This week on Kentucky Afield, we're headed west and hitting Kentucky Lake with a young entrepreneur who's making a splash in the fishing world.

Then we'll join biologists in the blind and see how research makes some of our hunting seasons possible.

It's all next on Kentucky Afield.

Hello and welcome to Kentucky Afield.

I'm your host, Chad Miles.

Join us as we journey the Commonwealth in search of outdoor adventure.

I love heading to Kentucky Lake and fishing with Colton Jennings of Jenko Lures, because I never know what technique we're going to use to catch fish.

Today we█re out here at Kentucky Lake, right outside of Kentucky Dam village.

And I'm with Colton Jennings, founder and owner of Jenko Lures.

Fishing has changed dramatically in the last five years hasn█t it?

With the new advances in technology and the new stuff that we have coming out.

It's it's honestly totally different than whenever, you know, growing up as a kid, just going fishing.

You know, first it was, you know, sonar came to 2D, 2D went there- Well, no I meant 2D and then down scan and then side scan and then spot lock on your trolling motors and now forward facing sonar, which is to me, it changed the game more than anything else has up until this point.

You know, it's amazing.

The other day I got a flier in the mail from a large tackle retailer, and the entire flier was based on specific baits made for forward facing sonar.

That's just because that's a hot new thing right now.

I mean, you know, basically adapting the techniques for that specific style of fishing is what everybody's doing right now.

It's about where to fish it and fishing it near fish.

Correct.

So today it's, you know, we're kind of it's the beginning of May.

The spawn is has already kind of started.

It's still some of that's happening right now.

so do you use forward facing sonar when doing that?

Yeah.

So basically what we're looking for is some kind of a spawn, a pair of spawners or a fish related to something it could spawn on, whether that be a shallow flat or a piece of cover.

anything of that nature.

They basically are going to find something that they can spawn on or around, whether that's hard bottom, you know, if it's muddy around the stump or, brush pile or rock, heck, the anchor on this booey over here, you never know.

Yeah.

it could be anything.

any kind of possible piece of coverage is, optimal place for a bass to hang around.

Well, hey, I'm looking forward to learning some stuff today, because you're always designing new tackle and new gear and with forward facing sonar out there, watching how you utilize it.

And see if we can█t catch a couple off that forward facing sonar.

We're going to give it a whirl.

Let's do it.

So now how far out they say they are?

60 foot-ish.

That's where they're at.

let's go look in a different little area.

But basically what we're just looking for is just to pull in an area and start seeing fish spawning and fry together where you can actually catch some.

Got him?

There you go.

Oh.

Is that a smallie?

Yeah, that's what I thought.

He was sitting there on that piece of cover.

I tell you one thing.

Your first cast at that spot and he smacked it.

Yeah, and it's funny, like, you go down through there and you see some that just aren't active, aren't active, aren't active.

And then all of a sudden you throw over there and he just automatically just swims over there and bites.

So you saw that fish on the sonar and just- yeah.

One little cast to it.

Yep.

He nailed it and saw the- He was actually sitting a little higher up off the bottom instead of being so glued, you know, absolutely just glued to the bottom.

But it's a nice little keeper, but It's amazing that that little bitty bait you're throwing.

It's so easy to find it on that electronic.

Yeah.

Biggest thing is having your transducer lined up with the head of your trolling motor, you know?

All right, so we got some fry coming up here, right up here on this stump.

Got it.

Yeah.

Did you see him hit?

Yeah.

There you go.

That's pretty good fish.

There you go.

So that thing was guarding that.

That nest?

Yep.

And you can see that fry ball up here.

And you can see your bait coming down in there.

And all of a sudden you see him come up and look at it a few times and he turned and that time he.

Yep.

He said, no, I had enough.

Yep.

They got a little too close to whatever that little sweet spot was in that ball of fry because that's almost the thing with with most of the time you just throw and if it's active, it's going to look and go on.

with the fry, it seems like almost sometimes there's, there's like a sweet spot in that ball fry where they just really can't stand for you to be there, and then bam, they eat it.

Looks like there's something moving around in there.

This is just like a little steak mat or something is what this is.

Oh, here we go.

Don't even need livescope.

I'm over here not catching nothing.

So I'm just casting.

Fan cast.

You know, a lot of people talk about fishing behind someone with the live scope.

Yeah, that right there proves it.

Well, they do they take.

They, you know, they think, oh, well, I can't cast the same angle they're casting.

But you know what if there█s structure and there█s fish out there, you're not seeing everyone.

If they're on the bottom.

And you can't you can't be looking at every one of them at the same time either.

So I just decided I saw your fish in 2 or 3ft off the bottom.

Yeah.

And I thought, you know what, I'm just going to go with the worm and cast this thing, go ahead and get it on the bottom a little bit slower Presentation.

Take your chances.

This is how we fished for 100 years before we started the thing with the livescope, right?

It still works.

And you caught it behind somebody Livescoping.

And that's the even better part.

Yeah.

Got it?

Yeah.

There you go.

Did you see that one?

Yeah.

Oh.

Little one, there's two of them fighting over it.

Smallie.

Oh.

What do you know?

Quick release.

Hopefully we can fish down this stretch and catch some.

Keep saying that, but it's got to happen eventually.

There's a few swimming.

I definitely had a bite right there.

Got him?

Yeah.

There you go.

Oh, that was a threw your bait.

That's a good brown fish.

Pretty fish.

Now did you see that fish on the graph?

Yeah I could there's a little school of them on the end of that.

Probably would█ve just hit me too.

That looks like a nice smallie.

Decent one for sure.

Beautiful fish.

I tell you what, it doesn█t beat.

Nothing beats that right there.

No.

That█s my favorite fish in the world you got hooked up right there.

About a 20 inch small mouth.

What do you got him on?

6 or 8 pound test?

Oh, I got him on the heavier line, but I was.

I know how they are.

You start horsing them then- Lucky I caught that one.

Well, he threw that bait immediately, didn't he?

Yup, but look at look at that right there.

Oh, wow.

He's missing half his face.

I just barely got him right there.

Wow.

He█s a pretty fish.

Dark.

That's a beautiful small mouth.

Looks like one of those northern Smallmouth.

He is marked up.

That█s a nice fish.

There's a bluegill hitting my worm.

I'll bet $1,000.

Here we go.

What do we got here?

Probably a little aggressive.

Oh, it's a bluegill.

So you just called it.

Yeah, I thought it was going to be one of those little hyper aggressive- smallmouth?

smallies but he's even smaller than that.

I got small mouth food.

I'm just more impressed that he got it in his mouth and ate it and was hooked in the mouth.

A mink.

You don't see them very often.

No.

That's pretty cool.

What's he got in his mouth?

He's got something he's proud of.

But he don't want us to have no part of it.

He don't want us to have it.

What do you got in your mouth, dude?

Just let me see it.

Quit running so fast.

I got something here.

Put it in reverse, Terry.

We're chasing a mink and he's got something hooked up.

I think that's a catfish.

That's hilarious.

Lookie there.

The second I threw that bait on there, I knew that it was about to go to who knows what.

I'm gonna catch a little bit of everything on one of these.

There ain't nothing wrong with that, though.

Bite█s a bite.

Way I see it, we ain't out here fishing for money, we might as well catch whatever█ll bite, right?

If I was wanting dinner.

There you go, I have it.

Nice.

Nice dark, beautiful channel catfish.

That's pretty neat there.

There we go.

That a flathead?

Yeah, it's a flathead.

What do you know.

Better put him in the livewell.

A flathead catfish.

Two fish sandwiches.

That dude right there will grow up to be big and- that fish one of these days.

Feed your whole family.

A 50 pounder.

Yeah, that's pretty though.

What a pretty fish, though.

Look at those little bitty eyes.

And and you know what?

Come up and hit that thing.

I was probably six feet off the bottom vertically, making that thing look like it was struggling.

They just nailed it.

Uh oh.

He about knocked my rod back in the lake.

Oh, there we go.

Well, look at that.

A Tennessee tarpon.

Well it is a Tennessee tarpon.

I'll tell you what.

Those are about $6 a piece.

For catfisherman.

Ole█ skipjack.

And you can catch all of them you want on this Lake.

He better watch himself.

I know where there's a bunch of catfish.

What do you got this time?

Another species.

An actual bluegill.

Yeah.

I'll tell you what.

If you just want to go fishing, put you a little blade bait on here.

You don't know what you're going to catch.

You might not catch what you want, but you will catch something.

Oh, you're going to get a bite.

Oh, you already got one?

What do you got?

A little small mouth.

That was- was that the first cast here?

Yeah, maybe the second.

Tell you what, it's such a subtle presentation.

You're throwing it right at fish cover.

It just.

It just works, doesn't it?

Yeah.

And I mean, they're just postspawn males.

Well, Colton, it's been a lot of fun catching up with you today.

I've been really watching your product line, and you guys have done some really interesting things with as technology evolves, your company's evolving.

Yeah, 100%.

And you know, we've got we've got a full line of, oh, hey, what you got, another catfish?

I don't know what I got.

A drum.

Well you got a different species again.

Hey, can you tell these things that we're trying to.

We're trying to go home, go eat dinner and you█re catching drum.

Drum.

You caught a big old bluegill a minute ago.

tell you one thing.

Catfish.

I have been, you know, a lot of people have to fish behind other people throwing lures on a live scope.

And that's what I've been doing today.

And you've been watching and throwing at these beds, and you've caught about 10 to 1 bass that I've caught.

But you've had way more fun than I have.

But you got to find ways to fish behind people in a livescope, because that livecope can only watch in one location.

That's right.

So but it's not.

It's not, it's not impossible.

I've just done different techniques.

But you've caught all the bass.

I know today was you said a slow day and we still caught a bunch of fish.

And I'll tell you what, it's it's awesome watching what you're doing.

And keep up the good work, man.

Thank you.

Hey, I've had a great time, man.

This has been awesome.

It's been a lot of fun.

Yeah.

I'm here today with deer program biologist Tommy Apostolopoulos.

When you bring a deer home, one of your very first things your hunting buddies are going to ask you is: Hey!

What did It score.

That's right.

That's kind of a weird.

That's kind of a weird topic.

Tell me a little bit about what a score is.

Yeah.

So when you're talking about score, typically it's the Boone and Crockett score.

So Boone and Crockett█s has been around for a long time.

It's the original conservation organization in North America, founded by Teddy Roosevelt and a couple other of his conservation buddies back in the 1800s.

And it originally was set up to incentivize harvesting these old, mature animals in order to preserve and conserve the females and the young animals to bolster the population.

Now it is turned into it's kind of morphed into not only conservation, but also its this standardized way of measuring big game animals.

So in this case, deer, you can compare a deer that was harvested and scored tomorrow compared all the way back to, you know, the 1960s and 70s.

No matter where it's taken, no matter where it's taken, anywhere in the whitetails range, that score is going to be comparable to any other score, of a whitetail deer through this Boone and Crockett scoring system.

And there's two different kinds of scoring.

So there's there's typical whitetail racks and there's non-typical whitetail racks.

And the way that you score it's a little bit different.

so if you have a big gnarly buck then you would hope to score that non-typical because then those aren't deductions.

Those are additions.

And so that's going to add to your score.

Kentucky prides itself in being a big buck state.

We thought that it would be important to have Boone and Crockett scores across the state that were easily accessible.

wherever you lived in the Commonwealth, over 30 of us agency staff went and were trained by Boone and Crockett staff and were certified as Boone and Crockett and Pope and Young Measureres.

So Pope and Young is similar to Boone and Crockett.

but it's with archery equipment.

If you take a deer that is a mature trophy deer and you want to get it scored, all you have to do is go to the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife website, click on deer, and you go down and you'll see a little medallion on there that says Boone and Crockett scoring.

It'll give you a map that shows you the address and the contact information for every Boone and Crockett scorerer in the state of Kentucky.

That's exactly right.

And we're pretty evenly distributed across the state.

we can meet you.

We can have you come to us if we do measure your deer, and it does score over 160 as a typical or over 185 as a non-typical.

There is a small fee to enter it into the Boone and Crockett book.

If you enter in the book, then you are in that book indefinitely.

So your name basically goes down in history for for harvesting this deer.

This is a huge service to our our deer hunters out there.

And to to learn more information go to fw.ky.gov and then go click on deer and look for the Boone and Crockett medallion.

We've got 30 new official scoreres right here in the state of Kentucky.

Here at the Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources, our wildlife biologists are working hard to gather as much data as possible to support our hunting seasons.

Well, today we're in Ballard County, right here on the bank of a swamp.

We're getting ready to do something that's super cool.

We've done this one other time, years ago, in a different county.

What are we getting ready to do today?

So we're getting ready to, try to use a rocket net to trap some wood ducks trapping wood ducks there█s a couple of reasons why we do this, but it takes some prep work.

So we we kind of show up for all the fun.

You guys have actually been working for a couple weeks to prep this site and get it just right.

You know, it starts actually in, mid-summer.

We come in here and all the vegetation get sprayed and we try to clean the site as well as possible because any sticks or herbaceous vegetation binds in our net.

So whenever it goes off, it causes issues.

You know, some of the original prep work is putting up cameras, getting ducks on bait getting them used to the site, and then slowly but surely adding in the net, adding in blinds, getting them more acclimated for today, when we're going to actually shoot the net and try to band some ducks.

So you've been baiting these ducks and you're talking about like hundreds of pounds of what?

Wheat is what we've been using.

Yeah.

So the ducks kind of come in, they find it and then they start gaining in numbers.

And hopefully we get a chance to fire these rockets.

Yep.

So wildlife biologists also need to be bomb technicians as well it looks like.

and these are going to get a charge in them of what is it gunpowder?

It is.

It's a type of munitions that we're able to get through U.S.

Fish.

We have a stockpile of those for being able to band well into the future right now.

So and the idea is to get the data that you want, get these banded and get them turned loose pretty quickly.

Right?

Absolutely.

Looking at weather the last few days I've been, you know, looking at temperatures, we have in the past been able to band in the afternoons, but it takes a little bit more prep work to make sure the ducks are cool, to make sure they're not overheating and, that we're getting them out of the net and separating them so that they're not getting physically exhausted.

Yeah, yeah.

All right, we're all set.

Let's get in the ground blind and wait on the ducks.

All right.

Sounds good.

They're just now coming up on the bank.

So we█re just waiting on the ducks to get on bait.

Hopefully we'll be able to shoot the net here pretty soon.

There are tons of ducks right here.

Right by us right now.

Oh yeah.

They're flying in and literally landing 15 20ft from the shoreline.

They tend to get there, stage up.

And then they'll cross the net.

You'll see once one fo them gets on bait then they all go to bait.

These ducks have got more discipline than me.

If I was sitting that close to a meal I█d have a rough time holding off.

As they lose confidence, they█ll fly back out in the water.

They're a little wary.

They're kind of testing the waters if you will.

And they're all congregating on the bank again, just like before.

I can█t tell how many█s out there probably 50 or 60.

They█re crossing the net.

once they crossed the net you█ll start seeing them run to bait and then the others will pick up and fly to bait behind them.

It's really neat to watch.

I've seen them do that 4 to 5 times before.

We was actually able to shoot them in, so.

They█re already, coming back over the net again.

There's still birds on bait, so they're not as afraid to go on up to bait.

I█m going to go on ahead and shoot it.

3, 2, 1.

Every single time that thing goes off.

You know it's going to happen.

It still shocks the crap out of you.

So it's a mad dash to try to get these birds out of the net.

We want to try to do as little damage to the bird as you possibly can.

That's a female female.

Looks like a female.

I'm going to go in the male cage.

So now they've got all the birds sorted into male versus female.

We're going to take these cages back to the truck where they got all the bands.

From that point they'll start sorting them out, banding them, recording the data and then turning them loose.

We'll run male birds through one side and female birds through the other.

We'll have whoever's getting the birds out.

They'll check to make sure that it is a male that was put inside of the cage, that it was in.

You got the bar shaped wide on the end of the speculum.

That indicates a male most of the time in a female.

That white part will be teardrop shaped.

These guys have been doing it for years, and they're able to spot some of the adult birds.

That's really what we're looking for mostly is adult females.

Yeah, I won't call that an adult.

What is wood duck population in Kentucky like right now?

It's very stable.

That's the whole reason that we're doing this banding is to be able to see the numbers year after year, if that recapture data and be able to map these birds and where they're going to want and how they spend their winters.

This is a conservation aspect.

If you want to duck hunt, the department has to have this project going forward for early wood duck season, and I think the department is pretty well committed to it.

I know that our sportsmen and women here in the state of Kentucky that do enjoy that early duck season, tell me some areas that would be good for woodduck hunting.

Obviously right here at boatwright is a good location.

Yeah.

So I mean there's a lot of WMAs across the state that have options to be able to woodduck hunt even in the eastern part of the state, some of the rivers and lakes, there's a good number of wood ducks that are there.

Last bird.

Look at that brand new hardware on there.

Turn it loose ready?

Well, I tell you what.

Coming down here and doing this is always a lot of fun.

And I don't know how else you can get this up and close and personal with wood ducks or other forms of wildlife literally in your hand.

Thank you so much, it█s been a blast.

Now let's check in and see who else has been out having fun in this week's ones that didn't get away.

Check out this giant largemouth bass that was caught by Buster Chapman in Bourbon County, Kentucky.

Nice job.

Here we have Zach Wireman, who caught this nice smallmouth bass on the big Sandy River in Floyd County.

This fish was caught on a whopper popper.

Nice.

Sherry Baker was really excited to catch this nice largemouth bass in Crittendon, Kentucky.

Congratulations.

Nine year old Milam Staggs caught this beautiful 25 pound blue catfish in Floyd County, Kentucky.

Congratulations!

I love this picture.

I hope this is me in a few years.

Here we have Smooth and Jamie who caught these nice two flathead catfish that were 32 and 29 pounds on limb lines on the Rolling Fork River.

Nice job.

Gunnar Pulliam caught his personal best smallmouth bass at 4 pounds and the North Fork of the Kentucky River.

Great fish, five year old Joseph McCowan went to Cedar Creek Lake and caught this nice bluegill.

Nice job.

Here we have Hunter Brown with a beautiful trophy buck that he was able to take while still in velvet.

Congratulations!

Check out Shane Taylor with these two 23 inch walleye that he caught on Laurel River Lake.

Nice job, Gavin Davis was able to take his very first long beard this year during the Kentucky Youth hunt.

Nice bird.

Our Kentucky deer archery season is only five weeks away.

This is the time of year you want to get your gear out and start practicing, and it's a perfect time of year to set out your trail cameras.

And remember, hunting and fishing on private property is a privilege.

Always ask permission and thank the landowner.

Until next week, I'm your host, Chad Miles, and I hope to see you in the woods or on the water.