Great Lakes Dude #11: Great Lakes Fishing & Conservation with D’Arcy Egan and Jeff Liskay

Jeff (2s): Hey, hey, this is your Great Lakes dude, Jeff Liskay coming to you on the Wet Fly Swinging podcast, where we’re gonna Be going rage Angler on all things Great lakes from gear fly big water and swinging flies. Of course, if it concerns the Great Lakes, we’ve got you covered. So stay tuned to this next episode. Welcome to the Wet Fly Swing podcast, great Lakes. I’m your host, Jeff Liskay, AKA Great Lakes dude, it’s been a while since the listeners I’ve had a podcast and after around 200 some days of guiding and destination and another grand kiddo born, I’m back at it. Jeff (44s): I have a great episode for you, really long time friend, D’Arcy Egan, long time outdoor writer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer for over 50 years. I’m super excited to dive into a whole bunch of topics with him. But without further ado, Darcy, welcome to the show. D’Arcy (1m 1s): Jeff, it’s so good to be with you. You know, we’ve spent a lot of time together over the years, and I’m talking decades. It’s been really an awful lot of fun. But one of the things that an outdoor writer, and that’s primarily what I am. I’m an outdoor writer for the plane dealer, but I also do radio and television and magazine articles. And one of the things I learned early on that in order to be able to do what I did and do it well, you have to have the knowledge, you have to know the terminology, you have to hands-on, be out there with experts who can show you how much the fun is that we’re having out on the rivers, out on the lakes, in the Turkey woods, in the deer woods. D’Arcy (1m 46s): It doesn’t really matter, but you know, I have to know the terminology. You have to know the, the hows and whys of what we’re doing. And Of course, if you do that, you’ll also have an incredible amount of fun. And some of the guys that I’ve had the most fun with are guys like you fishing steelhead trout. Because northeast Ohio is really a mecca, is a world-class fishery, and you have become one of the icons of steelhead trout fishing in northeast Ohio. Jeff (2m 17s): I guess it comes with just ears on the water, right? It doesn’t matter, you know, who your mentors, whatever, look at all the contacts you’ve had, Darcy, right? It’s like unbelievable. Everybody ask me. It’s like, if you need to know anything about the outdoors in our area, just contact Darcy. I, because you’ve the context you’ve achieved over all the years. It’s like from hunting or fishing too. It’s like, oh my gosh, it’s unbelievable. D’Arcy (2m 39s): Well, where do you think I learned all that stuff from? I learned it from Mike Spino and I learned it from you, and I learned it from Jerry Darkes and, and the good feelings in my heart. I saw the a Facebook page the other day from Jerry Darkes, and basically he was posting a picture that I took long ago of his daughter in his lap, five years old, tying a fly that she was going to use to catch a fish. And he posted a picture of his granddaughter in his lap who was five years old tying a fly. D’Arcy (3m 20s): It was just generational. It was amazing to even think about that, that we’ve both been around for so long. Jeff (3m 27s): Yeah, right. Why don’t you tell the listeners a little story where you came from, maybe how you got into writing, maybe give a little tip for some of the younger writers who are out there, but why don’t you just give us a little background of how you got to Cleveland. Huh? D’Arcy (3m 38s): Well, we kinda stutter, stepped down to Cleveland. My dad and mom grew up in Calgary, Alberta, in western Canada, on the eastern shore of the Canadian Rockies. And it was, my dad was into the hockey business. His father owned a, a theater in Calgary, the Palace Theater. And my dad did stage shows with my, his sister, my Aunt June. And, but my dad also did radio. He broadcast hockey games in Western Canada. My grandfather was really into amateur hockey and the years before they moved to Calgary, he was, they were in Regina, Saskatchewan. D’Arcy (4m 18s): And my grandfather was the president and coach of the Regina Pats Junior, a hockey team. And the, the Regina Pats were the first Western Canada Junior a team to ever win the national junior a championship. So my grandfather was a hero in Western Canada, and in 1960, he, they proclaimed him the sportsman of the year in western Canada. Wow. So we were Canadians. My dad was into hockey and the Cleveland Barons who he had scouted for and sent players to Cleveland from Western Canada, they wanted to hire my dad because he had hockey broadcasting experience. D’Arcy (4m 60s): And, and very few people in the states were able to do that. So my dad was hired to come to the, to Cleveland to broadcast the Cleveland Barons hockey games on radio and do public relations, which he was, he was that kind of guy. He liked public relations and marketing and he had stories and, and he was just really a popular guy once he moved to Cleveland and he stopped saying, Hey, I’m from Canada. And began to speak Ohioan. Jeff (5m 32s): Got it. So what, did you come into the hold the whole picture? Was it, you were born in Alberta, but then after that, how did it all start? How’d you get into writing and, you know, the outdoors and things like that? Well, D’Arcy (5m 42s): My dad didn’t quickly bring all of us down to, to Cleveland. I arrived when I was about six, seven years old. And when we got to Cleveland, I was just a normal kid. The, the neighborhood kids looked at me kind of funny because I, I said a and, and they said a what? And so, you know, out and about was still in, in my vocabulary, but I discovered that I really liked fishing. And I had a couple of neighbors when I got to be 11 or 12 years old that would take me down to Lake Erie to fish for yellow perch. And they were older guys and it wasn’t very often, but my part of the job of going along and, and being, getting to areas that I couldn’t get to as a kid, my job was to scale perch when we got ’em home. D’Arcy (6m 38s): And so I had a, I had a, a kind of like a thumb depressor with two bottle caps nailed to the top, and I would scale perch and I learned to filet perch and stuff like that. And my mom coming from western Canada, had had rarely had Fresh Lake Erie perch ever. And so she was pretty kicked off with, she loved that, that her son was, who was 10, 11, 12 years old, bringing home fresh perch for dinner. But I really began to love it. And when I was young, one of the things that, that my, my folks did was my dad broadcast for a short period of time, the the Cleveland Indians baseball team. D’Arcy (7m 20s): And he had sports radio shows and Clay Dopp, who broadcast the Indians back in the, in the 1950s had a cottage over at Euclid Beach Park. And you may not remember Clay Dopp, but you will remember Mr. Jingling because Clay do’s wife was the play lady. But they would, they would take me in for a few weeks in the summertime. And there was, once you’ve ridden all the rides at Euclid Beach, it got pretty boring. So I would go down to the pier with the old timers and they would show me how to catch yellow perch, and they would show me how to catch sheep head and catfish and the blue pike were already gone. D’Arcy (8m 3s): They were extinct just about, but they would become ex extinct. And while I, there weren’t any, but I learned to fish and I just, I started to, to ride the bus from the Cleveland Zoo area of Cleveland down to Ridgewood Lake in now where Palm Town Mall is. And I would fish for catfish and bluegills, or I would take a bus all the way down State Road, west 25th Street, down to the lake, and I would either walk to Edgewater Park or walk to East ninth Street and fish for perch. Oh, the old captain’s Franks old Captain Franks. D’Arcy (8m 44s): And we would sit on the pier and there were, there were an awful lot of of guys that would come down every day and fish. And those are the guys that I learned to how to catch perch. And we did weird things back then, like rubber band fishing where you’d use a rubber band and you’d make a long cast. And when you brought, and you would leave the rubber band attached to your line, so you would bring in the fish, and then when you took the fish off the hook, you would open the bale and the rubber band being all stretched would go back to its normal position. Right. Where you caught that last fish, Jeff (9m 22s): What was the weight? How much was the weight on the end of the rubber band? D’Arcy (9m 25s): The weight on the end of the rubber band was usually a railroad spike. I mean, you Jeff (9m 30s): Threw it out there, you D’Arcy (9m 31s): Threw it out. Oh, oh, yes. But it was, it was a hoot. And that’s, that’s began my love of fishing. And I really started to, to travel a little bit to go fishing. And when I got married, I got married early. I was 19 years old, and at 21 had two of the prettiest daughters you’d ever imagine. And I started to, to my newspaper career right out of high school. I worked for the old Parma Post, which became the Parma Sun News eventually. And then that was my first daily newspaper job was the Cochin Ohio Tribune. I was the sports editor. And I left there after about a year and went to the Medina County Gazette as the managing editor. D’Arcy (10m 15s): And I started working part-time at the plane dealer, and eventually I worked my way onto the plane dealer. And Jeff (10m 22s): That’s 50 some years ago, correct? D’Arcy (10m 24s): Oh, yeah. Well, Lou Gale was the outdoors editor back then. And I thought to myself, that would be my dream job that really would. And back in 1976, my dad died, unfortunately, and he was the publicity director at, and marketing director at Northfield Park. And I was working there part-time because I had to feed my family and he had a heart attack in 76 and died. So Carl Milstein, who owns Northfield Park, called me and wanted me to replace my dad. And I said, well, I don’t know. I’m working for, I was full-time at the plane dealer, good pay and all that type of thing. D’Arcy (11m 6s): And he threw a number at me that I couldn’t resist. And so I, I took it and I did it for a year. I did it for a year and, and I realized that it wasn’t really for me. And, and so I had quit and not knowing what I’d do next, but Hal Leitz, who is the plane dealer sports editor and a, and a good friend and mentor, Hal Leitz called me and he said, Hey, I know you wanted the outdoors job. Well, Lou Gale just walked outta my office. He just retired and you better get down here today. And I did. And I was the first of about 175 people that wanted the job. D’Arcy (11m 50s): And, and so I thought, well, I don’t, man, this is gonna be a, a good one. But I had enough friends and I had enough mentors at the plane dealer that I got it. And it’s been my dream job for decades and decades. And I have to thank hell, love of it for making sure that I got that job. And it, You know, it’s been just really, it really has been a dream job because I’ve been able to travel everywhere. And back in the day we had a, we had a travel budget, which was really good. So I could go to Canada three or four times a year and, and really find myself in, in places that fly-in trips that places nobody had ever been to ever before. Jeff (12m 33s): Yeah. I mean, I can’t remember just how many hundreds of people would come to me and wait for your articles to come out. It was like, ’cause you were the resources that you gave the local fishery here from fly fishing to conventional gear fishing. It was just like, oh, it’s, you know, your fishing reports and then your reports is like, ’cause it, we didn’t have the technology back then. It was in print and you were the one giving the local anglers the information. Now they pick up their cell phone a couple bs later, they’re like, oh, I go here, I do this. But how was it like when you first got here and as you’re working through before that, when you were younger, how was the conservation issue? Was it was, it was like, it was still like, really the pollution and everything was just starting to get better or where was it at there as far as like all like the Cuyahoga River out in the lake? Jeff (13m 23s): How was it? D’Arcy (13m 24s): Well, you know, we’re spoiled right now. There is no doubt about it. When I began with the, I’ll, I’ll tell you a perfect example. When I began in 1978 as the outdoors editor of the plane dealer, one of the stories that I did was about the three sets of nesting eagles in all of Ohio. Now, this DDT back in the old days after in World War II was used as a pesticide and it killed so many things, but it was, it was a poison it, the Eagles disappeared in Ohio and so did korans and children got sick. D’Arcy (14m 8s): What they were doing, they were dusting in northwest Ohio, dusting the marshes with DDT to kill the mosquitoes because you couldn’t live in those areas because of the mosquitoes and the black flies and everything. So DDT was used early and often until Rachel Carson in 1962 published her book. And basically that did it, that now Rachel Carson was, was a great writer. I’m trying to remember the name of her book. But anyway, it, it described the evils of DDT and DDT was banned. D’Arcy (14m 48s): Silent Spring was the name of her book, the Silent Spring. And that’s because DDT killed so many much of our wildlife. We didn’t realize it was gone until all of a sudden, one spring we said, where is everything? Where are all the warblers? Where are all the eagles? Where are all, all this wildlife? Where’s it gone? Well, that’s where it had gone. So in 62, she wrote the book, they soon banned DDT, and the next thing you knew, you were starting to see some of it come back, but it was slow and steady because there was so much DDT residue all around. Now in 1978, I wrote about those three eagle nests because that’s all that there were in the state of Ohio. D’Arcy (15m 34s): The Buckeye state was, was in trouble. Now, in 2020 was the last census of eagles in Ohio. There were 707 eagle nests from Lake Erie to the Ohio River. Jeff (15m 54s): Wow. D’Arcy (15m 54s): It was amazing. Today when I was leaving the house on Marblehead, Ohio, I saw two eagles from the east west highway going to down to route two to come here. Two eagles flying. One had some kind of small rodent in its mouth, the other had a twig, meaning they’re building a nest. Jeff (16m 19s): So we have that comeback story. We have the wall, I comeback story. But let me, let’s backtrack you, we chat a little bit before is pre probably your generation of how DuPont and the story of the Cuyahoga River when it first started on fire, but how the commercial fishery really started and you know, the downfalls of how we, You know, interjected with when the DuPont company invented a net. Much of that was a great story, you told me. D’Arcy (16m 45s): Well, the, you’re talking about two or three different stories. Yeah. And one the, what most people don’t realize they didn’t know, but if they look at the records and they look at, at the past experts of the fifties, they can realize what happened to Lake Erie and why was it a, the mistake on the lake in Cleveland? Well, pollution had something to do with it. There was no doubt about that. But Lake Erie was still a very fertile lake. We had guys like Glen Lau out in Toledo, who was, who became a, a real icon of the outdoor industry and the film industry. His, his film Big Mouth was an exceptional film on large mouth bass. D’Arcy (17m 30s): We had all kinds of people out there that that knew. Lake Erie was a really great lake, but it had been abused. The commercial fishing industry at the time had used the fish down method when they caught fish and they caught fish with trap nets. They caught fish with sane nets, but more importantly, they caught fish with gill nets. And a gill net back in, in the forties wasn’t all that much of a problem. It was a problem, but not that much because they were cotton or linen nets, creosoted. So they wouldn’t rot when they were put in the water. And so you had to pull those nets every couple of days, dry them out, or they would quickly rot. D’Arcy (18m 14s): So if you were gonna use them all summer long, that’s, that was the system. Now in the, in, during World War ii, DuPont invented nylon and nylon translated into Mona monofilament line, which did not rot like the regular gillnets would. So they could take, they could use monofilament, not line to manufacture their gillnets, which were far more efficient because they were, they were less visible to the fish and they would catch every fish that swam through them. So anyway, you can go back in the records and you can see from the early 1950s up until the early sixties, you can see the har commercial harvest of Lake Erie Fish, Scott Rocket. D’Arcy (19m 5s): And we were shipping carloads of fish from Lake Erie, from walleye to perch, to white bass to carp, to you name it, all over the country. And restaurants were booming selling Lake Erie fish. But what happens if you take too many of them, or in some cases take almost all of them, like the Blue Pike, they disappear. And now the Blue Pike, which was really popular in the sixties, they had a restaurant on ninth Street in Cleveland named the Blue Pike Cafe. The Blue Pike not only just disappeared, it became extinct. We do a really good job as humans, don’t we? D’Arcy (19m 49s): But it, you know, it, it was, it was an amazing happening. But back then, and I can, I can attest to this, not many people had boats. There were small boats being made by, in, in Sandusky. The Lyman boat works made a lot of money. The Lyman boat works, when they started making boats in the late 18 hundreds, early 19 hundreds, made huge boats, huge sailboats and, and huge power boats. But then they, they really ran outta that market. And what they did was they moved to Sandusky, Ohio and started making affordable 16 and 20 and 24 foot boats, wooden boats. D’Arcy (20m 34s): And they were so popular that people were buying them, but still, there were still very few boats on Lake Erie and very few fishermen on Lake Erie that were going out in boats. Well, when fiberglass came along and aluminum came along, that changed. All of a sudden we’ve got more boats on Lake Erie, we’ve got more people fishing, and we’ve got an industry. After we bought out the Gill Nets that was starting to blossom. Now, it didn’t blossom in the sixties, it’s just started in the sixties. And by the time we got into the seventies, we began to see that what would happen if we allowed walleye to spawn instead of gill netting them in April and May. Jeff (21m 19s): Well, and that’s when my, my generation I started fishing is in the seventies, and I was, it was just taking off. So I didn’t see the bad of the worst, but then it just kept getting, from the seventies to the eighties, it just kept 80, I think 84 was just an, was unbelievable walleye boom too. So if you let Mother Nature do its thing, right? Yep, it does. Its thing. You wouldn’t happen to know how much that lineman cost back then, would you? D’Arcy (21m 44s): Oh golly. No, I don’t, Jeff (21m 45s): Yeah, like $400 maybe. I don’t know. D’Arcy (21m 48s): Probably four or $500. Yeah. And they, and they made some really small boats, little 14 footers as well and things like that. But they were great boats. My wife Laura, when she was working her way through college, she worked her way through college as a Lake Erie fishing guide in the summertime. Her parents owned Channel Grove Marina and Laura was a good fisherman, and she bought a 26 foot lineman, open lineman, and she went out there fishing and, and she laughed because all of her friends were working at fast food restaurants or, or McDonald’s and, and that type of thing for $4 an hour. D’Arcy (22m 31s): And she was running trips for 400 a day. So she worked her way through college and on her own as a charter guide. And she was quite the charter guide she get, she drew attention to it from a lot of people. And the only ones that that wouldn’t book her were the Amish fishermen. Jeff (22m 51s): Oh. D’Arcy (22m 51s): Because their wives didn’t like them going out on the water with this girl in, in cut off jean shorts, you know, that type of thing. And, but Laura had had a lot of, lot of fun charter fishing and she was very good at it. And she’s still, today when we go out on the water, she’ll point out something that we missed on Gulf. Sho you, we should have drifted over the top of Gull over there. So, you know, she is still pretty acknowledges, you know, all of what she’s known about Lake Erie over the years Jeff (23m 25s): Besides her. You’re, you were a charter boat captain too. I I, your resume gets pretty long. Well, D’Arcy (23m 31s): I, I ran charter trips because I enjoyed it and it really was an awful lot of fun. But it was really, at the time, I, I had a big mortgage and I had two kids and I thought, you know, we gotta be doing something on, on the weekends to be able to make a few more bucks. And, and it, it, the fishery was coming back and because I did fishing reports every week, because I talked to the people all over Lake Erie every week, I knew where the fishing was good. And if I had mentioned guys in my, my fishing report or in my columns in the plane dealer, they felt obligated to make sure that I knew where the good fishing was, both for my fishing reports and for, for me and, and for them. D’Arcy (24m 20s): Yeah. Jeff (24m 21s): I mean, knowledge is king right now. We go and research and text messaging, but back then it was like pretty much a small village of who was in your marina. And like Of course you had hundreds of, You know, people that read your articles and stuff like that. But maybe let’s shift the gears a little bit and we’ll tell a, a funny story. So it’s not a funny, but it’s a long time stir, I think. Can you remember back the first time that we spent all day on the river steelhead fishing? D’Arcy (24m 47s): Oh, I think that was, that was with Mike Spino and you, and we were, we were had fished over at the, on the Chagrin River and we decided to go for the big fish over on Elk Creek. Jeff (25m 1s): And how many people did we see back then? D’Arcy (25m 4s): None. Right. It was amazing. And this was the beginning and you guys, it wasn’t a secret, but it was, no one realized that they had the beginning of a world class fishery, Jeff (25m 16s): Right? No one, I think we put, you know, the od NR they stocked a few fish. It was the king salmon and co start, You know, first. But remember, it’s like, I think everybody’s like, they put the, You know, the cart before the horse, right? D’Arcy (25m 29s): Oh, there’s no doubt about it. Jeff (25m 31s): You know, and I, I really remember was like, this is a great fishery, and it’s like you’re looking around and there’s no one there. And it took 20 some years. D’Arcy (25m 40s): Well, you know, it, it did, it took an awful long time. And, and the division of wildlife really just didn’t have it together because they didn’t, when they began, they stocked co-host salmon. Now what the heck? I mean, we, we didn’t know any better, but they certainly didn’t know any better either. Coho salmon were fish that were going to go out, grow large enough, come back, spawn and die. And then they began with Chinook salmon. And everybody loved Chinook because they were big salmon. They were big fish. But the Chinook, when they came in, like in on the Chagrin River at Daniels Park Dam, when they hit the dam, they couldn’t go any further. D’Arcy (26m 25s): So the only way you could catch them was snagging them or just watch them die because they were spawning fish. Now the Steelhead Trout, the first effort at Steelhead Trout was a rainbow trout that they kind of morphed into a steelhead trout for like, they, it did go out on Lake Erie, it did come back and, but it didn’t come back in the numbers that it should have when they went to a real steelhead, wild steelhead trout that they got from Michigan. Now that we got a different fish, now we’ve got a steelhead trout that not only goes out to Lake Erie and feeds all summer long and gets big, it comes to spawn and then goes back out to feed again and get bigger. D’Arcy (27m 12s): And then it comes back in the next year and you can catch them. And most of the guys that fish for steelhead trout are like you. They’re sportsmen. They enjoy the thrill of catching a steelhead trout, but they realize that releasing most of the fish they catch is the right thing to do to maintain this fantastic classic steelhead trout fishery. Jeff (27m 38s): Yeah. You know, if you’re not just listening right now, This is the Wet Fly Swing podcast with Jeff Lisk as your host. And my guest today is Darcy Egan, and we’re reminiscing some old time stories. He’s telling us about the fisheries, and I’m interjecting with some stories of my own, but thanks for the listening. And what’s interesting, Darcy, is that back then, did you ever think, and I didn’t think that this fishery would explode this much as it has now, how it’s grown. I mean, I knew it would take some time, but it’s been way over 20 years. It’s been over 40 years now. So it’s like, yep. What do you think, do you think ever would be where it was, where you had the Cuyahoga River being stocked with steelhead and to keep the numbers, do you think would ever happen like this? D’Arcy (28m 25s): I never did. I truthfully never did. I, I went through the years of the salmon stockings and knew that wasn’t gonna be what we really wanted to do now. But one thing that that changed the whole complexion of the steelhead fishery was we knew that we had to get those wild steelhead from Michigan and Wisconsin to be able to, to raise them and stock them. And let’s go back to first Mayor, governor and Senator George Voinovich. Jeff (28m 59s): Absolutely. D’Arcy (28m 60s): And George Voinovich, Steve Maywell and I had taken George Voinovich out fishing a number of times. And Madewell was the director of the Lake County Metro Parks at the time and would go on to be the director of the Toledo Metro Parks. Madewell was the real prodding entity with George Voinovich. And we fished with George, and he loved perch fishing on Lake Erie. He was an angler. We prodded George as best we could. When, when the Castilian fish hatchery went up for sale, we told him he had to buy it. He had to buy that hatchery because we would, if we could propagate steelhead trout there, if we could get the fingerlings in and raise them to eight, nine inches in length and lings and stock them in the rivers they would survive. D’Arcy (29m 53s): The fingerlings didn’t survive you. The seagulls didn’t get ’em the wall. I did. And so when the Castillian fish hatchery went up for sale, Voinovich told the head of his department of, of natural resources to buy that, buy the Castillian fish hatchery. Well, it got sold, but not to the state of Ohio. And Madewell and I were not happy, and especially Steve and other people really didn’t understand why, why we should be so upset. Well, George Voinovich, now, the senator at that time was the governor, George Voinovich apologized, and a couple years later the hatchery went up for sale because the people that bought it just really couldn’t support it. D’Arcy (30m 43s): It, it needed a lot of repairs and work. So anyway, George Voinovich called Madewell and he called me and he said, guess what I did today? I said, okay, what did you do today, governor? And he said, I bought the Castell fish hatchery. It was a grand day. And now here’s the problem with that, that steelhead, it’s not a problem. But here’s, here’s what I know about that steelhead tr fishery, that steelhead trout fishery is excellent. That’s number one. Number two, it gives us more than 20 miles of the Rocky River and more than 20 miles of the chagrin river, not counting all the other rivers that are stocked with steelhead trout. D’Arcy (31m 32s): It gives them, those rivers are free and open for everyone to fish. Everyone, doesn’t matter if you’re coming from Sweden or Timbuktu or West Virginia, you can come and fish those rivers. They’re open, there are, there are no no fishing signs, number one. And number two, if you wanna buy a one day license in the state of Ohio to go fishing, and again, it doesn’t matter where in the world you are or where you’re coming from, it’s $14 now. Come on. D’Arcy (32m 12s): That is the, the most economical steelhead trout fishing in the world. Jeff (32m 18s): Right? I can’t believe it myself. I think it might be going up a slight bit more now, but it’s nothing like the other states. But I heard the word when the governor was getting ready to buy the hatchery, he, they were recommended he didn’t do it. And the exact words were, you weren’t listening. I said, buy it. D’Arcy (32m 39s): Like Jeff (32m 40s): They were like, oh. So without that I think we’d be, we’d be back to our one loaning hatchery. I don’t think it’d be so successful for sure. But, so we we’re moving on. We got this hatchery, we got this great fishery that’s all around. So what do you think about this stocking the Cuyahoga? What’s your thoughts on that? And like you grew up on Big Creek, a tributary of it. D’Arcy (33m 3s): You know, I did. And when we moved to Cleveland, my mom rented a house on West 24th Street in Broadview and it overlooked Big Creek, which runs past the Cleveland Zoo. And, and it wasn’t a nice place. There were slaughterhouses down there in the valley. There’s a bridge over it Of course that separates Pearl Road from West 25th Street. And we used to call it the Brooklyn Bridge, I think they still do. And there was A-Y-M-C-A on the far side, but we used to play down there and we were forbidden, which we did anyway. We were forbidden to, to even wade in Big Creek because there was a paint and wallpaper factory on the Bank of Big Creek. D’Arcy (33m 49s): And it was just one of the many polluters of Big Creek. And so you never knew what color Big Creek would be each day because you didn’t know what kind of effluent the paint and wallpaper factory would pump into the river. So you, you could have a, you could have a Red River, a green river, a blue river one day, but there nothing could live in there. There were no crayfish, there were no fish, there was nothing that could live in Big Creek. And Big Creek flew out wood flowing right into the Cuyahoga River. And now we’re seeing everybody, especially the Northeast Ohio Sewer District, but the EPA and everybody, they’re really working on those creeks. D’Arcy (34m 37s): And now, and you would know better than I would, how many of those small creeks flowing into the Cuyahoga River in the Cleveland area have steel, had trout in them. To me that, that’s magical. I can’t, I couldn’t imagine this happening. I still can’t imagine that I could go to the old haunts in my neighborhood and in the old Brooklyn neighborhood where there were truck gardens and, and orchards and things, I still can’t imagine that I could have caught steelhead trout in those streams. Jeff (35m 8s): Right. I just recently, during the Covid and since then, thinking that I should probably learn the Cuyahoga River a little bit better, do some hiking around the tributaries. I walked up the tributaries and everyone had spawning migratory trout or great lake steelhead in them. And I think farther up the system we go once since the dam has been removed, now we’re talking about removing the other dam, you’re gonna see some sustainability. I think it’s one of those rivers that you’ll actually see fish that’ll be hatching and surviving. ’cause there’s, there’s gonna be some cooler waters once you get up to very Brandy Wine Creek and, you know, all those furnace runs. So I’m excited. What do you think the general public is gonna do now that they have this huge river to start fishing? D’Arcy (35m 52s): I think it’s gonna slap ’em up alongside the face because we have polluted that river. I mean, sincerely polluted that river, knowingly industrial human waste, everything. We’ve, we’ve done it. But we think that that was something that recently happened. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. 200 years ago, almost 200 years ago, two guys opened the first hatchery ever in the United States, and it was on the east side of Cleveland. And the reason they had built that hatchery was that they loved the brook trout. D’Arcy (36m 34s): They caught brook trout in their streams around Cleveland. And they were a wonderful fish. And they, they were great to eat. They were fun to catch, but they disappeared because brook trout are pollution sensitive. They will not survive in a, in a waterway that has any pollution. And so they decided, let’s see if we can bring back the RK trout. And they tried for a few years and they failed miserably because the citizens of Cleveland, the citizens of Northern Ohio we’re not about to stop polluting those rivers. D’Arcy (37m 14s): Now we thought the river that burned in 69 was a terrible thing. And, and Lake Erie was made the mistake on the lake and everything else was going wrong because of the pollution. But most people didn’t realize that wasn’t a modern phenomena. A good friend of mine, Dan Egan, wrote the book three, four years ago, the Death and Life of the Great Lakes. And in his book, after he had written his book, he sent me a review copy because he knew I’d want to read it. And I went right to the right to the pages about the Cuyahoga River and he talked about the, the river that burned in 68. D’Arcy (37m 55s): And I thought to myself, well that’s wrong. The river burned in 69. We all know it. We saw the pictures, we, we saw the front page of the plane dealer. We saw all that. It was in 69. And then I read on Dan Egan wasn’t writing about 1969, he was writing about 1868. Jeff (38m 16s): Oh my gosh. D’Arcy (38m 17s): So we had a hundred years of pollution so bad that oil slicks burned on the Cuyahoga River and fires broke out about every 20 years until that 1969 fire that was so visible to so many people Jeff (38m 38s): From there on in 50, what four years later we’re here today with steelhead swimming up the rivers. And now we just recently stocked sturgeon up in the upstream of the Cuyahoga. So it’s like, it is one of the better comebacks. Think about on the East ninth Street Pier, downtown Cleveland, you are gonna have the availability within, if you don’t own waiters or anything fancy, you’re gonna have the availability to catch a steelhead from Lake Erie. You don’t have to have all the fancy fly gear or any of that. You’ll be able to just to sit down there and enjoy that fishery because it’s gonna eventually come up the river. You can intercept them off the brake walls just like you did at Perks back in the days. D’Arcy (39m 17s): Well, if it’s a calm day with a South wind, you can take a rowboat out on Lake Erie and you can put some or so many lures that we can use today. Whether it’s a, a diving plug or whatever, you can catch walleye. You can catch steelhead trout from your rowboat if you’d like. And Frank Kalish Sr. Who lives on the east side of Cleveland, who fish bas for a long time and still designs lures for pr co lures, one of the major maker of fishing lures Frankish Sr. Introduced me to one of my favorite fishing holes that I had never imagined. D’Arcy (40m 1s): The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And we fished the shadow of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for large mouth bass, small mouth bass, rock, bass. We caught fish everywhere. And Frank s Kalish knew that Cleveland Harbor was one heck of a fishing hole. And you rarely ever see anybody fish it. And here’s the thing that we’ve discovered over the years, when October rolls around, if you wanna fish after dark on the piers, 72nd, 55th Street, Edgewater Park piers, if you wanna cast after dark, there’s a good chance you’re gonna catch a walleye. Jeff (40m 45s): I would have to agree. And it’s not just 10 people, it’s hundreds of people. D’Arcy (40m 50s): Exactly. Jeff (40m 51s): You know, I’ll ask you this. So some rumblings, since we’ve stocked the Cuyahoga River and the National Park doesn’t want us to stock them in there to state because it’s not a native species, but most of all, they don’t want us off their given trails and busting through could, could you enlighten us? Maybe something you dealt with national parks or something like that. It’s like they want us to keep us this little magic and of, you know, little tote path and these little paths. But the minute any sportsman wants to break free and really enjoy the park, they’re like, no, no, no. Is that something you can enlighten us with? Have you any knowledge on that? They D’Arcy (41m 28s): Have. They have their ideas of what a national park should be and it’s ridiculous. They don’t want exotic species in the Cuyahoga River. Come on now, give me a break. We have already got exotic species go to our federal government today. That’s just messed up. The treatment program that we’ve got for lamprey eel. You don’t want an invasive species in your waters. Well then you start spending big money to kill lamprey eel because we have lamp invasive species in all our waters. Now the national park, we have to realize that the Coga Valley National Park has amazing amounts of deer, whitetailed deer in their park. D’Arcy (42m 16s): And a few years ago I did a story and they wouldn’t comment on it. I did a story on whitetail deer starving to death in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park because there’s no forage for them there. They were eating the bark off trees and it wasn’t enough sustenance to support them in the wintertime and they were dying. And I found those critters and I found that to be happening. Now the national park out, the Coga Valley National Park would not do a culling program to make sure that the herd size didn’t rise exponentially to be on. They couldn’t handle that. D’Arcy (42m 58s): So guess who had to call the deer herds on an adjacent park? The Cleveland Metro Parks, the Cleveland Metro Parks biologist understood that we can’t support that many deer on our Cleveland Metro Parks. So we’re gonna have to call deer, there’s no doubt about it. And we’re gonna use Sharpshooters and we’re gonna do it at night and we won’t offend anybody, but too many deer is going to destroy our park. They’ll eat so much that some of them will die pretty soon. So the Metro Parks is doing the calls, but the Coga Valley National Park wouldn’t do it. And it was their responsibility, their deer, once the Cleveland Metro Parks had thin the herd in their surrounding parks, the Coga Valley National Park gear would go into those parks because that was, that’s where the food was. Jeff (43m 50s): You know, all those stories like that sometimes makes me wonder about the National Park system because it’s like they’re there to help, you know, all the outdoors enthusiast rights. So it’s like, I feel the OD and R did a really good job of bucking the system for the once. ’cause you know how you’ve been covering the OD NR and you’ve been keeping them on their toes for 50 D’Arcy (44m 10s): Years trying Jeff (44m 12s): To Yeah, yeah. You try, you’re not afraid to push a few buttons and then you always tell me it’s like it didn’t take, but like two hours after your article hit that somebody from the OD NI or somebody would be like giving you a call just to D’Arcy (44m 25s): Well, you know, we, we have to be proud of of what the Division of Wildlife and, and what the Ohio State parks have done. Ohio State parks are, they’re really inundated with folks in, in throughout the summertime. Most of our good inland reservoirs are are from their state park reservoirs. Jeff (44m 44s): Yeah. I mean the steelhead program and we always do some research, this stocking program hats off to Ohio. Oh yeah. They have not missed their goal. Even during covid they haven’t missed their steelhead stocking programs or anything like that. But one fishery that they really haven’t had to do much other than manage limits is the walleye boom. Right. D’Arcy (45m 6s): Well, you know, we’ve gone to a 10 fish limit on walleye and, and it really didn’t work. And, and there, there’s a really good reason for it, I think, is that if you take and realize that most of our fishing guides on Lake Erie are six pack charters, that means they can take out six anglers and the skipper and a first mate and they can go fish. Now if, if you raise the limit to 10 on walleye, the big problem is that you’ll have days when the wa the walleye fishing may not be as spectacular as it can be. It may be it may take you pretty much longer to get a limit of fish. D’Arcy (45m 49s): And if it goes from six, which means you’re gonna have 42 fish on the boat, that’s a lot of fish. It’s going to go from 42 fish to 66 fish on the boat. So anyway, if you were a charter captain and you, your clients that day caught the limit of fish 36 and 6 42 fish. If they cut those 42 fish, that’s enough. If you wanna stop keeping fish at a certain time or you want to really make sure that the fish you catch are the ones you want to keep, that’s fine. D’Arcy (46m 30s): But your limit should stay at about 36 per day. If you start to get into a situation where you’ve got 66 fish that you, you have to catch every day as a charter captain, you’re not gonna do it. It’s going to be far more difficult to come home with a limit of 66 fish than it will be to come home with a limit of 42 fish. Jeff (46m 55s): Right. If you would’ve told me, you know, both of us got our license early in the, You know, early eighties. It was like, I’m catching walleye on a fly now. It’s like, I never would’ve guessed that, you know, and it’s taken a while to figure that game out, but it’s like in the min, you know, with the backdrop of Cleveland and the backdrop. So it’s like that fishery is still world class and still is the walleye capital, the world for sure. What about the perch? So there’s been some perch declines. What have you heard about the perch? Like, you know, that you’ve, that was our bread and butter was the perch fish back in the days and it was just like the, you old, you said your all night long cleaning little perch with the bottle caps and that. But you know, it’s like, do you think it’s gonna come back in the central basin? Jeff (47m 38s): Do you think mother nature’s gonna basically rejuvenate itself? What if D’Arcy (47m 42s): We Well we, we’ve seen, You know, we, we saw in the Western basin, and that’s where I lived, right in the Western Basin, we saw that the Western basin, the yellow perch populations 10 years ago went in the tank. They were just difficult to catch and you’re mostly catching small perch. And the head boats were having a real problem. So what the Division of wildlife put a moratorium on perch, commercial perch fishing. Bingo. Well, they left it on for, I can’t remember how many years it was, four or five years they left, they left that moratorium on, on the commercial fishery and the commercial fishing industry transferred their nets to just about Huron all the way down to the Pennsylvania border. D’Arcy (48m 26s): They had that stretch of water to continue to fish. Well, all of a sudden, about three or four years ago, the yellow perch fishing in the Western basin not only got to be good, but the people that told us that because of, of the, the lack of bait fish in the, in the Western basin and stuff, that those perch would not grow as large as they do in the central basin. Well these days the jumbo perch are being caught off Port Clinton and they’re doing really well. The party boat out of Port Clinton, I mean, catches 10,000 yellow perch every year now. Oh my gosh. D’Arcy (49m 7s): And the people in Fairport Harbor have an abominable perch season and they’ve had abominable perch seasons for the last few years and nobody knows exactly what the problem is. But I, you know, it’s a system of management. Now what we have to say is that the system of managing lake area as a whole has vastly improved since the days when I came on covering lake area and its fishing. Back in the old days, Canada and Ohio could not agree, Ontario and Ohio could not agree on how to, how to share the fish, whether it was walleye or yellow perch or anything. D’Arcy (49m 51s): And so if our commercial fishermen over bagged, then the Canadians said, we’re gonna over bag too, because our commercial fishermen aren’t going to be punished because your guys are catching more fish. Well, nowadays the Great Lakes Fishery Commission has the Lake Erie committee that takes the fisheries experts from every state and the province of Ontario and they sit down and they hash out what’s good for Lake Erie, the whole lake. Not, not the Ohio share, which is pretty big, not the Ontario share, which is pretty darn big, but also the Michigan share and the Pennsylvania share and the New York share of Lake Erie. D’Arcy (50m 40s): We’ve gotta make sure that the whole lake is viable and, and we have to make sure that the populations are maintained of fish. So we have to manage both our commercial fishery and our sport fishery to make that happen. Jeff (50m 57s): I think that’s across the board from each coast, from salt water, the fresh water to in the lakes, everything is that management, D’Arcy (51m 2s): Right? Oh, there’s no doubt about it. You know, and it, there are, there are a lot of, of different things that we’re gonna see, think happening in, in the years to come. One of the things that really Cleveland needs to do, and so does the state of Ohio and so do all the other states, you know, there are a lot of people in this country that don’t understand just what we’ve got a lot do. A lot of guys that come here know they realize we’ve got the best wildlife fishery in the world. We’ve got a steelhead trout fishery that a freshwater steelhead trout fishery that nobody else has. We have got a small mouth bass fishery. D’Arcy (51m 44s): I mean, I watched the Gallagher boys out two years ago bring in a 10 pound small mouth bass off the north side of Peele Island. That is the biggest smallmouth bass ever caught in the Great Lakes. I’m seeing that I, and what we don’t have, we don’t have the, sure, we’ve got a sports committee in Cleveland that promotes sports things happening in Cleveland. It doesn’t matter if it’s the Special Olympics or, or it’s, you know, any kind of competitions and things like that. They, they just don’t understand fishing. They don’t understand a, a tournament that’s being held here. D’Arcy (52m 28s): They don’t understand any of that. They don’t promote it. The state of Ohio, their department of tourism just kind of says, well, fishing’s good on Lake Erie, you oughta come here. That’s it. You know. Oh boy. They don’t, they don’t promote it. They don’t go to a show in South Dakota. They don’t go to a show in Nevada. They don’t go to a show in Texas and say, Hey, you guys want to come to Ohio? You come to Cleveland, Ohio to steelhead trout fish or to walleye fish or to have fun. And guess what we gotta show you? We gotta show you the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. D’Arcy (53m 12s): And guess what? We have all the major league sports in Cleveland. I guess Jeff (53m 19s): It’s not the mistake on the lake, is D’Arcy (53m 20s): It? It’s not the mistake on the lake anymore. And, and thank goodness the guardians showed everybody in this country last year, what an exciting young team they are. And they were so much fun to watch. And the fact was you could go to a guardian’s game and after the game you could wander down to ninth Street and cast from the pier and maybe catch a walleye or a steelhead. Jeff (53m 44s): That’s pretty amazing. Is there anything you’d like to tell the listeners before we start wrapping it up? Do you have any stories or anything that you want, you wanna bring up? D’Arcy (53m 52s): Well, you know what, what I wanna bring up and it’s, it’s, I get more calls and I have for the last 40 years from people that say, you know, I’ve tried this, this form of fishing or this form of hunting and I, I’ve really, you know, I, I haven’t been successful and what do I do? And you know, in the old days you just had to, you had to had an uncle that mentored you or you had a dad, or you had a brother that mentored you and showed you how to do these kind of things. But that’s, that’s obviously not happening these days. And what, what I insist that people do is, you’re well aware of this, if you’ve been steelhead trout fishing four or five times and you’ve never even hooked a fish and you don’t know why, you’re not catching why it’s not happening, it’s because you don’t know the things you don’t know. D’Arcy (54m 42s): Right. And so what I suggest, and it’s easy to find, get a guide, go to a fly shop, talk to the people and make sure you got the right gear, make sure you got the right baits, the right flies, all those kinds of things. Back when I started, people that fly fished generally went to, to truck clubs around the area and that was it. That was their whole experience. Now because of guys like you, Jeff, we’ve got things happening. I fished the upper Rocky River for carp. Common carp. It’s like bonefish fishing. It’s amazing. It’s so much fun. D’Arcy (55m 22s): You’re not gonna keep the fish generally some might, but it’s the best, one of the best fights you’ll ever have in fly fishing. Now I talked to Jerry Darkest the other day from Strongsville who’s got the really great fly tying book that’s just come out again, Jerry is, is is a magician, but he was taking a young lady that ran a fly fishing club down in the Cincinnati area. He was taking her out on Lake Erie, right shore of Cleveland. And they were catching jumbo sheep’s head and I mean, big ones. That’s insane. That’s fun. D’Arcy (56m 3s): And now I’m finding out, and I found it out last year with the catfish channel Catfish in Sandusky Bay. It’s insane. They’re catching more catfish. Addison does. It’s like the Red River in Saskatchewan for god’s sake. The Red River has been known around the country as the channel catfish heaven, where you go to catch a 20 pounder. I went to Sandusky Bay last May and I caught a fish, a channel catfish with Sam Horn and his charter service. I’ve caught a fish with him that weighed 26 pounds, a channeled catfish. D’Arcy (56m 46s): He threw it in my lap. And I said, that’s the, that’s the biggest channeled catfish I’ve ever seen. And we did it in about four hours of fishing. We cut 47 channel catfish and I would say 10 of them were over 20 pounds. Jeff (57m 1s): I make a living catching catfish on a fly. D’Arcy (57m 4s): And you can do that. And that’s what we’re gonna try this year in May and June. We’re gonna try this, the fly fishing for catfish. And I think, I’m sure we can do it. Jeff (57m 13s): Oh, absolutely. D’Arcy (57m 14s): And you would know, I, I mean at all this, all the different styles of, of fishing, but, and you get to places that I’ve never fished the, the rivers of British Columbia. I’ve, I’ve fished a little bit of Alaska, but not like you have. I mean those are some really wonderful areas and to me that that’s what I’d like to experience in the years to come, you know, just once, once or twice or in my, in my lifetime, go to go to those kind of fishing holes and I’d like those people that fish those kind of places to come to Cleveland and see what’s happening in an urban area. It’s going to stun them. Jeff (57m 54s): Right. Urban fishery in its finest. Do you got any last words of wisdom for young writers or any other things you’d like to cover? D’Arcy (58m 2s): Well, you know, the one thing that that kind of disturbs me a little bit is that we’re becoming too technology oriented. And, and what brings it to mind is that so many fishermen that I I see on Lake Erie, especially the tournament fishermen are going to forward facing sonar. And I know it’s a great thing and for people that don’t know what I’m talking about, when you use a sonar unit and I, I go back to the old green box made by Lorenzo Electronics that gave you the depth of the lake you were fishing or the river you were fishing. And Of course it was, it was fine tuned to be able, so you could see a blip whether there was a fish down there and you couldn’t tell what size it was or, or what kind of a fish it was. D’Arcy (58m 49s): Well, with forward facing sonar, you’re basically what you’re doing is you’re taking the transducer of your sonar unit and you’re pointing it away from your boat horizontally. And you can see a fish 50, 60, 70 feet away, you can see that fish and you know it’s a fish and You know the depth of that fish and you can cast a lure right to that fish without that fish realizing that there’s a boat a hundred feet away and you can set the hook on that fish and catch them. And tournament fishing fishermen are doing that quite often. The bash fishermen are are finding that it’s really worthwhile. D’Arcy (59m 32s): Croppy fishermen are doing it. You know, wildlife fishermen in tournaments are doing it. I talked to John Hoyer of, of Minnesota about that last spring because he told everybody where he was going fishing on Lake Erie on a tournament out of Port Clinton. He told them what he was gonna be using. He told everybody that what he was going to do and then he went out there be. But because he is so accomplished in forward facing Sonar, he won the tournament for fun. And he is done that quite a bit in his career. So, I mean, I don’t know if we’re, we’re getting too sophisticated, too electronically sophisticated and doing things. D’Arcy (1h 0m 15s): I don’t want to go back to the old green box even though I have one in my shed. And it works Jeff (1h 0m 23s): Well, you know, I think it’s been great chatting. Do you have one last story you want share with this? What’s your like, what was your favorite fishing adventure? What was your most memorable one? You have one on top of your head. D’Arcy (1h 0m 35s): You know, the strangest and, and most different fishing trip I took was, I was invited by, by a tourism Canada to go up onto Baffin Island. And it was just unbelievable because you’re in the middle of nowhere. It’s the fifth biggest island in the world, and only about 2000 people lived there, and they’re all shoreline people. There’s nobody in the center of the island. And we went to Lake iMac and it was fed by the Bingo river. And the reason we were there was we wanted to see if there were enough trophy arctic char. And there were landlocked coming out of the Mango River and going into Lake iMac for tourism to build a lodge there to be run by the Inuit. D’Arcy (1h 1m 20s): And Of course the Inuit Nation now owns Baffin Islands. But it was the strangest feeling because I could see a mile. We were, we were camped on Lake Eman, and I could see the rising landscape, and I could see about a mile up, and I saw something white moving. And I told the tourism guy who had accompanied us there, we were there for about a week, camped out. We’d come in on a, on a twin otter with tundra tires and landed on the beach. And he looked at it and he said, oh, crap. I said, what? He said, it’s a polar bear. D’Arcy (1h 2m 0s): He said, let’s move everything closer to the water and get the boat ready. So if that, if we see that, that polar bear come anywhere closer, we’re outta here. We’re gonna, we’re jumping in the boat and we’re gonna run. And, and I said, what? He said, you don’t understand. Polar bears have never seen people. They know exactly what you are to them. You are food. And I thought, whoa, wait a minute. He said this, this isn’t like Hudson Bay, where you’ve got places where you can see polar bears and stuff like this. He said, this is the wilderness here, and you are just guests. D’Arcy (1h 2m 43s): They live here. And while we were there, a friend of mine and I that were, were on the trip. He was from Ontario, and we found a pile of rocks that was as probably as tall as a, a kitchen stool. And, and we looked at it and thought, what the heck is this? And then I realized it was a trapper. It was a trapper that had come that far. And he had killed a caribou, and he had taken the rocks and put it on the parts of the caribou, the, the legs and the, and the hindquarter and everything. He put rocks on it, and then he’d put traps all around it because the arctic fox would come in and feed on it. D’Arcy (1h 3m 27s): And so we thought that, well, that’s pretty cool. And then the guy that was with me went over and he saw something and he went over and it was a rifle. Oh. And it had been there at least for 50 years. It was covered in Patine. It was, you couldn’t even open any, you know, the cartridge, you couldn’t put a cartridge in it or anything, but it was a rifle. And obviously what it was, was a trapper was out. He had his rifle, he probably walked away to go fish or do something. And the polar bears arrived, or one of them. D’Arcy (1h 4m 8s): Oh my goodness. And we could never find his bones, but we found his trapping rock pile. And a friend of mine who was from Ontario, who’s publisher of a paper in lower in Southern Ontario, he took the rifle home and it’s on his wall right now because it’s a story. It’s a, it’s a story of things happening. And then that’s the biggest really enjoyment of my job, was the stories. There’s so many stories. I’ve been to Costa Rica many times. I’ve written for Costa Rica Outdoor magazine. And, and Jerry Ruo, who was the editor for many, many years, he died about four years ago. Jerry Ruo always wanted me to come to Port Costa Rica to, to work for his magazine when I retired. D’Arcy (1h 4m 52s): And, and I, You know, I told Jerry, I said, you know, the, it, it was great. And I see tourism blossoming down in Costa Rica, and we used to Fish Lake Aall, which is an active volcano where you would fish to the lake and the lake would tremble every once in a while and kick out some volcanic dust because it was still an active lake. And all the dust would float down on your boat as you are fishing. Jeff (1h 5m 19s): That’s what we do as anglers and hunters. Yes. Stories. Right. And I think regardless of what you catch, what you kill, whatever your goal was, the some of the times the best part of the story, it’s not that part. It’s the adventure. D’Arcy (1h 5m 33s): It’s the adventure. It’s so much fun. And I’ve, I’ve hunted and traveled in South Africa. My brother lived there for quite a bit. My older brother, Johnny, Mike, he lived in, in Johannesburg and had a, a company there doing assembly line equipment. And his wife was from South Africa. She was a model. And they met in Paris when he was there, and they moved to South Africa where she grew up. And you know, I, but I just love the countryside. Kruger Park with all the critters. I mean, you could, elephants and giraffe everywhere. It’s just so much fun. And Cape Town, I brought some lures. D’Arcy (1h 6m 13s): I called one of my friends at Pratt Co. And I wanted some of the biggest crank bait that they had because the fishermen in Cape Town, who I was gonna fish with, asked me if I could find some of them because they couldn’t buy them in Europe or in, in South Africa. So I called Pratt Co and got a box of them and had them sent to these guys. When I got there, they thought I was a God because I got ’em lures, they couldn’t get in their own country. And we went out, we went fishing for longfin and yellow fin tuna. And they don’t have large fishing boats. They got small fishing boats, and they only have one launch ramp in Cape Town. So we went out fishing one day and they’d put out about five lures, and they’d put one in the prop wash. D’Arcy (1h 6m 57s): And they were both in the cabin of the boat eating this greasy sausage, the South Africans love deed. And I’m looking down at that, that lure fluttering in the, in the water as it, it was only about three feet deep, four feet deep. And water was clear. It was, it was the ocean. And so I’m watching it, and then all of a sudden something came up, and when I saw it, I was startled on. I stepped back and it was a tuna as long as our boat, and it grabbed that crank bait and turned, and we had short trolling rods, the real heavy duty short trolling rods with roller guides on them, and 120 pound test line on Penn International reels. D’Arcy (1h 7m 48s): And it took the rod tip, you and I couldn’t have done this. It took the rod tip and brought it in and hit, hit the water. The rod tip did, I thought the rod was gonna break. And it, that fish ran off about, I’d say a hundred yards a line. And the line 120 pound test line snapped. And I thought, holy smokes. So I, I went up to the cabin and with the guys, and I said, Hey guys, you just lost a lure. They said, what? I said, A fish took it. They said, tell us about it. I said, it was longer than your boat. They just laughed. And I said, I thought you’d be upset. D’Arcy (1h 8m 30s): They said, Hey, we done never gotten in that Fish Inn. Never in a hundred years just too big. And I thought, oh my goodness. But I mean, those are the stories that you get, You know, hitting Kruger Park and hitting some of the, of the game parks and everything. So, you know, the thing that that I really enjoyed too though, was that when I became the outdoors editor, it introduced me to a whole new line of books that I’d never read. And I do now. And I mean it, you know, I, I love things like Stephen King and, and Carl Hyon, but all the other books, the outdoor books, the old timers, if you ever get a chance like Robert Rourke and all those great old time writers, hey, you kick back on a Sunday afternoon, put your feet up, have a cup of coffee, and enjoy the outdoors. D’Arcy (1h 9m 24s): You’ll understand what we’re all talking about then. Jeff (1h 9m 27s): Darcy, I can’t thank you enough for all your knowledge and your stories, and we’re gonna call this a wrap of this episode. Maybe we’ll get Darcy back again and chat some more. Just the wealth of knowledge and the stories and the memories are something I enjoy. I hope you enjoyed the listeners, enjoyed it. And if you ever have a chance, check out cleveland.com. Darcy still does the Fisher Reports on Fridays, and he does a little ghost writing here and there might not be his name, but if you have any questions, reach out to me personally at Great Legs, dude and or Dave Wetly swing. Thanks for the listen and we’ll be catching you on the next episode. Dave (1h 10m 9s): That is a wrap. You can grab all of the show notes@wetlyswing.com and please follow us on Instagram and share this episode out with someone you love. Please send me an email, dave@wetlyswing.com. If you have any feedback or want us to put together an episode on this podcast for you, check in anytime. I hope you enjoyed this podcast and would love to meet up with you on the water. We have new fly fishing schools going all year long and all around the country, so if you want to connect, let’s do it right now. All right, time to get outta here. I hope you have a great evening. I hope you have a great morning or great afternoon, wherever in the world you are. And I appreciate you for stopping by and checking out the show today. Dave (1h 10m 51s): We’ll talk to you soon.