748 | Top 7 Alaska Fish Species to Target with Marcus Weiner of Fish Alaska Magazine

Dave (2s): There are a number of iconic species that live in Alaska, but likely none other bigger than the Alaskan Rainbow known to get much larger than many places in the us. These aggressive rainbows have got what it takes. Today’s guest owns the leading fishing magazine in Alaska, and today you’re gonna get his top species and tips for fishing Alaska this year. This is the Wet Fly Swing podcast where I show you the best places to travel to for fly fishing, how to find the best resources and tools to prepare for that big trip, And what you can do to give back to the fish species we all love. Hey, I’m Dave host of the Wet Fly Swing podcast. I’ve been fly fishing since I was a little kid, grew up around a little fly shop and have created one of the largest fly fishing podcasts in this country. Dave (43s): Marcus Weiner, owner of Fish Alaska Magazine and self proclaimed fishing and hunting attic will share some of his favorite trips and species of over 23 years now of running the magazine. You’re gonna find out how to catch sockeye fish that are known to not eat flies or jigs. We’re gonna find out how he’s doing it now up at Togiak, and we’re also going to find out what other salmon species he loves. He’s putting together a trip. Again, when should you be going? When should you be planning? We’re gonna be up there in July. That’s a good time. August is a good time. There’s a lot of good times up there. He’s gonna talk about that. We’re also gonna find out about catching this Alaskan salmon shark on a fly 250 pounds. Dave (1m 24s): And we’re also gonna get a story from a trip he did with a ex-pro football player, somebody you may have heard of, and he spent a week out there in the back country fishing and floating 120 miles of the remote Alaskan wilderness. This is an amazing story as well. So here we go. Marcus Weiner from fishAlaskamagazine.com. How you doing, Marcus? Marcus (1m 46s): Doing good, Dave. Good to be here, bud. Dave (1m 47s): Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for setting some time aside today to jump back into Alaska. We’re always excited about talking Alaska, and we just had, as this episode goes live, which is probably gonna be kind of early April in that range, we’ve wrapped up a, a giveaway to Togiak, which I know you’ve been up there in the past and you know, the guys at Togiak River Lodge. So, you know, we’re gonna be looking to fill some spots for that as well as we go ahead. But we’re gonna talk about just the magazine you have, which is the biggest magazine in Alaska. Not only fishing, but I think you do some hunting and things like that. And I, I know you’re like a fishing nut. So let’s take it back real quick before we get into all the magazine. First, take us back to fishing. Like, how’d you get into it? Dave (2m 28s): What’s your first memory of, of all that? Marcus (2m 30s): Dave? I grew up on the East Coast and my grandmother was a salty dog, and from a very, I still have visions imprinted at about two and a half years old of casting off the beach for baby blue fish called Snappers. So from, as, as far back as my memories go fishing has been imprinted on me, and that’s where it began. I don’t know, it’s just one of those things that I, I started doing it and I couldn’t get enough. Yeah. Dave (2m 55s): You’ve had the bug your whole life. Has, has fly fishing been there early on, or did you pick that up a little bit later? Marcus (3m 1s): Yeah, I would, I would say by about, at the time that I was 10, my, my parents split up and I moved up into a rural portion of upstate New York where we spent a lot of time on streams catching brook trout and brown trout. And the family that I, I grew to be really close with, almost adopted me like a fourth son. They were a real outdoors family that everything that they could catch or shoot, they would eat. So my upbringing there was, we had a worm farm and we were catching trout and it was 10 a day and we would bring them home and we would eat them over the course of the year. And there wasn’t a breakfast that went by at their house that we didn’t have trout and eggs. And, and that’s where I grew up. And by after doing that for a few years, one of the, the father’s friends came out with a fly rod and he proceeded to just put on a show. Marcus (3m 49s): It, that was the point at which my fly fishing career started. So I’m gonna say I was about 12 or so. Right. Dave (3m 56s): Gotcha. So you saw the, the success of another flight angler. Did, did it take you a while to make your way across the country out to Alaska? I Marcus (4m 4s): Went to college in, up in upstate New York at a, a state school called Binghamton University. And, and I got degrees in physics and mechanical engineering and, and I just had a kind of a wayward travel bug to me that I just wanted to see some of the country. So I convinced a buddy of mine that we should make the trip all the way to Alaska. And to be quite honest, Dave, I didn’t intend on staying there. I was just thinking I was gonna go up there. Honestly, I was gonna go work in a cannery for the summer and just work in obscene amount of hours and put some money aside and then moved back to the lower 48 and then start a professional career as an engineer. It took about a week to realize just how amazing even Anchorage was. People were super friendly, you know, it was, I was up there when I got there, it was late May, so by the time I kind of got my bearings, it was into June and, you know, it was literally 24 hours of daylight and you could work a full day and you could go fish for eight hours afterwards and still have time to sleep. Marcus (4m 59s): And so my plans quickly changed, and instead of maybe pursuing the engineering career like I thought I would, I started doing various jobs that led me from point A to point B. And after about six years of, of doing various sales jobs, I decided it was time to start working for myself. Dave (5m 16s): Amazing. And so you’ve been up there Alaska ever since? I Marcus (5m 20s): Lived there full-time for 17 years. You know, I got up there in 1994 and I left in 2011. And the last 13 years I’ve been down here in southwest Washington. Winters in Alaska get, get pretty long and tough. Yeah. And while I was a skier and I had a snow machine, the rest of my family didn’t, didn’t fare so well with some of that winter. So this was the compromise that we made to move down here. And I’m pretty pleased with this compromise. There’s great fishing down here in the, in this section of the country, as you know, and it gives me good access to get back and forth from Alaska. I make six to 15 trips a year up there. Yeah, Dave (5m 55s): You’re you’re up there a lot. That’s it. Okay. And, and the fish Alaska does that, was that something that slowly evolved or maybe talk about how you came into that? Marcus (6m 4s): So I’m, I’m up, I’m in Anchorage. I’m, I’m working for the largest legal publisher in the world. I’m the, I’m the Alaska statewide representative for LexiNexis and all of their sub-brands, literally selling over 8,000 products to the legal profession. Hmm. And I hadn to spend a lot of time with my sister over the years, when our parents got divorced, we, we lived with different parents. She graduated from college and we started to connect again, and I brought her to Alaska and we built out a, a room in the house we were renting for. And she, she went to work for me. And pretty quickly we were the top team in our, in the northwest. And then I came to find out that the legal publisher wasn’t gonna allow me to have my sister work for me. Marcus (6m 50s): And so then I helped Melissa’s launch her own media company. And so while Melissa was doing that, I was realizing, you know, we need to do something together. And she synthesized the idea, look, there’s no fishing magazine. She was looking for something that I would love to do and that her husband would love to do. She wasn’t really a, a fisherman at that point. And, and that was the, that was the spark of it. Looking around Alaska, the only magazine that existed for fishing was called the Alaska Fishing and Hunting News. And quite frankly, it wasn’t, it wasn’t any good. Yeah. Dave (7m 23s): We Marcus (7m 23s): Would often see, you know, large mouth bass in the magazine and white-tailed deer species that didn’t even exist in Alaska. And it was a, it was a national company that put out various states hunting and fishing newses, but the Alaska version was pretty weak. So that had just gone under and we saw the opportunity to potentially step into the space. When I look back on it now, you know, to, to fully commit to something like that. You know, I had worked for a lot of years to go from having nothing to having a house and some assets, and I, I leveraged them all to attempt to start this business with my sister. People thought we were a little bit crazy, but I was 150% committed to the idea. Marcus (8m 5s): And I, and I think when you were, when you’re fully committed to anything, you know, there are no obstacles that you’re not gonna be able to get around. That’s pretty much how it came, came to be, Dave. Dave (8m 15s): Yeah, that’s so cool. I I love that you were, I mean, you’re just all in, I mean, that’s such a, a awesome thing, right? You just went all in and leveraged it all and said this, I’m gonna make this work. And you have, and now you have, you know, a great magazine. You’re traveling up there, you know, it sounds like quite a bit. And yeah, and I think we connected on just some of the stuff we’ve been doing as we’ve been putting these trips together as well. So it’s been, it’s been really cool to make a connection here. So, so what does that look like on the magazine now? So when, what year was that when you kind of first launched the magazine? Marcus (8m 44s): We brought the company to life at the end of 2000. In 2001. We put out a single issue, and I had visions a grandeur. I was, I was thinking that if we got the magazine into the hands of the right people, we could convert, you know, a couple, 3% of them into subscribing, which was, that was pretty ambitious. And we, we started our, our full-time publishing journey in January of 2002, we started producing 10 issues a year. And we, we’ve been doing it ever since. So 23 plus years of, of publishing the magazine, you know, 25 years in business. Yep. But think about it, Dave, you start a magazine, you know, how do you determine who to send it to? Right? You don’t have subscribers, right? Marcus (9m 24s): You don’t even, you know, you’ve gotta put a staff together, you’ve gotta figure out an, you know, a framework for the business. You gotta find advertisers and then you have to find subscribers. Well, from my past experience working with Lexus Legal Publishing, I knew that there was a lot of public information out there that you could get your hands on. And as it so happens, the state of Alaska sells the fishing, hunting and trapping license list each year. Hmm. So I can tell you who Phishes and Hunts in any state, and I used that as the basis for my direct mail campaign. And like I said, I had, I had big time aspirations for making this a national title. And so we came out of the gate printing 75,000 copies a month. Marcus (10m 5s): That was a lot. Yeah. It’s a big financial commitment to put out 75,000 copies of the magazine. And we did that for a year, but it allowed us to send it all over the world. And within a short period, we had subscribers in all 50 states. Wow. I think what’s allowed us to keep these subscribers is the fact that we, are we always seeking to make the magazine better. We’ve, we’ve expanded the scope of the departments, so those are the monthly columns that exist. So maybe there was four or five in the beginning, and now there’s closer to 10. So there’s not only a fly fishing department in the magazine, but there’s a fly tying department in the magazine. So in, in each issue, you know, you’ll get that, that the April issue that I’m working on right now is our exclusive fly fishing issue. Marcus (10m 51s): So the entire magazine is dedicated simply to that. But there are, you know, Alaska Scale offers a wide variety of, you know, opportunities for anglers of all skills and techniques. And so we try to embrace that and in the course of the year, and so we have a salt water column and a gear column, we have, you know, eating the fish that we keep is an important part of the lifestyle in Alaska. And it’s always been part of my mentality. So we have a recipe department in there each, each issue. And that’s one of the more, you know, popular destinations on our website for people to come look at these recipes that we’ve published from lodges and, and restaurants and individual anglers over the years. Marcus (11m 31s): It’s quite a big cookbook at this point. Dave (11m 33s): I was gonna ask you that, you know how after, you know, you’ve been going a little bit longer than us, quite a bit longer, but 23 years over 23 years, and, you know, that was a question we got when we first started the podcast. You know, God would, are you gonna run outta topics, you know? Yeah. Are you gonna run outta people to interview? And that’s always something I thought of like, well, I don’t think so, and now after we’ve been doing this for eight years, it’s like, yeah, no, not at all. And is it the same for you? Do you find that after 23 years you still have lots of topics and interest? Marcus (11m 60s): I do. Yeah, I do. And things continue to evolve, you know, when you look at what phishing was like 25 years ago compared to now. Right. The techniques and the gear, I mean, they have, they’ve come miles in, in just that little amount of time. So, and, and then new destinations open up and nothing’s ever static. So you might go to Togiak River Lodge today, but five years from now, that river could look a little different. And this contest that we’re both part of here for Togiak River Lodge, I’ve been going to that lodge for 20 years. So I’ve seen a lot there. I don’t know precisely how many times I’ve been there. I’m sure it’s at least 10. Wow. And Alaska is just so gigantic. Marcus (12m 42s): You know, that’s, this is an important thing for, for the listeners to understand. Alaska is like two and a half times the size of Texas. It’s like nearly a million square miles. Dave (12m 52s): Right. There’s no way you’re ever gonna see all of Alaska right. In your life. Marcus (12m 56s): No, no. And and the more I travel and the more I fish up there, the, the more I realize I haven’t seen, and how little I actually do know Yeah. About the state as a whole. It’s a micro ecosystems from the, you know, far southeast, you know, traveling into South Central and the western portion and the whole interior portion of the state. They all, they all have a completely different look to them. So no, I, I think I’ve got another 25 years of, of doing this. Yeah, Dave (13m 21s): You do. Marcus (13m 22s): I I do. I’m I’m passionate about it still. Yep. Dave (13m 25s): Do you think there’s, you know, we’ve had some episodes recently and we’ve, we always talk conservation and on I think any event we’re doing, we’re talking about, have you seen, I mean obviously you’ve seen some changes. Do you think, you know, 25 years you’ll be there. What do you think about in 50 years? In a hundred years, what do you think Alaska, you know, because we’ve got some changes going on Chinook, even down to Bears, right. Places where bears aren’t anymore. What are your thoughts there? Did you look out that far? Marcus (13m 51s): Well, we’ve taken an active role in conservation for at least the last 20 years. We, we have a conservation department in the magazine that’s sponsored by Trout Unlimited. They write it each issue. And we hold an annual contest with Trout Unlimited, where a winner and guest gets to come fishing with us and a Trout Unlimited representative at one of the lodges that we choose. So the conservation concept is in, is incredibly important to us. You know, when I talk about harvesting fish, I hammer again and again and again for people to understand, to only take what it is that they’re gonna be able to eat within a year. And, you know, we, we see that the diminishing fisheries is a very complicated problem that that crosses over to all the user groups. Marcus (14m 32s): So this is something that commercial fishermen and subsistence fishermen and sport anglers all need to be working on together to improve. So that’s probably easier said than done, but I, I will use an example of the pebble mine that we all came together to stop as an example of, of how this can work. And I just spent four days at Alaska Sportsman’s Lodge with my good friend Brian Kraft, who runs that lodge. And Brian is, is one of the people that is, or was definitely on the front lines in helping stop the pebble mine from happening. And his efforts stayed back over 20 years. And it took a local, with the knowledge of the area and to be able to get out and talk to local natives to make them understand what could potentially happen. Marcus (15m 21s): And from there to move it up to a state level to bring some other players that had greater influence so that the state legislature could understand what was happening and to then bring it to the next level of drought unlimited. We’re on a national basis. Yeah. We could influence policy. The bottom line is that, that that heavy metal leach mine that would’ve gone in into that area. There’s, there’s really not an example anywhere in the world where that system of mining doesn’t end up destroying the environment. And this is, we’re talking about a place with the largest run of wild sockeye salmon in the world. You know, some years 40 to 50 million fish return. We’re talking about rainbow trout that can grow past 30 inches. Marcus (16m 3s): And, and all of that system, you know, all depends on clean water. So I’m uplifted on how we were able to stop something and it was so large, you know, that had an international money behind it. So when I look at that as a, as a concept, when I take a step back and I, and I look at like, what’s going on with Chinook, while it is a complicated question, and I’m not sure that anybody really has their exact finger on the pulse of what’s causing such a decline, it’s clear to all of us that have watched it, that it’s happening somewhere out at sea. Right. It’s inconceivable to think that runs would crash all across Alaska if it was an inRiver issue. Dave (16m 46s): Yeah. And you don’t have any dams. You don’t have any dams. The habitat is perfect. And it comes down to that’s it, it’s either harvesting, right, it’s harvesting or it’s something out there or oceans. Marcus (16m 56s): And it’s where’s the intercept happening is what it comes down to. And it appears that age classes of fish are getting, you know, sucked up. And so it’s, it’s just, it’s pretty damning evidence that the international t tra fishery is having a substantial effect on what goes on the returning Chinook Dave (17m 14s): And the bigger fish, the Chinook being the big, the bigger of the salmon. Right. Or, and they’re also out there eating, they’re the predators, right. So they’re going further out, eating more compared to say, a sockeye or some of these other fish that maybe aren’t out. Is that kind of your thought there? That’s Marcus (17m 28s): Correct. A, a big sockeye is a three ocean fish, where a big Chinook is a five or six ocean fish, even, you know, on river like Kenai. And, and you’re exactly right, I think humans have gotten more effective as anglers, and that’s commercial and sport. And so we’re, we’re more effective at harvesting these fish. And so it’s just harder for these fish to make it, to return back to their environments. But it troubles me that it’s, that it’s the, so much of the state is crashing. So I think until we take a step back and perhaps stop fishing them for a while, I have gone strictly to catch and release when it comes to Chinook personally. Oh yeah. They were my favorite salmon to eat. And I’m, I’m a fish eater, but I, I recognize that we can’t do that. Marcus (18m 11s): And I continue to implore our readers of Fish Alaska magazine. While it seems frustrating that other user groups could destroy so many fish and, and how it seems unfair that individuals wouldn’t be able to harvest what they would need to feed themselves as citizens of the country, I still feel like we can make a difference. Dave (18m 32s): Yeah, I agree. You know, it’s interesting where you’re at because you have this magazine, which is the largest magazine out there in that region, but it serves not only, you know, it’s kind fairly general and I think you’re involved in some hunting, right? The Hunt magazine, but you’ve got fly fishermen, you’ve got conventional fishermen. What’s it like being covering both of those topics? Because I know I’ve heard some things, like even some of these lodges where, you know, I always feel like I, I think there’s a lot of positives to do both, right. But I feel like the fly fisherman was known as the old uppity white guy that is, you know, has to be a dry fly fisherman. What’s your take on being in the middle of that and do you see that as evolving? Marcus (19m 10s): I do. I, and I, I just wrote about that is I have a department called The Traveler in my magazine. And so I, I wrote about just Alaska fly fishing and I called it Alaska Fly Fishing simplified. I touched on the concept that yes, I think that there are two camps and they sear at each other for different reasons. But I think, I think if I was someone on the outside trying to get into fly fishing, it wouldn’t matter if I was, I had never touched a rod before, or if I had spent the last 50 years, you know, bait fishing for salmon, there are enough preconceptions as to what a fly fisherman is. So know someone casting, like you said, handmade dry flies with bamboo rods, you know, to replicate the exact bug life that exists. Marcus (19m 52s): Right. And, and, you know, they’re more likely than not, it’s a top water fly. So I just took a step back to say Alaska is one of those places that is welcoming for new fly fishermen. And I used some examples of, of over the years, I had a big client, it was, it was the, the local phone company in, in Anchorage as a statewide phone company based in Anchorage. And what I was doing for them for a number of years, they bought the back cover of the magazine. We would take their clients. Okay. So they had, you know, major corporate clients around the state, and I would take their clients to various destinations and hook up with various guides and lodges, and we would take them fishing, and then we would feature them in the ad on the back cover. Marcus (20m 39s): And so in, in this latest department, I’m recounting how I took a group of three anglers to a far west side of Kodiak, and they’d never touched a fly rod before. And the two species that I suggest to new anglers, new fly anglers are dolly var and char and pink salmon. They both exist in ludicrous numbers and they’re really widely distributed and they both bite very easily. So these are perfect opportunities for someone to get into the sport. And so those three anglers had never touched a fly rod. I brought six weights with floating lines, eight foot liters, you know, nothing special. And I hook hooked them up with indicators and egg patterns. Marcus (21m 23s): And I know that’s an, that’s another, you know, debate within the fly community is is, is it fly fishing if you’re using an indicator, you know Oh, right. Gets called a bobber. What, you know, you take it however you like. I, I am, first and foremost I love to fish and it, you can put a fly rod in my hand, or a spinning rod, or a bait caster or an ocean rod. I’ve pulled plugs with fly rods for steelhead. I mean, I’m, I’m more about doing what it is that works for you. I, I recognize people, you know, end up migrating maybe to one of the groups. But I, I, I like to bridge the gap and be in all the, all the different groups. And I’m, I had an, I know you’ve spent some time talking with George Crumb, my editor in chief, but the predecessor to George Crumb. Marcus (22m 5s): His name was Troy Leatherman. And, and I would go on many trips with Troy where he wanted to just dry fly fish while I would streamer fish. And I would catch at least 10 big rainbows to everyone that he touched. Meanwhile, we could both do what we wanted to do. He was, he was more than happy to just try to get that one fish to eat off the surface. And what adventurous I was on with him. He worked all day to get one fish to eat and then he snapped it off because he had such small tip. So Dave (22m 34s): That’s what I love about, I love about just fishing in general or fly fishing, you know, it’s like, it’s open to do whatever you wanna do. Right. If you want to be that guy that’s just the, you know, dry flies only you can do it. Right. Or if you wanna be just spay, like, we got some guys coming up and they really love spay and that’s like their, in fact, they’re spay only and that’s okay too. That’s right. Right. And I feel like, or if it’s bait or if you’re, if you’re baits your thing, go for it. Right. I, I feel like, have you been to lodges where you’ve had fly anglers and conventional anglers and do you see that that’s the same discussion or it sounds like maybe there are some, some heated discussions there. Marcus (23m 7s): No, I think it’s, I think when you get to Alaska, it’s so remote and it’s so kind of different for most people that it, it puts them in a different mindset there. It’s not the same old concepts. Right. You know, the same old preconceptions. Yeah. So I think that it’s more of the culture of the lodge itself dictates what happens there. Dave (23m 26s): What is it about to, and let’s just go to, to, because I, I also wanna get into some other, you mentioned a couple of species. I wanna talk about some of your favorite top species, you know, if you can, but what is it about toia? Because I, I know Jordan, you know, and Zach, they’re, because there has been a transition right. From, and you’ve been there over the transition. And now I think, think they’re going more, they’re trying to get more flag going there, maybe less understanding changes. What’s your take about togiac? And it sounds like you’re are, you’re probably going back there in the near future. Marcus (23m 55s): Oh, I’ll be back up. Yeah. I’m going back up this summer. Yeah, nice. I’m going in August this time. So Togiac for the longest time was one of the very best Chinook rivers in Alaska. I can recall a trip in the mid two thousands where, where I landed 27 Chinook in one day. Geez. And that was using five different techniques. One of ’em was with a fly rod. So I, you know, I was, I was swinging streamers, you know, I was also nipping big egg invitations, fat Freds. And I caught ’em both, both those ways. So, but on, on top of that, it’s, it’s just a multi-species extravaganza there. I used to run a contest with Sportsman’s warehouse and the last year of the contest I brought the winner and guest to Tok River Lodge. Marcus (24m 38s): And Zach at the time was a fishing guide there. And I fished with Zach and literally the water was in the trees. Hmm. Okay. And even in those conditions, like we had to wait the storm out to make it so that it was even like, safe to be on the water. ’cause you get to certain sections of that river where the wind is ripping. Oh yeah. And you, you could have three, four foot standing waves. Oh wow. And so we didn’t even go out and we snuck out towards the end of the first day and throwing twitching jigs into the brush. And we literally had a limit of coho for all of us within an hour and a half. Oh Dave (25m 12s): Wow. Yeah. Marcus (25m 13s): Later on that trip, we made it up to, you know, scouting around and Zach took us up one of the sloughs that you normally wouldn’t fish. And because there was enough water and the fish were seeking some, you know, some slower water, they had moved into there. And over the course of the next four hours, we caught the grand slam of salmon. That’s all five salmon species. Oh wow. Plus dollies and rainbows. Dave (25m 35s): What time of year was that? Marcus (25m 37s): That would’ve been about the same time. I’m, I’m about to go back. That would’ve been their first trip in August. Dave (25m 42s): Okay. So August. So that’s kinda your best shot to get every, like if you do have a shot at everything, like all five Pacific salmon. Marcus (25m 48s): Yes. Because that was coho. You’re not gonna be able to catch coho until that point. Yeah. And that’s the, that’s what you’re waiting for. Now it closes the kings by then, so it’s an incidental catch. You’re not allowed to target them, but they’re there and then they’ll bite what’s your, you know, any number of presentations. Dave (26m 4s): So August, so Chinook coho and then you of course you mentioned pink sockeye and chum. So have you caught a few chum on Togiak? Oh Marcus (26m 12s): Yeah. Many, many chums on toc. Dave (26m 14s): Lots of chum. Are they bright? Are are a lot of them bright in there the Marcus (26m 17s): Further down the river they are, the brighter they are for sure. Yeah. I’ve been in there in years with, with other operators. Not Togiak River Lodge, where we caught them down in Tide water and we were eating chums. We were growing ’em as soon as they came out of the Oh right. Water. Dave (26m 30s): You so chum are good to eat. That’s the thing about chum, they’re down as you go further south, you know, they’re known as well with the dog salmon. Right. But they’re, but they’re good if you get ’em fresh. Marcus (26m 39s): We call ’em dog salmon in Alaska too. And they, and they very much are one of the Rodney Dangerfield species up there, and they fight harder than most. They never give up. And I think once they turn and they, they start to turn pretty early, then I wouldn’t try to eat a chump. But if you catch one in the ocean, if you get them when they first come in, you know, they’re covered in Sea L they haven’t colored up at all. We, we were eating, you know, fish that you had to look at ’em carefully to figure out what species they were. ’cause they had no bars on ’em at all. Dave (27m 9s): No bars. Yeah. Gotcha. So, no. So this is the, the cool thing about, again, Alaska, the cool thing, you know, this and all these species. What are your, I know this is probably a hard one, but if you had to say some of your maybe top five species, how did, could you do that? Do you categorize, could you say like, okay, this is number one. Oh Marcus (27m 25s): Yeah, for sure. I can easily, I can do that. I can do that. I do love to catch it, you know, everything. But, but I have been a rainbow trial fanatic for as long as I’ve lived up there. The rainbows are very much the top of the, the food chart for me. I think right below that I would put steelhead. These days we classify that as the same fish. So that’s your choice where you wanna put that in the list. Dave (27m 46s): Yeah. That’s good. I’ll we’ll call that number two. I think, I think different life history, you know, different, same species, but that makes them, yeah. Let’s call that two. Okay. Marcus (27m 53s): I am, as much as I am a fly fisherman, I’m equally a saltwater angler. And I, I very much like to fill my freezer. And I’ve been doing it for 30 years with fish that my family eats. I have a wife and four sons. And so halibut is my third the best on the list. Dave (28m 9s): And you’re not catching that with a fly rod, although I’m sure you probably could in some situations. Marcus (28m 14s): I have coughs. I’m on the fly rod. Oh wow. They, you use a heavy sinking line and you target ’em in shallow water. And I don’t think it’s the best means to do it, but I’ve done it. Okay. You know, just as a side note, we have something called the salmon shark. Oh, right. Alaska. It’s a poor beagle. They range from, I don’t know, 250 up to 600 pounds. Geez. And after I had caught two three of them on conventional gear in different towns, I had the wild idea that I should catch one on a fly rod. So I had 15 and 17 weight fly rods. I got, one was a Loomis, one was a Lama glass that I had borrowed. I got Billy Pate tyer, they were the same company back then. I got them to loan me their bluefin series flywheel. Marcus (28m 57s): And back in those days there’s an Alaska fly Fishers group and their head guy was one of our photographers and he was a fly tire. So I had him tie me up. Flies that represented socks, salmon. Hmm. Dave (29m 10s): Like big ones. They Marcus (29m 11s): Were 18 inches to 20 inches maybe. Yeah. And they were on size 20 odd hooks. And I went to Cordova. The first one I hooked was down pretty deep at about 60 feet. And that hole. And the thing, this is not true fly fishing, you can’t cast these flies and you, you’ll have a awful hard time landing on, if you don’t have a, a section of steel cable as a leader, they can cut just about anything. Even with just their skin. They can braid, braid with their skin. Wow. So you have to have 20 foot a quarter inch steel cable on there. At any rate, the first one that I hooked was probably about 500 pounds. It was down about 60 feet. And in about three seconds they could see it on the camera In about three seconds, it had pulled me 20 feet to the rail and then went the entire shark was in the air, all of it. Dave (30m 1s): Oh really? It jumped, Marcus (30m 2s): No, it didn’t just jump. It was like three foot clear of the whole water. This is Oh, amazing. 500 pounds of shark in the air. Wow. For the next four hours we watched see the, the, there’s not all that much known about these sharks. They, they travel really wide distance from Japan, you know, up to Alaska in a big sweeping circuit. And they’re, they were there so much because we have so many pink salmon being pumped out by the commercial hatcheries. So it was drawing these massive schools of sharks. And I was in, I was in Orca Bay having left out of Cordova with a gentleman that was studying them. Okay. And so he had figured out where all these sharks were in the, literally in four hours that we were, we were in this bay, Dave, there was a shark jumping at all times. Marcus (30m 50s): Oh Dave (30m 50s): Wow. So you’re just right in the middle of shark, shark infested waters Marcus (30m 54s): The whole time. And, and I, I hooked 12 of them and 11 of them bent my hooks out. Damn. I finally landed the 12th one, which was maybe about 250 pounds. And then we hightailed it out of there because it was, it was a tug of war. Dave (31m 8s): Do you have a, did you get a picture? Marcus (31m 9s): Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Dave (31m 12s): Some places are just different. You feel it the second you step into the water. Mountain Waters resort sits on the legendary Portland Creek, a place where Atlantic salmon runs strong. And where fly fishing history was written, Lee Wolf himself fished these waters. And now you get to experience the same world class fishing in a setting that feels untouched by time. Whether you’re swinging flies for fresh chrome or kicking back in a cozy riverside cabin, this is the kind of trip you’ll be talking about for years and years to come. And guess what, I’ll be there this year as well. But here’s the deal. Primetime season fills up fast. So don’t wait. Check in now and join me on this historic river this year. You can head over to wetly swing.com/mountain Waters right now. Dave (31m 52s): That’s Mountain Waters Resort. You can go to wetly swing.com/mountain waters right now and save your spot for this epic adventure. So, Sam Shark, now are they on your top species list? No, Marcus (32m 9s): They’re not on my list. I mean, it’s a, it’s a big game hunt and it can be an abusive event to try to land one when they’re, you know, big ones. They’re delicious, they’re good to eat. But I would advise if you, you do want to eat one, you need to bleed it as soon as you catch it Right, right in the water. Yeah. I mean, gut it and bleed it in the water within minutes. ’cause it sharks push their waist out through their bo you know, their muscle through their skin. That’s how they do it. Dave (32m 32s): Oh, no kidding. Marcus (32m 33s): Yeah. I, I had a party at my house with about 30 people and I cooked it up about five different ways and I didn’t tell anybody what it was. ’cause I knew knew that how they would react and they ate 20 pounds of salmon shark and were raving about it. Dave (32m 45s): Right. Is it kinda like a sturgeon sort of thing? Marcus (32m 48s): No, it was more gray and it, it cooked up more like pork. Dave (32m 51s): Oh, like pork, all right. Marcus (32m 52s): Yeah. It had, it, it took on whatever flavor you gave it, but it was very mild in, in that regard. Sturgeon obviously is like that too. It, it wasn’t, you didn’t need to cook it as long as you have to cook a sturgeon to break that, that meat down. Yeah. Dave (33m 4s): That’s good. Okay, so going back, so I, we’ve got rainbow, steelhead, halibut, what would number four be there? Marcus (33m 11s): Probably put king, king salmon. Yeah. Kings. You know, Chinook would be number four and number five. Now that’s, that becomes a tricky one. My last trip to Togiak River Lodge, we filmed sockeye, actively biting jigs. Hmm. It’s pretty much common, commonly accepted in Alaska that sockeye don’t bite anything. Right. Kinney, however, do Right. And there are, you know, I’ve talked to many sport and commercial fishermen in British Columbia that they, in the salt water, they will make these really long straight trolls with sparsely tied gear. You know, even just red hooks and troll ’em, you know, through the salt water and not divert. Marcus (33m 52s): And they’re able to catch saltwater sockeye. So those guys down, down at Togiak River Lodge, they’ve known for a while that this could happen. And they started experimenting with how do we do it when we’re fishing for sockeye with fly gear, you know, even conventional gear. We’re usually targeting fish that are on the move. And the basic means of catching a sockeye is, is to floss it. Are you familiar with that, with that term? Dave (34m 16s): Oh yeah. Flossing is basically just you what, putting some weight on there and you put the line right in their mouth and then they, they hook ’em on the outside of the mouth. Right. Pretty Marcus (34m 25s): Much. Pretty much. Dave (34m 26s): So they’re not biting, you’re not biting, you’re just kind of almost like snagging them. And it’s legal in Alaska. Right. Marcus (34m 31s): It is absolutely legal in Alaska. And it’s the, it’s the accepted technique. And when you’re a good angler and you, and you read the water properly and you know how the fish are lying and you set your gear up properly, you don’t have to do much. Fish will hook themselves, which I have learned after thousands and thousands of hours doing it on the Kenai. But unfortunately, like so many, you know, so many of the people that are shoulder to shoulder, maybe they’re a little impatient or maybe they’re not in the bright spot or maybe they haven’t rigged properly. And a lot of times it can end up snagging these fish places other than their mouth. And those are, those need to be put back. And so over the years, the amount of broken rods and injured anglers and, you know, the, what we’re doing with these fish, that’s all been kind of, I’ve looked at that detrimentally in, in terms of the technique. Marcus (35m 18s): So when I heard about these, you know, the guys at to River Lodge working on figuring out how to get sockeye to bite, it was like, whoa, does that can, that actually happened. And in the last few years I’ve made trips up there where we targeted sockeye and I’ve filmed it, you know? Yeah. Ad nauseum watching sockeye bite. Now when you hook a 10 pound sockeye, you’ve got your hands full. I mean, to me a 10 pound sockeye is like an 18 pound steelhead. Dave (35m 43s): Oh wow. No kidding. Marcus (35m 44s): It is as hot a fish as you’re gonna find up there. Dave (35m 47s): Is it kind of like Chinook, the way Chinook just run and just go? Marcus (35m 50s): No, it’s never in the water. It’s cartwheeling. Dave (35m 53s): Gotcha. Well Marcus (35m 54s): I’ve got some footage of one jumping like a 15 feet. It is completely unpredictable and it’s super fast and it’s a high flying adventure and they have soft mouths and they’re hard to land. And for all those different reasons and because Chinook are on the decline and we can’t eat them, and sockeye are plentiful and they’re delicious. Probably gonna put sockeye as number five. It’s, it’s a close call with coho. Dave (36m 18s): Yeah. Well let’s, let’s just do that. I was gonna say, so I was gonna say, let’s just add a bonus. So you’d probably put coho right there as number six. Marcus (36m 24s): I mean, it’s a tough one there, you know. Dave (36m 26s): Yeah. Sockeye record. They could be five or six. Right. Okay. And then, and then this, this is just the bonus would be, okay, let’s add a seventh just to see if the, would you have, would that be an easy call or, or what would that be? If you had one more? Marcus (36m 37s): I think I air towards Dolly Varden on that one. You know, Dolly’s an arctic char. Yeah. And I’m, you know, there are some gigantic specimens in certain rivers up there. Yeah. Dave (36m 46s): And it’s so unique. You can’t find dollies everywhere. Right. That’s the other cool thing. No, you Marcus (36m 50s): Can’t, I mean it’s, it’s unbelievable how many dollies there are in Alaska. Right. People rather glibly throw out the concept of catching a hundred fish in a day. Yeah. And it, it’s more often than not, it’s, it’s not accurate at all. And so I, after hearing that from so many people, years and years ago, I took it on myself to see what it would, how long it would take to catch a hundred dollies. ’cause that’s the species you could do it with. And I was on a, I was on a Kodiak or remote Kodiak Stream, and I brought my clicker that I would use when I was coaching baseball and counting pitches Oh yeah. For our pitchers. So I had an accurate count and it took me about eight and a half hours of nonstop fishing to land a hundred dollies. Marcus (37m 30s): There are many places you can go to land a hundred dollars. You know, we, we talked a little bit before about certain fly anglers getting so screwed in about catching top water. Well I knew a lodge owner, he’s not around anymore. He is on the far east side of Lake Ilena. And the river that he is on dumps into Cook Inlet on the other side. He took me on a very hairball ride on a road that the Corps of Engineers put in, think in the fifties. And it dumps down into the salt water on the west side of Cook Inlet called Williamsport named after the Williams family that were the original home setters out there. He had a skiff out there and we jumped in the skiff and we went up the bay a bit and took us up into this river mouth where he had been telling me for months that he was catching top water dollies. Marcus (38m 14s): Yeah. So I, I tried various flies and I, I got to 52 dollies before he managed to land the top water one. I’m not gonna say top water is the most effective technique for almost anything in Alaska, you know? That’s right. With, with few exceptions, Dave (38m 28s): They don’t have to eat stuff on the surface. Right. It’s, Marcus (38m 31s): You know, they, there are times a year where there’s, there’s not a platitude of salmon and salmon components and other bug life in the water where they’re looking up. And there are places in those tundra rivers where they eat a lot of, you know, mice, voles shrews that, you know, that’s an important part of their diet. Right. That’s huge. And so I’ll fish top water in those spots. Right. And coho present an opportunity at times, you know, when you get ’em when they’re fresh in off the tide and they’re really aggressive, they’ll chase down a top water fly and that, and that’s awesome to watch. But you know, by and large Alaska fish resident species rely on on salmon. And so that’s gonna be salmon flesh and salmon smolt and vin and eggs. Marcus (39m 15s): And that’s gonna be the main things that they’re looking for. Dave (39m 18s): Yeah. That’s, that’s the game. Okay, cool. What is, when you look out at Alaska, you know, have you seen any kind of, you know, big changes in recent years? Like what are the biggest things you may be seeing as changes or what do you expect upcoming, you know, what are you looking forward to kind of looking ahead? Marcus (39m 33s): Well, I think that there’s, there’s really a growing awareness among, among the angling population about the issues that need to be addressed. I think that that’s gonna be, you know, our main concepts. Dave (39m 44s): The phishing itself, the, the phishing you do, you’ve done with groups and stuff. That’s pretty much all the same. It’s pretty much a similar deal that like it’s always been 20 years ago as it is now. Well Marcus (39m 54s): There, there’s, you know, certainly concepts are evolving. You know, Togiak River Lodge is a good example Yeah. On how that was a go catch and kill Kings Lo location for decades and now is, you know, becoming a catch and release spay fishery. Yeah. So I think there are, you know, when you have paradigm changes, when you have management changes in locations that, that might direct how individual, you know, fisheries change, but, but just as by and large, I think that for the most part, the salmon species are, except for Chinook, are doing reasonably well. There’s, you know, ever increasing pressure. So I think we all just need to be aware of the fact that if we aren’t good stewards to the resource that it isn’t gonna be around in hundreds of years. Dave (40m 41s): Yeah. It’s interesting because you get a bunch of probably, you know, I’m sure I don’t even know all the issues, but I’m sure there’s misinformation going on. Right. Stuff like that. I mean, we just had a, a comment, you know, I did that episode with the salmon state and I just basically let them talk and tell the story and, and I got, you know, at least one comment, which was like, Hey, you know, you should have brought up some of the other side of the conversation. And I actually didn’t even know exactly what I missed on that. Right. But I guess there’s some other people thinking like maybe the trollers aren’t, but I don’t know. Right. But you probably see that, right. There’s two sides to the, to the argument. Well, Marcus (41m 14s): It’s such a complicated and, and big multi-variable system that, you know, from, just, from like an engineering head, you know, whereas a lot of times that’s where my brain goes is analytically trying to figure this out. You have so many moving parts and anecdotal evidence and getting the true data and then yeah. The, these are complicated issues, but you just just do the eyeball check on what’s happened with Chinook across the state and you can see that there’s a problem. Yeah. Dave (41m 41s): There’s something that’s gotta be changed. Yeah, Marcus (41m 43s): Yeah. For sure. And, and I, I’m not sure that we have completely figured out what that is other than to slowly add protection to the fisheries that need it. Dave (41m 54s): You know, maybe that’s halting fishing, maybe. That’s right. Some sort of stopping something for a period of time to see if that, you know, changes it. But yeah, that, that’s something we’ll, we’ll continue talking about on this podcast. And you know, we’ve, I’ll put links to those, show the, in the show notes to the Salmon State episodes we had in some of that stuff there. I did wanna check, you know, back in the magazine because I think that the magazine is amazing, all the content you have going. What would you say, if you look at kind of over the years top articles, do you know, like top topics that always resonate? You mentioned cooking, but are there some, like maybe people can go take a look at some of those ones that really resonate with people. Marcus (42m 27s): We’ve produced so many articles. Yeah, that’s, that’s gonna be a tough one. This Dave (42m 31s): How many articles do you think just to guess do you have out there? Marcus (42m 34s): Well, you know, if we do four or five main feature articles in an issue and we’ve been producing the thing for 23 years, so, you know, that’s 230 magazines. There’s, I don’t know, well, well over a thousand individual articles that are, that are done. So that’s a tough one there, Dave. That is hard. Again, it comes down to this to the individual. Yeah. Dave (42m 54s): It’s hard for me too when I think of the podcast because when I was at 200 episodes it was kind of like, well, I knew everyone, I could remember everyone. And now that I’m over 700 it’s just all, but you know what I mean, there’s no way I’m gonna pick a Right. I hear you. Marcus (43m 8s): I’ve written a lot. I know, I know. I could probably fill several books with the articles that I’ve written and some are technical and some are just anecdotal stories, you know, from various trips. You know, there are fish that stand out in my mind. This one is an example, 20 some odd years ago, I took an NFL player and his family and a friend of theirs and his child on 125 mile float trip down the Ke River. Dave (43m 31s): Oh wow. Now who is the, who is the NFL player? Would we know him? Marcus (43m 34s): He was a kicker for the Minnesota Vikings. Okay. One of my sales managers at the time was a diehard Minnesota Vikings fan. I told him contact the Vikings and see if you can find me a player that’ll fish with me and their kicker, whose name was Gary Anderson at the time. Oh yeah. Who’s a South African fly fishing nut. I think he runs one of the programs in Banff now fly fishing programs when I last talked to him. Huh. Anyway, Gary at the time was like the leading scorer in the NFL. He’d had a long career and he, he would, he would practice fly casting in their practice facilities. You know, he sent me some videos of this. So I thought, okay, if I’m gonna agree to do this flow trip that’s gonna take us 12 days, I, I need to get to know this guy first Sure. Before I go there. Marcus (44m 14s): So I decided let’s meet in Yakutat, one of my favorite stomping grounds and let’s go fish for steelhead on the sea tuck. So I quickly saw that Gary was as fanatical about fishing as I was. You know, it is getting dark and he’s still catching steelhead. And I can, one of the last photos, it’s pitch black and it’s just the flash that lights up the fish that he’s got. I’m like, Gary, we got it. We gotta cus over, you know, it’s let’s go rest and we’ll be back here in the morning. And he and I were bunking together and I woke up about two o’clock in the morning and he was, he was up tying flies. Wow. So I thought, okay, this guy cuts the mustard. Let’s, let’s do this trip. And so we, we went out to the zolic, that’s a one of the rainbow trout that still haunts. Marcus (44m 57s): My, my memories was, was hooked that day. It was about halfway down that river got an intel that from about mile 50 to 70 was the premier rainbow water on that river. And it was a slough off the main channel. A big, big spurs tree was down in that slough. And I thought this might be an interesting spot for a big trout to hang. And I had a mouse pattern on that flow trip. I had four fly rods rigged with different presentations. And so I grabbed the top water and threw this mouse pattern in there and first cast nothing. Second cast what looks to be about a three foot snake rainbow comes chasing and tries to flush that mouse pattern. Geez. He misses, you can only imagine the adrenaline rush from watching this thing take a swipe at it. Marcus (45m 41s): You see the toilet bowl come down. I probably pulled the fly out of his mouth at the time, stripped it back to myself, watched the fish go back into the tree, threw another 50 60 foot cast out there, walked the fish right back to me, takes another swing outta misses. At this point, you know, my heart’s probably 180 beats a minute. Threw the third cast in there, stripped it four, five times and just left it. And that fish took that mouse pattern down hard. And then the next thing I know it’s up at eye level and then it crashes back down in the water. And my brother-in-law was with me goes, what the heck was that? I mean, it sounded like a beaver tail slamming down. Oh yeah. That was my entire interaction with that trout. Marcus (46m 22s): Never, never spent more, any time with it. Never hooked up to it, but it’s still burned into my brain. Wow. I love flow trips. Yeah, Dave (46m 31s): Me too. Marcus (46m 32s): It’s just an, you know, and, and there are a lot of rivers you can float in Alaska and, you know, to be out there in your own schedule and, you know, to fish as many hours as you want. And you know that, that one was a, it was a pretty wonderful experience. Dave (46m 44s): That is, that is remote. Is that, that was one where you kind of fly into, well, Bethel right. Is the closest kind of town is, did you guys just fly out from Bethel into there? Yes, Marcus (46m 54s): We were based in Bethel working with Papa Bear Adventures. Papa Dave (46m 57s): Bear. Yeah, yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Marcus (46m 58s): Steve Powers was, was in charge of it back then. It’s, he’s no longer, you know, he sold it. Oh, okay. And yeah, we fly, flew to the headwaters where the keys were all like, pumped up the three rafts the day before and waited for the rest of ’em to come in. And then first day was a 25 mile float to the class four Rapid. Oh wow. Yeah, that was, that was interesting. It was a 20 foot waterfall. Dave (47m 22s): Holy cow. And you had to just go, just go for it. Marcus (47m 24s): No, you, what you had to do was unload the boats, portage the gear about, I don’t know, close to half a mile up over the hill, back down, then you go in two man teams with an empty boat. And I rode them. There was a giant shoot in between rocks that were about the size of cars. It wasn’t wide enough that you could keep the oars out. We were using NRS, you know, self baling rafts. Sure. And you had to pull the oars in. And then you had about 75 yards of fairly calm water. You needed to get out of the boat, get the oars back in the, or locks, pull the, all the ropes off. And then one guy stayed at the top of the waterfall, one guy was able to walk down to the bottom and we lined the boat over the waterfall. Marcus (48m 5s): Oh. And then put ’em back together and rode it over to the other side. But you know, that obstacle was, the salmon couldn’t make it past that. So all the rainbows were gonna be living down below there more or less, you know. And in the top 25 we were catching dollies and we caught some lake trout and we caught grilling. But, you know, from that point forward then, then we got into king salmon. And it was hard for me to get those guys to, you know, I needed to cover some ground each day to cover 125 miles. Yeah. And we got in days where we went nowhere because there were a lot of king salmon. And those guys weren’t gonna go until we hooked every one of them. Dave (48m 39s): Wow. That’s so cool. So yeah, I mean that’s one of those definitely trips of a lifetime, right? You said it was over 200 miles? Marcus (48m 47s): 120 Dave (48m 48s): Or 120. Yeah. Yeah. 220. Right. So that’s like, Marcus (48m 50s): Which is a long float. It was, it was 12 days out in the wilderness. You know, you learn a bit about your outdoor skills when you go on these adventures. There’s another float I did in that same region on the LIC River. And, and the reason I put dollies on my number five on the list, when they come back from being out in the ocean, they act more like rainbow trout than they do the normal dolly. Hmm. A normal dolly just sort of bulldogs you, there’s kind of a twisting, you know, go down to the bottom and just kind of pull, you know, there’s not, you don’t see much above the surface with dollies. Now, on this particular trip on the lic, they, I was there in August and, and those fish were just fresh returning from the sea. Marcus (49m 30s): And I would say 80% of them were airborne, like, like rainbows. Geez. That was amazing. The combination of the volume of those fish and the ability for some of them to get to, you know, 20 pounds in Northwest Alaska and how easy it is to get them to eat different presentations. Yeah. Dollars are awesome. Dave (49m 50s): It is amazing. Well, mark, I’m gonna take it outta here pretty quick here. And we like to do this with, with our winner shout out. You mentioned a couple of events you did with back in the day with Sportsman’s. We’re doing one, we actually did a couple this year. And this one today is presented by, again, Togiak River Lodge. We’re doing this giveaway event, which is awesome. And we’re actually gonna be heading up there with some people, listeners from the show. So everybody can go out to right now Wet fi swing.com/alaska. And they can actually save a spot if they wanna go on this trip with, with me and some other folks out there. So first off the winner shout out, but it is actually for Kevin Mahoney who won one of our other trips out to Colorado to fish with land and Mayor. So we’re gonna be doing that this summer. Dave (50m 30s): So big shout out to Kevin Mahoney. We’re gonna be there on that one as well. And then, and then checking in on Togiac. So for you, it sounds like, you know, this is kind of our random segment, but you have a lot going. What is it about, you mentioned that the Trout Unlimited event you guys do, what is it about that, that you really love? What do you enjoy about doing those things where I’m, I’m assuming you’re kind of putting some of that together. Marcus (50m 51s): Yeah, and I’ve been, I’ve been one of the hosts on these trips for as long as we’ve had contests. So I like being, you know, out at the different destinations with the Trout Unlimited partner. You know, our, our whole concept there is conservation. So that comes through in whatever, whatever we do in the article. And it’s just neat to go to a, to destinations where typically, you know, we’re typically gonna be fly fishing in these events, the ones that we do with Trout Unlimited. So I don’t know, being there with people of like-minded trout unlimited that, you know, have conservation at the forefront of what they’re doing. And then to bring someone that wins this trip, you know? Yeah. To a person, the people that have won these trips on the 10 years that I’ve done contests pretty amazing. Marcus (51m 31s): They’re just, they’re thrilled. I know. So it’s an amazing experience from them. And it gets easy for me to be a little jaded, having seen a lot, you know, and been to many places and it’s refreshing to, to see it through their eyes. So I think those are, you know, those are the main reasons I like to be involved in it. Yeah, Dave (51m 51s): I agree. I think the people, the people and the, the surprise, it’s funny, you know, how cool it is to talk to them and, ’cause I’m usually the one that lets them know they won. Right. Yeah. It’s a pretty, it’s a pretty cool moment. And then, and then talking about the logistics and, you know, all that, it’s no doubt. Sounds good. Cool. Well, let’s take it out here. This is our kind of our random segment now that we’re gonna jump into here and we’re gonna talk, I just have a few questions then we’ll jump outta here. One thing I’m always interested in, you mentioned the hunting. Is that still something that you’re a big part of? I’m not sure if, if there, there is another magazine. Is that still going out there? Marcus (52m 21s): When we started Hunt Alaska Magazine, we wanted to make sure Fish Alaska was fully functional, and we had figured everything out. And we also wanted to be in a spot where we didn’t need investors to start hunt Alaska. We started hunt Alaska in 2009. I spent as much time hunting as I do fishing, fishing, fishing. So fishing, yes. I’m, I’m heavily involved in that one. Yeah. And as a matter of fact, I have a moose on planned for October this year. Oh, you do? I do. I I hunt deer and caribou and moose and, and Alaska on a regular basis. Dave (52m 50s): Okay. Let’s take that really quick. If you could do the same thing, five species of the hunt species. What are the top five Marcus (52m 55s): There? Dave (52m 57s): Is that easier? Is that easier or harder than the fish? Marcus (52m 59s): That’s a good question. It’s probably harder. Yeah. Because fishing is a generally just an easier process. The logistics of traveling around Alaska and, and what’s required to find animals and, and get them makes hunting harder. But I’m gonna say, I’m gonna put Sitka blacktail deer at the top of my list. Okay. Dave (53m 18s): Yep. Sitka, Marcus (53m 19s): It’s, they’re, again, they’re fairly widely distributed. They’re in Kodiak and Prince William Sound, and they’re all through southeast Alaska. And it’s that species that can bring people from, from small game into big game. It allows that transition, it allows new hunters to learn how to target big game. And then when you, when you do harvest one, it’s not such a massive animal Right. That you’re dealing with. Right. So you want to build your steps up to that. ’cause harvesting a moose is doing it yourself, which has been all the trips that I’ve, I’ve done for moose. I’ve always been do it yourself adventures you’ve gotta be able to handle dealing with a large animal. Damn. So sit of blacktail deer on the top of my list. Okay. And I’ve got a lot of adventures hunting them. Marcus (54m 0s): Moose are right there. Yeah. For me, you know, it could be a tie because moose respond to bull moose when they’re ru respond to calls. Oh, wow. And, and we typically hunt them when they’re rut in Alaska, it’s a September hunt. And so when you, you, you just learn the basics of how to cow and bull call, you can bring moose to you. So I’m gonna be filming this hunt that I do in October. I’ve hunted at this place before and I was successfully able to bring moose to us. And, and now I want to bring it to video so people can see just exactly how you do it from start to finish. Nice. You know, what gear is involved, what’s the process, and then how do you break down a moose? Marcus (54m 40s): There are laws within Alaska to prevent want and waste, want and waste. So you have to, in many places when you butcher a moose, you have to remove all of the, any useful meat. Plus you have to leave the meat on the bone in many locations. So just bringing viewers and readers the details of that. And I’ve done that in the do-it-yourself hunt articles that I’ve written. And I don’t give you enough good information to make it possible. If you have basic woodsman skills and you know how to hunt, I think you can handle a moose. I just did a trip with a good friend of mine who was born and raised in Prince of Wales. He’s a native from down there. And I’ve hunted deer with him several times before in his country. Marcus (55m 20s): And he and I went out to Western Alaska and I used one of the longtime outfitters out there. And we got, we were way out in the bush 120 miles away from anybody. And we spent seven days in the field hunting moose till we successfully got one. And you know, every one of those adventures just, I’ll never forget them. Yeah. Dave (55m 44s): That’s awesome. Wow. So you got moose. What is the, if you had to throw three other quick ones to line that out, the other species, what would they do? You do You have three other animals? I Marcus (55m 52s): Would probably put, I love to love to walk with a shotgun. And we have a species called Willow togan. Oh yeah. Togan in Alaska. It’s an upland game. Bird. They’re delicious to eat. They’re plentiful. I would put that on the list. Nice. I put caribou as, as number four. Okay. For me. Dave (56m 7s): You got one big one. That’s, I, I feel like is a red flag out there, but maybe not everybody is into or not a red flag. What is it? It’s just, I would think bear is one that people maybe a lot of people don’t like thinking about or don’t hunt bear, but is as big species people are into. Right. Marcus (56m 20s): People definitely hunt bear for different reasons. I’ve hunted a few black bears and eaten them and I didn’t care for the meat. Yeah. And just my own perspective is that I don’t hunt things that I can’t eat. So I don’t hunt bears specifically for that reason. And I’m not ruling it out because there are spring bear, you know, black bear that are, that are tasty. Yeah. You get ’em, you know, you get a spring mountain bear that’s maybe eaten. Dave (56m 43s): And I, if I think I look at a list of the five, I feel like you hit ’em all and throwing a bear on there makes sense. Even if you’re not a big hunter for bear is just such ape, iconic species. Right. I mean, I think Marcus (56m 54s): Have a lot of bear stories. Yeah. From interactions with brown bears and they’re, they are really well-behaved. I mean, they’re very intelligent creatures and, and we coexist with them very easily. And many places that your, your listeners would go fly fishing in Alaska and Western Alaska. You’ll be fishing with the bears. The first trip we did with Trout Unlimited was to Qic Lodge. And I was literally, you know, could spot 10 brown bears within three rod lengths of myself most of the day Dave (57m 20s): Chase. Marcus (57m 21s): So some of the pictures are a little dis disconcerting for people that haven’t spent much time around bears, but you know, they learn how to interact with people and you know, they’re there to eat food and you’re not food for them most of the time. So there are plenty of misconceptions about bears in Alaska, I would say to people that just be, be wise, be bear smart. Dave (57m 42s): All right, Marcus, I think we can wrap this up here now. And I have just one final question. Always love when I get a sports, it sounds like you were a coach or something, maybe talk about that. Was baseball your big sport growing up? I Marcus (57m 52s): Played pretty much everything Dave. You did? Dave (57m 54s): Okay. What was your, what was your position in baseball? Or did you play everything? I Marcus (57m 57s): Played third and short most of my life. Dave (57m 60s): Third and short. And did you take it, was that the sport you were potentially going pro? If you, if there was any sport that you were gonna go pro into? Marcus (58m 7s): Probably not. No. Probably not. I don’t, I don’t think there was, I don’t think any of the sports I was going pro. I played varsity basketball and, and golf and soccer. Dave (58m 16s): Oh, you did? Where at? Where, where was it? Was that in New York? Yeah. Marcus (58m 19s): Yeah, that was in New York. Dave (58m 20s): Okay. So you played varsity ball, so you must have been pretty decent. Yeah, Marcus (58m 23s): I was pretty decent. I’m, I’m six two. I, I could jump back then. I, I could still beat my sons who were much younger, you know. Could Dave (58m 29s): You dunk in your heyday? Marcus (58m 30s): I didn’t have a strong enough hand. I dunk it. I could, I could dunk a volleyball, but I couldn’t ever hold the, get a basketball down right on, on the 10 footer. Yeah. Yeah. Dave (58m 40s): You weren’t doing like two hand reverse jams or anything like that. I Marcus (58m 44s): Didn’t get up quite high enough to get it down with two hands. It’s funny, one of my high school buddies has got stage three lung cancer right now that I just found out about and which is really awful. Yeah. And he was, he was a standout soccer player. He went and played at Duke. Oh Dave (58m 59s): Wow. Marcus (58m 60s): He could run and dribble faster than any of us could chase him down. Geez. He was that good. He was, he was a starting stopper on the varsity team as a freshman. His name Derek Lockman. And Derek and I, when we were seniors, the varsity basketball coach was our gym teacher. And the entire year he would just, he would send the class out to do different things and he was training freshman talent and we played two on two, Derrick and I against the coach. And this freshman, every single day of my senior year, I can, I can still remember being in a flops sweat in AP bio right after, right after that gym class. Yeah. Yeah. Brought up some memories of days and days gone by basketball. Marcus (59m 41s): Yeah, Dave (59m 42s): Basketball. Hoops. Hoops. That’s awesome. Yeah. Marcus (59m 45s): Any, any more these days? Day day all I do is play golf. Yeah. Dave (59m 48s): Right. Well, and you got the kids though. You got, you got, sounds like you got four boys. Are they all a range of ages? Marcus (59m 54s): My twins are 10. My middle one is about to be 15 and my oldest boy is 17 going on 18. Yeah. Dave (59m 60s): You got it all. So they’re, are they in the sports stuff? Marcus (1h 0m 2s): They have come and gone through it. Okay. They liked doing it, but they were never as intense with it as I, as I was. So my coaching of them was always like, I’m glad to be here and this is great and we’ll always remember this, but the moment that you stopped being, wanting to get better and putting in the effort, then we should consider doing something else. And right now the, the oldest is active in Jay Rozi and he is a, he’s a shooter on the, on their air rifle team. Oh, cool. Which has made him a really good hunter and he wants to be a pilot in the Air Force. It looks as if he’s gonna get that dream. He just got accepted to their flight academy. Oh wow. He’s gonna have a professional pilot’s license before he is 18. Amazing. Marcus (1h 0m 42s): And that should help him dramatically in getting into the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs in a couple years. And we’re, we’re heading to Salt Lake City in April. I’ve gotta go chaperone him because he got accepted into the regional, you know, national shooting tournament. Wow. Yeah. So that’s cool. That’s about what I do with the boys these days. Dave (1h 1m 4s): I love that. Well, the cool thing about that is, is that, yeah, it’s not just about sports. I always used to think like, it was big for me growing up, but when you get kids, you know, they might be into something completely different. And as long as you could find that, as long as they can find that passion, you can help ’em Right. Kind of live it then that’s kind of where it’s at. Marcus (1h 1m 20s): I’ve watched as a coach, I’ve watched so many parents that are trying to live through their children. Yeah. And they put so much pressure on them and they have such unrealistic expectations. And the whole thing, especially in baseball, I’ve had to umpire many games. Oh Dave (1h 1m 32s): Man, me too. You Marcus (1h 1m 33s): Put on the gear, you’re not even a person anymore. You know, it’s, it’s like half the people hate you, the other half Love you. Dave (1h 1m 40s): I know, I remember that. I, I coached, I did, God, it was in, what was it? It was junior high girls basketball and I was like a referee and it was unbelievable, man. I was like, wow. I mean, those parents were, were vicious. Right. Marcus (1h 1m 54s): In my personal experience where I’m living, baseball’s the worst. The other sports are a little bit better, but so much time and you know, every call is scrutinized and you know, Dave (1h 2m 5s): I know, I Marcus (1h 2m 5s): Mean, baseball has a lot of rules too that people don’t necessarily know. You know, I have a lot of respect for, for people that coach and people at umpire and, you know, and I, all I ever tried to do with my boys was to teach ’em to play the game with respect, to be thankful to the umpires and their teammates, to just root each other on never dogging one another and to play hard, you know? And that always made me feel good when, you know, when I would have parents or kids come back and, and thank us, you know, for teaching them these things. But that, that’s good stuff. Yeah. That’s, that’s what’s important. Cool. Two quick things, Dave. Dave (1h 2m 40s): Yeah. Go for Marcus (1h 2m 40s): It. For the last three years I’ve been doing a, a series on YouTube called The Jig Life. And the latest episode is shows people how to catch these sockeye, getting ’em a bite at Togiak River Lodge, which could be an interesting piece for your viewers to watch. Sure. Should one of them win it. I’ve decided this year that I’m gonna add another series and it’s pretty much will be fly based called The Trout Traveler. And I intend to film a number of episodes this coming summer and, and roll it out later this fall. So Nice. You’ll get to see some behind the scenes, you know, cover on how we catch different species of trout in Alaska. Dave (1h 3m 17s): That sounds amazing. Trout travel. Yeah. We’ll, we’ll follow up, we’ll get a link to the, your YouTube channel and then follow up on that as we head forward. That sounds amazing. Thank you, Dave. Cool. All right, well, and we’ll also get everybody out to fish Alaska magazine.com for just to connect with you and, and check in on things you have going. And yeah, I feel like it’s, there’s a lot going on in Alaska. I’m excited about everything we have going. So yeah, Marcus, I appreciate your time today and looking forward to keeping in touch with you. Thanks, Marcus (1h 3m 42s): Dave. It’s been fun. Dave (1h 3m 44s): All right. Quick, quick call out to you if you’re interested in Alaska, if you’ve been thinking about it, of course you can check in with me anytime. But I would recommend checking out the magazine. Check out Marx’s Fish, Alaska magazine, get on that list and so you can get updated with all the good stuff they have coming recipes. And not only that, but much more. And if you haven’t heard, we have our YouTube channel’s going strong. We just had Bruce Richards on last month for full webinar on casting. If you want to up your game, you can go there right now and watch that full webinar. Bruce Richards, the great Bruce Richards presented a full webinar on video on YouTube right now. Subscribe there and you’ll support this show. Dave (1h 4m 25s): And if you haven’t already checked out our togiac trip, go to wetly swing.com/alaska and if you sign up, we’ll follow up with you on details. We have a few spots for that trip. We’re gonna be swinging for King, swinging for Kings in Alaska. And if you’re interested, definitely check in on that right now. I’ll let you know this is gonna be an epic trip. We’re gonna be up there with Zach and the gang. Another good one. We’re turning right around tomorrow and we are launching right into Josh Miller or another Epic podcast, Pennsylvania Angler and team USA coach and, and just all around a good guy is gonna bring it tomorrow. Josh Miller, we’ve been waiting for this one a long time. Stay tuned tomorrow, subscribe and you’ll get that next episode delivered right to your inbox. Dave (1h 5m 8s): Follow the show and you’ll be catching up on it. All right, I gotta get out here. We got, we got this next one right around the corner. Hope you have a great morning, great afternoon or a great evening, and we’ll see you, you and talk to you on that next episode. Outro (1h 5m 19s): Thanks for listening to the Wet Fly, swing Fly fishing show. For notes and links from this episode, visit wet fly swing.com.