So your next size up that we typically use would be in that 12 to 12 and a half foot range, five, six, seven demographic. That's when you jump up to my three and three quarter. And then I have my three different sizes of four inches that I developed, like the scanty, the skagit and the spay and that kind of fills in the gambit from that. You know that 13 to 15, 16, 17 foot long double hander.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:49:41

So the question would be, what size rod and what are you going to be going after? Some type of grain window, you know. If you want to have a one piece line or basically a mono with a shooting head type of system like your Skagit, scandi, again, it might dictate getting a larger reel or a smaller reel. So yeah, it's kind of all spelled out on the website and a lot of times you're going to be like I don't care, I want the brass reel because it's pretty, that's cool, I get it. But yeah, I'm always reachable. You just basically give me a call. I mean, obviously it's 12 o'clock on a Sunday right now when we're talking. Yeah, appreciate it.

Andrew Barany: 1:50:37

Yeah, are it.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:50:38

Yeah, are you kidding me? No, it's no big deal. I'm kind of a night owl, but yeah, that's, you know. And I just have so many different finish style options. You know different porting and things to kind of you different, different bearing systems, um, you know just just ways we can kind of get this further, kind of custom dialed weight wise. The capacity on the reels is off the hook. I mean, you can fit so much freaking line on my reels compared to most is what dudes are saying and it's the way that I build them. You know, straight cut. You know this is my wide that I use. This is that one that I shot with the Ruger. See that Uh-huh. My buddy brought it by the shop and this is titanium and the sales guy said it's bulletproofing. So it wasn't bulletproof because it shot all the way through. I to spool off of it, but it shot all the way through. It took a little bit of rebuilding but I wanted to use it, you know. So this is kind of my main.

Andrew Barany: 1:51:46

I was just using that just the other day and then so you use a reel that has had a bullet go through it?

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:51:56

yeah, yeah, a hollow ruger right here. See, there's the.

Andrew Barany: 1:52:00

Yeah, you may be the only person in the world that has continued Dominoff to do that.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:52:07

Yeah, that's probably what it is. I wasn't going to be the guy that said that we were cleaning the gun and it was this grappa's gun, and I'm just like you know, yeah. So we just I took we were cleaning the gun and it was this grandpa's gun, and I'm just like you know, um, yeah. So we just I took this fool off, you know, and it it did. It deformed everything. It hit the gear, blew the whole year through it. It blew the whole housing. It had this like most excellently beautiful, like splattering of aluminum. And so I you know, and splattering of aluminum. And so you know, and I popped it all back in the lathe and I machined it all out flat and put it back together and yeah, man, it's still still running nice. I can't fly with it anymore because it still got the um, the powder residue on it.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:52:52

I was trying to fly it out to the Somerset show and they pulled me aside. I was like, whose bag is this? I'm just like, yeah, that's my bag. What is all that cord running around there? They're running a wandering, wanting this little wand over it and it's like it's got. It's got a gunpowder residue on it.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:53:12

I'm like I looked at him. I'm like dude, you got to be kidding me. I'm like I looked at him. I'm like dude, you got to be kidding me. I'm like you obviously can read English correct. He's just like, well, yeah, and I'm like, read it. It says bulletproof on it. I shot it with a gun, you know. I'm like you can't take it, like you're not taking my reel, you know, like you know, because he wanted me to throw it out or whatever, I'm just like no. And someone with some common sense came over and I'm just like, hey man, look at this, I'm going to a fly fishing show. This is a joke, right, I mean it's. I wanted to scratch out the bullet proof and put bullet resistant because it wasn't bulletproof man.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:53:56

It took that titanium, that that hollow point just blew that shit just right through it. You know, um, and it was a pretty close range. You know it's kind of behind a tree because I didn't know if the thing was going to ricochet. You know, you don't ever know. I mean um, but yeah, the the third shot. I you know pretty good. You know that was like pretty. I wanted to try to hit it outside of the gear, but not hit the outside of the frame, and you got it right in the sweet spot. Like I said, I've run into dudes down the river and they've seen the advertisement for it and they're like, and you fish that thing. Yet I'm just like, well, yeah, man, take one minute. You know that's the coolest. People are going to start calling you and like, hey, man, I got this uh fly reel and you fish that thing. Yet I'm just like, well, yeah, man, take one minute you know, that's the coolest.

Andrew Barany: 1:54:38

People are going to start calling you and like hey, man, I got this.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:54:41

Uh, fly reel, I totally had guys from alaska saying I want to buy one with a actual bullet hole in it. I'm swear to god, and again we could I. I talked him out of it because I'm just like man, I can't be out there shooting, you know shoot reels.

Andrew Barany: 1:54:57

You know't be out there shooting reels.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:55:01

You know how many reels you might actually have to go through just to get one that you could reuse. And I told him I'd just shoot the plate. But I'm just like, honestly dude, I could bring it over to the drill press and, you know, drill, press a hole through it for you real quick. If you really want to have a one-ported reel, you know, hammer at it, make a stimulated one. But again, we just deemed it to be too cheesy. I'm just like I'm just going to build you a real, real you know, let's not shoot, shooting stuff.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:55:29

I mean it was totally illegal where I shot it already. You just bought it back behind the shop. I was in city limits, there was a river back there I I mean it wasn't like there was any danger or whatever. But talking to somebody after they're like, dude, you aren't supposed to be shooting rifles in town. I'm like, well, whatever, that was the insurance agency, you know, can't be shooting, can't be shooting hollow point Ruger's in town.

Andrew Barany: 1:55:56

Hey, we all learn lessons when we need to. That's when you needed to learn the lesson.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:56:04

Yeah, man. So basically I got it, you know, and then up to my four and a quarter, but those are getting used less and less these days. I mean I have a four and a quarter reel. I mean that's pretty huge dude. It takes a pretty speckled guy that wants something that tremendously large, especially in the classic style reel. I mean I don't it fits everything um, do you have like?

Andrew Barany: 1:56:32

sorry, I was looking through your uh, your website at one point the other day and then I got distracted by my son, so I didn't continue with it. Um, but have you only really stuck to the classics or have you done anything?

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:56:47

kind of, yeah, really just like yeah just the classics now, but I am developing a few other reels. Right now I'm working on one that's going to be Click and Paw and a Gist Drag. I do have a few other designs too, like kind of in the saltwater large arbor realm. The first introduction is going to be coming soon because you know I want to go down to Fish Tarpon, I want to get into that saltwater style thing and see what that's all about. So I gotta I'm gonna need reels to use. You know. I mean I got customers that use these out in the saltwater now for, like you know, inshore stuff. Uh, you know bone fish. Um, you know redfish. Um, you know maybe a jack. You know like a uh, not like the giant frivalli, but you know like the small jacks and stuff. And, um, you know he likes to go out with glass rods and catch bonefish with a click and paw reel or sharks, and he is the craziest dude. I love it when his videos come. They're always the most spectacular. It's just a, a 30-minute run of you know lightning-fast runs and you know bonefish or whatever. I guess they don't have any place to go but away at 106 miles an hour or whatever they do. I think it's like 20 or 30 miles an hour or something they run at. So that's. But yeah, I'll have to get out on the. I get up doing some bone fishing with, um, their pacific bones too. So they're pretty big ones, I guess you know. Um, yeah, it's pretty.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:58:29

Yeah, like I said, the saltwater seems to be, you know, I know there's, I guess, maybe more of a competition too in the. You know, I don't want to say that either. There's a lot of competition in the market across the board, but I think there's a few design elements that I feel like it can add something to the market. You know, to the market. You know, I think, what I did with spako I'm making an affordable reel. You know, 350 to 500 and I've stuck with that same price structure for 20 years. You know, maybe up up to by about 20, 30 or whatever over the years, but you for the most part, keeping them the same cost. I want to do the same thing with the saltwater reels. Just try to keep them high quality, high performance, affordable cost. But there's a few things that I do believe that haven't been done yet. There's a few things that I do believe that haven't been done yet Because I'm like you, I don't like to just say, well, let's just grab XYZ ABC thing and replicate.

Tim Pantzlaff: 1:59:51

I would never want to do that because someone's already done that and you've got to come up with something, at least original or otherwise. Who's going to have any? Come up with something, at least original or otherwise. Who's going to have any? I don't know. The fly fishing world is filled with enough stealing and acts and people ripping off the next guy. It's just it's not my scene, you know. I guess that's all that way across all manufacturing, I suppose, but it just seems like in the fly fishing market it's pretty. You know, I don't want to say non-original, because there's some pretty interesting reels out there, but for the most part she covered up the name.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:00:26

On most of these reels I think you'd have an extremely hard time telling who built it, right, you know. I mean, I could always tell something like an Islander reel, you know, because they have a specific look to them. They aren't like anybody else's. Or you know, it's like some of the ones that you know, like an hatch. It's just got the. It's just got a look of a hatch to it, you know. It's got the foot on it all machined in. It's cool. They brought something awesome to the market that way.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:01:01

And you know, and obviously I'm sure you've made the first way and um, you know, and obviously I forget who made the first sealed drag. You know, I know it was said something to do with stage and I believe that might have been. I think it might have been jack charlton. I don't want to say that for a fact, but I'm pretty sure jack was the first one to come up with a seal drag system which, again, I think that adds, you know, a level of um that people don't have to care for it as much, right until the seals blow. You know, and uh, then you know, obviously it's going to need some type of refurb at that point. But you know, obviously Jack's reels or the Mako's would never. You know that's never going to happen. It's a real high quality reel.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:01:53

But some of these that are mass produced, they're not made very well. You know they're meant to be. You know, I don't want to say expendable, but I think they have a shelf life. You know, and I don't know about the actual machining itself, but whenever you're trying to seal a shaft laterally, you know you're trying to put a seal over a shaft that's going to be spinning. I had a company that I had bought and, believe it or not, what we would replace on these gearboxes and these assemblies all the time was always the seals. The seals would go out. That was probably one of the largest maintenance items that we would sell in the industrial market was seals.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:02:36

And talking to some of these seal manufacturers, you know they say trying to seal a high-spinning shaft like that is extremely difficult and it actually has a shelf life. You know, because essentially what it is, it's either you know two sections of typically, you know, I mean obviously there's tons of materials but it's some type of teflon base where it's pressed together under spring load on both sides, you know, and then the series of using o-rings and other things to try to keep the water out of the environment. You know, and most of them are probably more, you know, waterproof than you know are they're water resistant than waterproof, you know. So if you really you know, let's just say you're bone fishing. Right Now you have a sealed environment where this fish is running away at, you know, 25, 30 miles an hour, however fast they go.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:03:44

Well, that drag seal there. There's nowhere for heat to dissipate out of Well thermally going to expand. What are you going to do? You're going to set the rod down in the water while this thing is razor hot and it goes from super hot to cool quick, which is again I think they call that osmosis or diffusion, one of the two. You know water is going to want to suck in that air and you know you let the bonefish go. Now you introduce one drip of saltwater inside of a sealed environment and you're going to have problems. You know so. But you know, like I said, nothing is nothing is foolproof in the last hundred percent, forever right, everything is going to need some type of maintenance and seems like most of these guys have it down where you can get that maintenance done. Or and I think guys are understanding too they got to have some type of maintenance to a high-end reel like that. You know you got to take care of it, or otherwise it's just gonna grow barnacles on it.

Andrew Barany: 2:04:51

I mean so well and I think, uh, I think a large portion, myself included, not so much at this present moment, but, um, you know, the willingness to get a new reel when yours isn't working that great has come around me enough times that I just bought another reel or I'm like, oh, that one's look at that, that is like that would look so good on my berkheimer rod, or this rod, my sage like, oh, I, you know so there's always those, uh, like I have a couple of reels that I did absolutely no maintenance to and they don't run as smooth as they could have, you know at this point and I just at that time I I assumed the reel was just getting older, whatever, so I bought new ones.

Andrew Barany: 2:05:41

But now I take, now I take my maintenance and you know, clean my lines and and do those things.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:05:48

Yeah, I spend more, time cleaning my lines than I do the surfing reels. I mean I I purposely don't take care of my reels just to test the right thing to do, man, like I mean I, you know, like I don't, I don't. Nothing I have is nice. I like all the reels that you would see me rolling. They're all rejected parts. They're all something that's wrong. They're all something I had to rig, or him, or whatever else, because something went wrong with them, fell on the floor, got a ding in them.

Andrew Barany: 2:06:20

You know, like this face got a ruger or got a ding in the. You know, like this faceplate, you've got a Ruger. You know, casual shop day stuff.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:06:26

You know, those holes were maybe a little bit too big. I ran the wrong program and then they drilled into each other. You know like.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:06:35

I'm just like ah man like it grabbed the wrong. You know I put it was my fault. I put, you know the inside holes were right, the outside ones. I didn't put the right number in the machine and they came in and wrecked one of my parts. Well, I'm not going to throw in the garbage can or throw in the recycling bin. I threw it on the side of the workbench and it sat there for like seven years and all of a sudden one day I'm like, ah, I'll just use this one, it's fine. Right, you know, same thing with the spool. There was something messed up. The actual frame is cracked, the foot there's a little rough spot in it. You know just stupid things. You know the S-handle had a big gouge out of it. It kicked out and hit the floor.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:07:20

You know that happens a lot of times You're polishing stuff by hand, and you know like, yeah, like a screw's, not on all the way, and they go shooting across like tommy boy, you know, and I'm like you know, I mean they will. You know, these are three phase high powered machines. They got some snot to them so once, once they grab something, it's going away at a pretty breakneck speed. But yeah, I just you know, we've just been throwing all those parts inside of a bin or whatever underneath the assembly table. And whenever I come up with, you know, something new I want to test out or whatever, I just grab the junk parts out of there and I kind of, you know frankenstein, something together for me to use. And it's like the kind of.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:08:07

The standing joke is like I only trout fish like three times a year, but every single time I go trout fishing I I have to build myself a trout reel because I never can keep one around. You, you know, everybody's just like you know. It's just, it's just hilarious. Guys like friends will stop by and like, dude, I just need a trout reel and like, well, here, just take this one, you know. Or a customer call I'm like I don't have anything in stock. Well, you don't have anything. I'm just like, well, I mean, I guess I can sell you mine. Well, I'll come and get that one, you know, so it's like, even right now, man, I got, I got a nine foot five weight and I got a graphite and then I got my eight, six, uh, four or five weight glass rod. No reels for either one of them, cause both the same thing again. You know, like guys just bum them off me or, you know, just take them Robbed from Peter to PayPal or whatever. You know, it's so funny, like they just, oh, dude, I need a, I need a reel. You know, it's like like man, I don't just have reels always just laying around. You know, um, but yeah, and it's pretty rare. You know, wisconsin doesn't have a huge fly fishing population, so it's pretty rare that someone would actually stop by the shop. It's usually just friends of mine. You know that's typically, but every now and then we'll get some walk-ins. It's kind of cool.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:09:34

You know, like this one guy was on his way up north to do some fly fishing and he was like he saw it it and he was just like I think he was expecting that it was going to be a fly shop and he walked in and he's just like, no shit, you actually make the fly reels right here. And I'm like, yeah, man, I'm in the back and making them right now. So I was showing him all this stuff and he's just like, oh, this is super cool, man. I'm like I'm like, let me guess what? Are you going up north Trout fishing, you know? And I'm making salmon reels? And he's just like, yeah, yeah, I got a nine-foot five-weight. Well, all I got is this reel and I'm like I've only used it once. You know what I mean. Like it's so funny, like, oh, I even like the line, you know. So then I got to replace all that. It saw that it's just hilarious.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:10:24

But you know, like I said, I only, I only do trout every now and then it's not really my passion thing to do. I like to go hex fishing and mouse fitting. You know, do some brook trout fishing when I'm up in newfoundland, but it's just not my gig. I don't like catching fish every cast, you know, that's just. I mean it's cool, maybe for one day, you know, but when you catch a fish every cast for eight hours straight, it's just I don't know. I agree, yeah, I mean it loses its, it. It becomes comical after like the 50th, 60th, fifth, 5th, you're just like then. You're just, you know, then you're facing the wrong way, throwing it over your shoulder, counting to three and lifting. I shit you, not dude.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:11:12

We were doing, we were, we set up the tripod and we're focusing in on this hole and I was telling him I'm like dude, just, dude, just sit right back in the same spot so I don't have to move the camera. So he would try to hit it right where he had hit before. So it was in the frame. So the minor amount I'd have to adjust it. Wait about two seconds. Oh, gone, and in slow-mo. We had two and three brook trout coming after a fly and I was like seven or eight guest group that had went to this location they had done the same before I'd got there, just like the, the sheer amount trout. So sick dude. Um, but yeah, that's uh, we haven't really touched too much on that, on the newfoundland thing too. So hopefully, if anybody made it this far into our ramblings, um, it's, it's a pretty cool trip. It's where riffling, hitch and dry fly fishing came are you the host?

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:12:14

you're hosting the host, and then the and I manage and I do all the bookings and I go to the shows for newfoundland. Um, manage and I do all the bookings and I go to the shows for Newfoundland. Um, brian and I are working with the, the um, the economic tourism board for Newfoundland, right, so they, they help pay for boots and the travel and the expenses and then, um, I, you know, book the clients in. Last week of June and July are the main times for the salmon that I would actually be there fitting and hosting. You know it's a pretty affordable trip. You know it's like $4,500 for seven days, six nights fishing. You know, six days fishing. You know, essentially seven days you're going to be there. That covers your passes, uh, the cabin with starlink internet, all the food you have to have.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:13:09

Guys, in newfoundland, by law, you can't just fish by yourself. In the schedule of water you need to have a, a local, registered and insured guide to fish. Um, and uh, yeah, we're eating good food and you know we're fishing lead wolves. Where there, where he first learned to riffle hitch from the locals and wrote about it, it was actually at that time called the portland hitch and then when he wrote about it, he didn't want to call it the portland and she wanted to have it be all-inclusive. So then he changed the terminology to being the Riffling Hitch. And yeah, the Riffling Hitch, it's a deadly technique. It can be used for Atlantic Salmon and Steelhead. I mean, dude, I've been turning some of the trout guys onto it too, because if you put a caddis on right and if you riffle it underneath or riffle it off to the side, man, now you got a cripple caddis so you can dead drift it and then set it and actually skate it out around and have it flutter through. And that's a real trigger point sometimes for a trout where they might have a thousand naturals floating at them every second. You have one that's gonna look wounded and kind of flutter off to the side. You know, uh could trigger an extra couple hits, which is great, you know.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:14:35

Um, it's had great luck with both steelhead and atlantic salmon using that riffling itch locally and up in Newfoundland. And that's pretty much all we do is riffle wet flies, small flies, little undertakers, blue-winged charms white-winged charms, you know and myriads of other flies that these local guys had come up with over the years and that. And bombers, you know, I don't think bombers really originated in this area. But I think, like you know the use of like mayflies, like the what is it? The royal wolf right and the gray wolf, those are killer salmon dry fly patterns. Um, I can contest the fact that they do get a hex hatch. Uh, she's, a big mayfly ran into a couple hatches like that and absolutely put the herding on the salmon. It was so much fun. Um, they were, the hatch came off, the salmon were there and they were just who went up, these mayflies that were throwing at them Big mayfly man, like big mayflies, like big, you know for the trip.

Andrew Barany: 2:15:56

What do most people like? Well, I guess, what could you be expecting Um species wise?

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:16:01

you got striper and oh no, yeah, it's just atlantic salmon and brook trout you get?

Andrew Barany: 2:16:07

oh okay, just those sure thing.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:16:09

Yeah, there's no stripers, it's just. Oh, maybe I was just so. Uh, yeah, the, the lodge water is about a mile from the ocean. Um, the. The program is basically we get you there on the sunday, get you settled in, get you orientated, we have some food, get your license. Then we fit monday through saturday with the professional guys. They have boats, they have trucks. You can fish the camp water. We have the river ponds, the torrent, the, the big east. There's a few other add-ons too. If you want to take jet sleds in certain areas, um, uh, there's. We have access to a. Um, a float plane.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:17:08

And Ryan said something about potentially having a helicopter. Uh, I haven't seen the helicopter yet. I'm hoping to see that this summer when I go up there. I, it sounds like there might be one on the press, one landed one day, and it sounded like there might be one on the press. One landed one day and it sounded like. This is a guy that kind of does some scouting around or whatever. So maybe some potential moose hunting and probably scouting around for minerals and those type of things or possibly flying goods around, I don't know. Um, so, yeah, so, yeah, we, you know, like I said, we it. The whole thing is about fitting it and really good food.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:17:47

The people in Newfoundland are just, they're Islanders like yourself. So they're just cool people, man. They're so chill, so kind, you know they can kind of rip the Mickey out of you, you know cause you're kind of that weird, you know, especially me being like guy from Wisconsin. I'm just kind of just different, you know. So you know cause you're kind of that weird, you know, especially me being like guy from Wisconsin, I'm just kind of just different, you know. So you know, but they love me. I know they do a deep down, you know, but a deep deep down sometimes now. But yeah, it's been going really well. Man, it's a great place Highly suggest. You know, if you've never gotten an Atlantic salmon, I mean, this is a place you could actually go and get it done. The numbers are, fish are good, you know. The the location is biblical, so beautiful.

Andrew Barany: 2:18:31

I know, uh, I know, a couple of guides out there. I can't remember Uh one of them. Uh, I had on the the podcast actually toot, I'd have to double check if the other one's from Nathan Lange.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:18:45

Okay.

Andrew Barany: 2:18:45

I'm just pondering that, but I've heard just how frustrating these salmon can be, and then all of a sudden you get one, and so it's a similar take to steelhead, where it's like you know that much effort and then you finally get one and it's all worth it.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:19:04

Yeah, they can be very tight-lipped. I guess last year he said they're almost, they're the perfect blend between a king salmon and a steelhead. They're kind of I mean, they're nothing like the you know they're. Obviously the genealogy isn't the same but their behaviors are similar and I see it like like king salmon, like to ball up and hold where you know, but it's just, like I said, kind of the perfect cross. They're real strong like that. But then they got the aerobatics of the steelhead after you hook them, got the aerobatics of the steelhead after you hooked them. But I mean, all in all, man, as long as the conditions are right, if you try to go after salmon when the conditions aren't right, uh, they can be tough, but if the conditions are right, uh, they can be rather easy to catch. They're not a hard fish to catch, yeah, they're just they're a very hard fish to land. Sure, you know they don't want to come in, um, and lots of aerobatics, but you know you hook a grills, get a good opportunity to get that. You know that. You know six, seven pounder, eight pounder, that, sure, that's manageable. But, dude, once they start to get into that 14, 15 to 20 pound range, dude, it's a force to be reckoned with.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:20:34

Family teleporting style fish. They land, they cream, they jump 15 feet just laterally, just out of the air, back down. You don't know which way they're going to be jumping. They're just so incredible. I love them, I absolutely. They're my favorite. Every year they're just becoming more and more of my favorite species and I love all fishing. But man, these are these ocean running panics, are they're the? They're the shit. They're just so sexy and just. I just they're just. And they're all full of sea lice coming right out of the ocean. I mean, the ocean is less than a mile downstream, so when you're getting them in the camp water they're, they're dime, bright, you know.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:21:27

Um, then we got the river ponds up the road, which is again a great double-handed river. You know good pace to it. You know 12 and a half 13 foot double handers, real comfortable, um, you can use a single hander as well. You know the bomber presentation. You can riffle on a single hander. It works pretty well, you know.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:21:51

And Portland's a bit wider river than the river ponds, but it's not as swift right. So it's more like four or 500 feet wide and kind of broken down into like basically shells that come out of this lake and then the river go, the pool goes from one side of the river to the other and then there'll be another else, and then a pool goes from one side of the river to the other and there's a succession of those that go all the way down to the oak and um yeah, and then, you know, they come in on the tide and the tide comes down, they come up to the glacial lake. That's right there, because that's another thing that makes Newfoundland and this area so special. You know, it's all in the mountains and they're all fed by glacial lakes. So the glacial lakes are super-duper deep and it's river. And then all of a sudden it'll open up to a 7-mile-by-5-mile-wide glacial lake that's 600 feet deep, and then all of a sudden, boom, turns back into a river again and it'll go up and opens up to another gigantic glacial lake. I mean, just in Portlandland there's one, two, three. The first water. Well, there's one, two. Not sure if there's one above the waterfall, but I freaking guarantee there is. I haven't actually mapped it past the waterfall.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:23:15

And then, you know, like brian's feeder, which is another river that's in around the, you've got to take a boat to get there. I know that one has at least four glacial lakes that I remember mapping out. And then there's the Southwest Feeder, which goes up out of the Southwest Mountain Range, and there's four or five glacial lakes just on that. I mean the river ponds, it's almost after it gets to a certain point. You don't know what river, compared to lake, compared to glacial lake is. At a certain point it's just, it's crazy. There's thousands of these lakes up in there. You almost lose track of it. Like where is this thing flowing out of?

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:23:59

Like, you know, once you get to the headwaters, that's way up in the mountains, that's some cold water, and so the fish usually make their way up to those glacial lakes where they can hold and then spawn near the river mouth, you know. I mean, so they can kind of slide back in the winter over in the hole in the, in the lakes, right, so there's another level of safety. But but yeah, atlantic salmon in a lot of areas you got to be there right at the right time. Um, when they have just a river environment not knocking them, but they're when the water goes down and the water gets warm, they really have nowhere to go for their own safety. Where these fifths in Newfoundland and a lot of these areas. They do have a duck out of this glacial lake where they can go and chill out in the lake. That doesn't mean necessarily that we're going to have a way to target them, but at least for the species' safety themselves they can go and hang out in this glacial lake where it's cool. So water can get pretty warm.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:25:08

But Atlantic can take really, really warm temperatures. They really can. Much more than a normal rainbow or something like that would perish Atlantic salmon kind of just shrug it off. They get less active. They'll jump out of the water. The theory is to get oxygen in their lungs or in their gills and then they splash back down. Might be a dominance thing too. They'll jump out of the water when they start to get a little bit uncomfortable or they're wanting to go off, maybe.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:25:41

But uh, the getting the oestrogen in is probably why they're doing that, you know, because once the water temperature starts to get in like that 20 degrees celsius range which I'm not sure what that even is in fahrenheit, um and it's just creeping up there, getting warm, you know, and then they, the salmon, do shut off and now, and once it gets up to that warm temperature. They do closures, you know, like the camp water is never closed, um, it just stays too cold. It's very rare. But the three or four big river systems that are, it's very rare, that's usually the closures. That would be more in the southern region. Again, it's a completely different topography down there. Then that's just more river system where they have less glacial lakes because we have the big. It's actually part of the Appalachian Mountains. If you follow geography, the Appalachians come through. And you know, if you follow geography, the Appalachians come through and they come through Maine, they go right underneath the Straits and then they come up onto Newfoundland Island. So the Appalachian Trail that's where that starts, starts in Newfoundland and yeah, it's great for sightseeing too if guys want to come and see the. You know whales eating capelin and you know icebergs.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:27:08

The oldest geological site on the planet is right down the road from our, right down the road in the Gros Morne National Park, grossmoor National Park, and the whole thing is just basically sheer top mountains by us with waterfalls. It's just beautiful. You know Oceans right there, mountains off, I mean the whole time. You see there, do I look at the ocean or do I look at the mountains, you know. And Victoria asked me so what have you seen? And I was like, well, I've seen my fly every day. I'm like the other day the fog burned off and I found out there's this gigantic mountain right behind the lodge. I've never even seen it because it was hidden in fog for three weeks, you know um, but it's pretty crazy, I'll say I. I look up, I'm like holy shit, there's a mountain right there.

Andrew Barany: 2:28:03

You know, I didn't really even seen it before.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:28:05

It was just like sheer fog all the time. You're right and great fishing, and you're always keeping your eye right on the fly. You never look away, you know, because the minute you look away, that's when they're going to take it and you're going to miss it, because you've got to kind of react to it. You know, if they're taking a bomber you've got to come and let them come up and gulp the bomber down and then you lift. You know, but the wet fly, you know it's I don't know. You've got to kind of strike at them, but you can't rip it too hard, you can't rip it too soft, you can't be too late. You can't rip it too soft. You can't be too late because, well, the way the baby par feed apparently is, they come up instead of sucking down the whole bug. They'll come up and actually squeeze the abdomen and suck out the goop and spit out the active skeleton so that they don't fill their stomach up full with a bunch of sticks and rocks. Right, they, they want just the icky goop. So the little baby par, like the little three four-inchers, they come up and they start, you know, and that's the way that the big adult salmon, you know, because they got small brains. And my theory is, when they come up, all the ocean and all these little pars are feeding, they're like oh yeah, that's what I'm doing, you know, and I just start, you know, and obviously it might be a competition thing, might be territorial, I mean, no one ever really know. I mean, these are all just theories. But you know, like I said, it seems to me when the little baby pars start to feed, the big salmon start to feed, you know, and you'll be hooking little baby pars, looking little baby pars, hooking little baby pars. And, yeah, sometimes when the pars are on a bite, you can't buy a salmon bite because every single time the fly hits the water you're catching a little tiny, little three, four-inch long salmon, you know. But you can kind of wade through and store them off the holes and all of a sudden, you know, can pick up a an adult, you know, and that's why we use all it means barbless hook by law. There's nothing to really do with the salmon because you, you know, you're usually hooking them right in the tip of the snoop. It's very rare that you get it any lower and it's actually kind of rare to get them in the side unless they come creeding through on it, which I've had them do. But I mean, typically you're going to get them in the side unless they come creeding through on it, which I've had them do. But I mean, typically you're going to hook them in the front of the snoop with a wet fly, and so we debar the hooks, obviously by law, to protect the little baby salmon, more so than the salmon, you know, because he would be killing every single one of the little baby ones. See, would you be killing every single one of the little baby ones. And it's still a hard knock life for those because they're getting chased around by all all the big, huge brook trout that are there. And so sometimes you'll have a little baby par and this else in a sea run brook trout decides that's freaking lunch and they eat it right off the end of your line.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:30:58

Dude it just well. You know, yeah, it's a dog eat dog world. Oh yeah, like chrissy was telling me, she's like. She's like are you letting those little par go with him? I'm just like. Well, you know, I just reached down and flipped them off so I don't have to touch them. You know, she's like I wouldn't be doing that. I like cory or whatever boyfriend guides, and he's just like, yeah, he kind of tosses them off to the side. I'm like, why is he doing he doing that? She's like, well, I don't know, she said that there's so many brook trout in the pool. It's like you just let it go right below you. There's probably three, four brook trout sitting right below your feet waiting for you to basically hand feed it, so you toss it off to the side in the hopes that the par can get away from the brookies. But there's that many. You know I described what it was like. Imagine being a little tiny baby par trying to live in a pool, you know, and brook trout, they, you know they're an aggressive species. So they actually want us to get rid of some of these. The limit last year was five pounds plus one-fifth. That's your daily bag limit for Brookshire, five pounds plus one-fifth. So that basically means you can take six-fifths a day, because they're always trying to get the one-pounders because those are good eaters. You know the big, huge ones who want to eat something like that. You know, true, that, um, but yeah, I mean I'm like a big catch and release. I guess you know I take that back those other two fish, like locally.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:32:34

I did keep two brook trout for one of my guys, ralph. He had gotten sick and he mentioned that he'd like to eat them. So I was out fishing with danny, one of the other guides, and I was like you know, I think I'm gonna keep, uh, keep a couple for ralph and bring him over to his house. And, yeah, you know she was. I don't know he uh, what happened. He just collapsed one day, you know, um, and he had to take the rest of the season off and he's doing a lot better now. He came over to the cabin and we were hanging out Really cool guy, very interesting, extreme.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:33:12

He was. Actually. There's a gentleman called Henry Green. He is the man of one million casts and he had been coming to the lodge since, since the 50s and all the way until he was 94. And, um, uh, ralph had was his personal guide for gosh, I don't know, since the 70s, so he would guide henry all summer and, uh, they just did a write-up in the flight or the.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:33:44

The salmon federation did a write-up on henry after he passed on and he's the man of a million tasks, but he had documented all of them. He wrote down barometric pressures, river level, fly, what they took, where they took it you know. So his log was pretty cool. I got a chance to hang out in the cabin with him and talk some history and hang out with his dog. Yeah, he's a really cool dude, real smart. You know he was an engineer. You know he apparently has something to do with the 516 fighter jet design. Um, yeah, yeah, good, great guy man, you know he. He said he fell in love with the river the first time he saw it. But yeah, pretty cool stuff. But yeah, he was fishing all the way up there until until he turned 94 and unfortunately got cancer and got the best of him and passed on this last year and probably this last november, december possibly. But yeah, but anyway, dude 12.

Andrew Barany: 2:35:01

I was going to.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:35:03

I would talk forever about fishing.

Andrew Barany: 2:35:05

I was going to actually say, once we were done talking about the Newfoundland thing, that we should wrap it up.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:35:11

Yeah, dude, it's full, it rarely uh, we, everyone gets loopier.

Andrew Barany: 2:35:15

I've done enough podcasts to know that usually the the good juice is in the middle, near the end. Um but near the end it can also get really weird.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:35:27

Well, hopefully I didn't get too weird on you, man. I was just trying to.

Andrew Barany: 2:35:31

No man, you talked plenty. You made my job really easy.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:35:35

Yeah, I know I'm sorry to rattle on you know.

Andrew Barany: 2:35:38

No, it was great man. I was glad to hear your story.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:35:45

Yeah cool, I mean hopefully I you know it was great man, I was glad to hear your story and I'm yeah cool, I mean hopefully I you know hopefully I hit all the finer points.

Andrew Barany: 2:35:52

I mean it's just, it really is your life, so I think so yeah, exactly it's.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:35:55

Yeah, I'm just a fly fishing kid that loves fly fishing and loves fishing in general. Yeah, so at least people understand that when they're calling the order, you know they're Loves fly fishing and loves fishing in general. Yeah, so at least people understand that when they're calling the order, you know they're not calling like I'm not doing this, you know, for for the money. I'm doing because I love it so much. Man, it's even the salmon fishing, I don't, you know not a very lucrative endeavor to be managing doing all this stuff, especially, and I gotta pay for my own, you know, I gotta pay for guides when I'm up there too, so it's a pretty big expenditure, but I, I love it you know, yeah, I look forward to it every year and yeah anyway, brother, you probably should

Andrew Barany: 2:36:39

on that note my man, I will let you go Say goodnight and I really appreciate you sharing some time with me and telling me your side of the story.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:36:50

Yeah, you're welcome to come on out. I'll let you up if I head out to the island. The island has been calling to me for a while, so I do want to get out to Vancouver Island.

Andrew Barany: 2:37:02

Come, trout fishing with me. Make a just for it yeah trout fishing? That'd be cool. Yeah man, I, uh, I guide on one of the best uh rivers for it. On on the island and sea run cutties. Eh, there are sea run cutties. Man, I've done a fair share of sea run cutty chasing, both successful and non-successful, because those are pesky little creatures well, they're yeah, they're like any other fish that runs out of the ocean.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:37:31

They don't have to be there they don't have to be there. That's the big thing I got I got one out of the smith river in california. It was pretty cool. I got a couple of them. I got a couple really nice. I got a couple of really nice ones, but so I'd like your inland trout. What are they?

Andrew Barany: 2:37:48

Rainbow Well. On the collagen we got brown trout, rainbows, coastal cutthroat and sea run cutthroat. There are also dollies I know that's not a trout, but yeah. And then the four types of salmon and steelhead.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:38:04

I'm kind of down with those frickin' dog salmon. I know they don't sound very like marquee or whatever, but those things just look ghetto cool and you know, apparently they're you know, oh, chum salmon, yeah, okay, yeah, the dogs, I'm sorry yeah dog, yeah, dog, yeah no worries.

Andrew Barany: 2:38:24

I was like dog. And then I had to think about it. I was like which one looks like a dog you know it's like chum salmon.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:38:32

That's an american term. For that sure we'd feed them just to the dogs, right to dog salmon yeah, pound for pound, I would say I don't know.

Andrew Barany: 2:38:43

It's obviously this is just my own theories, but like if pink salmon got to the size of a king salmon, you'd be in for one heck of a issue, and then you know so. But chum salmon, they're a really good fight and they bite flies and they have their place yeah dude, I mean that's 100.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:39:04

I mean to me that's always I I'm not eating them anyway. Yeah, who wouldn't want to get a 40 pound schnook? And I don't think they get to that. I don't think that those drum salmon get that gigantic, right, dude. No, not really up there, but I've seen some 12 pounds, right.

Andrew Barany: 2:39:19

Yeah, I've seen some 10, 12 pounds, right. Yeah, I've seen some like borderline 20s out there. That's a good one, you know? That's just looking at it in the river, so was it that big, who knows? But yeah, man, I'll let you go right there and you have yourself a great night.

Tim Pantzlaff: 2:39:36

And I'll talk to you soon. Yeah, it was great talking to you. Yeah, don't be a stranger call anytime, man I enjoyed this. We could do the totally do that again all right, I have a new summer there you go.

Andrew Barany: 2:39:48

That would be sweet up there, so we're all set. Yeah, sweet, all right, man. Well, you have a good night and I will talk to you later cool brother, talk to you later, dreadful. Society.