This week on Kentucky Afield.

We're in the boat with a former basketball player who just loves to fish Next, we take to the river and search for the state's largest amphibian Then we're floating the beautiful Cumberland River and fly fishing for trout 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.

Hey, it's Memorial Day weekend.

Hopefully you're making time to get outdoors.

Now let's head to Meade County and do some fishing.

I'm out here today bass fishing with an old family friend, Roger Burkman How are you doing, Roger?

I'm doing great, Chad.

Good to see you, buddy.

You know, a lot of people know you, especially around Louisville, through sports, you know, even the athletic director of Trinity High School and now Spalding University.

Yeah, it's been 16 years I've been at Spalding.

That's amazing.

So you came and played basketball in Louisville in the eighties, won a national championship.

We're going to learn a little more about that later on.

Spent some years in the NBA.

But you've benn a lifetime long fisherman, haven't you Yes, I have.

In fact, that's one of the reasons why I chose Louisville over the other schools that were recruited me.

Coach Crum took me fishing.

That's true story.

That's a smart technique right there.

But, you know, we're gonna hear a little more about what you got going on.

And, you know, hopefully we will catch a couple of fish.

Sounds great.

Hey, let's.

Let's get started.

Go do that right now.

Let's make it happen.

So till we get some wind, I'm going to swim bait and creature bait.

That's a good idea.

I might even throw this top water bait a second Here we go.

There you go.

Second cast on a swim uh Spinner bait.

There you go buddy.

There we go.

Got a quick release.

Quick release, man.

It's like, hey, I'm out of here.

There you go.

Well, that's not too bad.

That's a nice start.

Yeah.

First fish.

It's always good to get one on the board.

Good to get that first one.

Yeah.

There you go.

Slow rolling it.

Slow rolling.

It's a little war eagle swim bait with a little trailer on it.

A little.

A little color on it.

You know, when we pulled up, I was looking at your graph.

Oh, those fish look like a lot of them were sitting in that six, eight foot range.

Right.

So this is a bait that's really easy.

For me to keep it in a particular strike range.

So good I'll tell you what.

This is one of those days.

This time of year, it's going to get nice and warm and hot today, but the water temperature is not hot.

It's still 60 degrees.

We're gonna have a lot of wind.

Right.

Tell me a little bit about it being athletic director.

The whole idea, I guess, is to have sports to attract and make a better experience for the students that are going there.

Right.

We definitely want them to have that collegiate experience that student athletes deserve.

We've been very fortunate, very blessed.

We've been able to build the programs That's pretty cool.

Check out that snake Rog.

Yeah.

Swimming along.

There's a lot of them out here on this lake.

You know, it looks like a northern water snake.

It's amazing to me the number of them that lose their life every year being mistaken for a copperhead.

Really?

Yeah.

People think those are copperheads.

All the time I get pictures and.

Hey, check out this copperhead.

I'm, like, well northern water snake.

I tell you what, though.

You try to pick one of those up, they will bite you.

Yeah, Here you go.

You go.

That's a little better, fish.

There we go come on around here, Junior.

Okey Dokey that's on a jig, isn't it?

That's on a jig.

There you go.

Look how you just choke that Look at that.

Yeah.

Now, this fish is either a male or has spawned Yeah, you see its tail.

It's.

You know, I think you're right.

I think it's a male.

Yeah.

So we'll find some females you wait.

You all have some eggs, alright, Well, that's a good fish.

We're gonna put them back.

There you go fellas.

There you go.

So now, Roger, what years do you play basketball at U of L?

I played from 1977 to 81.

OK, so, yeah, I know you were there for the 80 championship team.

I was.

I was on the 80 championship team.

That was my junior year.

I remember still watching that game.

I was pretty young.

You guys had a special team that year.

We had a bunch of just really good athletes, role players that all cared about each other and very competitive and got you drafted into the NBA, right?

It did it gave me a chance to play, and I was a late round draft pick to the Bulls.

No one expected me to make that roster.

And let me tell you, it was one of the toughest eight weeks basketball in my whole career was just making that team.

Yeah, there we go.

Got him?

Yup.

There you go.

he's a he's an angry little fella.

He's got an attitude problem.

He does have a little attitude.

He's a nicer fish.

Yeah.

Look at him.

He says, you know, he's not giving up.

He's go, look, you're going to put me in the net and look I choked that again, though.

Here you go junior, you have convinced me that things first got me when wet he was so mad He did.

He went after didn't he?

That's a nice fish, Roger.

Good, solid fish.

That's good two pound fish love it put him right back in the water right there.

That's a better fish.

That's a little better fish.

Let me get that net.

There you go.

Thank you brother.

The best one we've had today.

Oh, look at that.

Came right out then.

I knew I had to keep pressure on it because I couldn't didn't get a good hook set in him.

Right where he's in the boat at all matters there you go, man.

That thing was shallow, huh?

Yeah, it came right off that log.

I mean, that's just cool.

That's one of those bites.

That's You see him come around a log and grab that bait.

Yeah, that's a little better.

Fish.

Nice job.

Man.

I don't know if you can see the tail of that, Chad, but you see where it's been fanning.

Yeah.

So it's kind of off the top.

Yeah, that's different in it.

Yeah.

All right, buddy.

Here we go.

Hey, Chad, look over there.

It's a bald eagle.

Well, that is pretty cool land right there for you.

That's pretty cool.

You see, there's a couple actually, there's a couple of bald eagles that live back in this area of the lake.

We see them every year.

It's amazing you're starting to see that on these small bodies of water look at this little joker.

Oh, my gosh.

Look at that.

So we've been seeing these fish follow our bait in.

There's these little gizzard shads and you can see the black dot around the side of his face there.

There are a ton of these they were following and spinner bait in.

And I thought, you know what?

There's got to be a good sized bass over here because look at the size of that shad, I mean, that is a perfect meal for a big ol large mouth.

Yeah.

See yah.

What do I got?

Crappie.

I'll be Dag gone if you had a whole bunch of friends in there, we'd be keeping you.

Yes.

Here we go.

What do we got here?

I don't know, but I'm.

Get out when I hope It's about a five pounder.

Oh, you got your big old drum.

I got a drum.

Oh, golly, look at that.

Now, look, that's not coming on my boat.

I don't blame you, OK?

I don't blame you.

Hey, we've been seeing all those ever cares, and the bass haven't been responding.

Well, we'll just fish from drum.

That's a heck of a drum you got.

Old freshwater Drum.

We go a freshwater drum, you know, getting older, I guarantee you.

Well, hey, you know, you win some you lose some, you know?

Roger, we've had a good morning.

It's been a lot of fun getting out and catching up.

Any time you want to go, let me know.

Thank you.

Out of all the unique animal species that can be found here in the state of Kentucky, one of the most interesting is called the Hellbender What is it?

Well, let's go talk to a biologist and find out Hellbenders are our largest native species of salamander we have in Kentucky.

They'll get to be probably two foot long, sometimes a little bit bigger.

Than two foot.

Well, they live entirely in streams, but not only in streams.

They have to be in really high quality streams that have really large slab rock.

So big pieces of boulder that are pretty flat.

And that's where they live their entire life.

In the fall time of year we're in right now, they'll actually start breeding and the males will guard large egg masses that are underneath these rocks today as part of a project we've been doing for about two or three years now in collaboration with Purdue University, some of the researchers from Purdue will come down and assist us in locating adult hellbenders.

Everybody puts on wetsuits and snorkels and masks, and then it's just a matter of getting in the stream and snorkeling along, looking at the bottom of the stream for these really large slab rocks that a hellbender would like to live under.

Once you find this big rock or one of these big rocks you essentially hold your breath, swim under the water and use a flashlight and kind of stick your face up underneath the rock to look around and literally look and see if there's a hellbender staring you back in the face.

Most of the time when you do that and you don't see a hellbender, mostly there's darters, maybe some fish living underneath the rocks.

I've seen a couple fish that are just under the rocks that's got me excited.

Occasionally we'll find a tired, old, big snapping turtle, something like that that's living underneath there.

That's a big one.

You got one now there's a big snapping turtle over here.

Oh, we got one swimming along.

We found the first one.

Everybody went over and checked it.

And before we started trying to pull the legs out, we wanted to get a pretty good survey of the site.

So within 5 minutes, we found a second one and we got another one over here.

So we found two Hellbenders.

So far, we're going to keep moving upstream, see how many guarding males we can find.

And then after we do that, we'll come back to the known sites or the known rocks and start using a probe to hopefully pull some eggs out.

And I think within maybe an hour and a half or so, we had four hellbenders that we've located in maybe a hundred meter section of stream.

Then it's just a matter of using probes to see if we can get the males that are guarding the nest to get them to move out of the way enough to where we can run this probe in there and start pulling eggs out.

He won't move.

He's not especially aggressive.

But he is just blocking the hole we might come back to him later if we don't get something else they're guarding him for a reason.

They're wanting to protect these eggs.

So it's a little bit of a fight to get that probe past the male.

Luckily, we've got three more down here.

We're going to try those.

We can get after that.

We'll try to come back and hit this guy again.

Hope we get some eggs out.

we're able to go to the second Hellbender.

At that point, the rock there wasn't as large and we're able to really get back in them.

Within 5 minutes or so, we're probing, started pulling eggs out.

Typically what happens is you'll get in there and maybe pull out one or two eggs to start with, but then as you continue to get further back into that rock, further back in past the adult male, you can start pulling out pretty large masses of these eggs out from underneath the rock yeah.

We're starting to get some eggs coming out now.

We'll put them in a cooler and folks from Purdue will take them back to their lab where they will raise these up into adult hellbenders.

And the whole reason we do that is in the wild, if a clutch of eggs has maybe 500 in it, you're lucky to get maybe five to ten adult hellbenders to actually survive out of that clutch of 500, maybe one to 2%.

But if we take these eggs back to the lab, they can get a 60, 70% survivorship there, which gives us a lot more hellbenders that we can then bring back to our Kentucky streams and hopefully repopulate some of the streams that used to have good populations that don't anymore.

Have been pretty good success so far.

Pulling the eggs out haven't had good luck yet on getting the actual adult male out of the nest.

So hopefully we can find another one you put your goggles back on and watch this corner of the rock.

I think the Hellbender might come out the side.

OK, he had actually a second chamber that he could use to exit the rock from.

So at that point we had agitated him to the point to where he was ready to abandon ship and leave whatever eggs he had there and try to find a place to get away from us.

So I was able to grab him and put him into a net so that we could take him back, process him, see how big he was, how much he weighed, if he had any sort of health problems, and really check him over to see what sort of health he was in and studying the life cycle a little bit.

From what we've seen so far, most of what we're encountering in the wild with our Hellbender population are really old Hellbenders.

So this is a species that can live for multiple decades.

51 centimeters, total length funding for this project has been mixed.

Not only a federal funding the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife gets, but it's also funding through the Kentucky Wild program.

And Kentucky Wild is a program where citizens not just in Kentucky but around the U.S. or the world can contribute to the department.

And 100% of that funding is used for research projects like this.

We're done with the adult at this point.

We've done all the measurements that we need Check them over, make sure he's in good health now.

We'll take him back and put him back underneath the rock that we got him out from a few minutes ago.

There is a beautiful location here in the state of Kentucky where you can fish for cold water, fish species right in the middle of the summer.

And that place is the Cumberland River Well, Troy, we're out here early as usual.

Yep.

This trout fishing is on the Cumberland River to get here early and fish till the water opens up all the time.

Yeah, pretty much.

You know, you got to stay out in front of the water, get behind it.

One of the two.

That's one of the things about fishing this river that is you have to know what you're doing.

And hiring a guide is kind of a good way to go about it, to learn the route.

Yeah, it's, you know, it's kind of hard river to fish.

You wouldn't think it would be, but you know, with the water discharges coming up or down, you could get, you know, stuck in high water or stuck in low water.

And, you know, you just gotta know where you're at and kind of know where the discharges are doing.

So you've been guiding for over 15 years, right?

This is a hidden gem and it really is.

You know, I lived in Montana for ten years, and when I came back to Kentucky and you know, started guiding on the Cumberland, I was amazed.

You know, it really is a great river, big fish, big trout, and you never know what you're going to catch.

There's other species besides the trout here.

I'm super excited.

I don't do a whole lot of fly fishing, but this is a trip that I look forward to every single year because the just the sheer beauty of it as the water changes.

We may change it.

The techniques that we're you know, we're a start off stream of fishing this morning.

See this low light and see if we can't get some big fish to chase around a little bit and then we'll switch over and we'll nip for a little while this afternoon when the water starts to drop now.

OK, all right.

Let's let me know when I needed help.

Now let's get loaded up.

All right.

So good you know, cast it out, you know, make you like a little mend just to help get it down and a mend just to loosen up the line.

Give it a couple of seconds here and start stripping.

Yeah, strip pretty pretty fast and pretty aggressive.

OK, so it's a little more aggressive approach.

Because the low light situations, it just.

Yeah, well, it's, you know, it's just, you know, you want to get them chasing and they're big fish like to eat.

and so this is imitating bait fish or shad, something like that.

We've actually had a lot more shad on the river lately.

Oh, there you go.

Fish on very little brook, it looks like.

So that's a brook trout, huh?

Yeah.

And they're pretty common down here, right?

Oh, yeah.

We've been seeing them a little bit more often.

I mean, they don't seem to get very big, though.

It's hard to believe.

90 degree days, weeks on end.

50 or 60 degree water.

Yeah.

So here, I mean, stripers are obviously possible, I'm guessing some bass species walleye three different trout species all available down here.

stripers walleye sauger the trout species on occasions you'll see some small mouth, but not very often.

This time of year we'll roll back up and we'll fish that wood in different style here.

Go on this deal here I want to get this thing out and then do do my mend's and let it just do a natural drift down through there.

Yeah.

You just want a good dead drift down it.

I'll tell yah, this is such a cool, unique experience.

This feels like an old, old time experience where, you know, it's paddle only.

No.

And ease down to a river like this.

But this is exactly the way that if you went out west and this is exactly a drift boat like this.

So there you go a little bit.

Oh, it's better fish look there.

That is awesome.

There we go, nice little guy, nice fish.

So, Troy, what do we got there?

Probably 17 inches or so.

Put him on the old truth teller.

16 almost 16 and half.

Yeah.

Pretty good.

Yeah.

Nice little guy.

Oh, there you go, buddy.

There you go.

Get back out there They're Slick as can be aren't they.

They are.

And I'd rather them land in the water than on the boat.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Let them go.

Man they're so fast or they just look like it.

He's a little better.

He just acts like a little better fish doesn't he?

another Brookie.

That what we got here?

Yeah, a decent brookie too.

They don't get too much bigger than that in here.

And then when they get it in the net, they don't stop it.

Just ballistic.

Brookie.

Yeah, that's their second one of those today.

Oh, get him.

There you go.

That might be a good fish.

The way he's running.

He's quite a lot bigger than he is.

He sure is.

And we go, this is one that's probably got a lot of cut throat in him.

What a great fight.

And what a pretty fish.

Yeah his orange and how dark he is and look clear.

See all that underneath him.

That's part of cutthroat.

So in the best times of the year.

If you want to come down fish this you're looking at July, August, September time frame?

It all really depends.

You know, you can fish year around as long as you get good water.

Yeah.

You know, as long as it's not blown out and running too heavy.

You can come out here in January and February and used to be able to it's just been a little high water with the crazy rains that we've had the last three or four years.

Yeah.

The one that didn't get away right there.

Well, that's a nice fish.

Very well done.

That one right there.

So I didn't go, oh, lord, have mercy.

Look at that drag sing.

I love that he's coming at me fast.

This is why I come to the Cumberland River.

Yeah, that's for sure.

So that that particular fish right there, like you said, you said you fished all the way around all around, if you caught this anywhere.

You'd be happy.

Yeah.

I mean, I don't care.

Wyoming, Montana, Idaho.

What a pretty fish.

Yeah.

Let's get this guy back in.

Here we go.

Oh, yeah.

Nice one.

Good one.

Here we go.

We've been seeing a couple of good trout right here in this area.

Yeah, this one.

This is a good one here.

Look at that.

A beautiful.

Yeah, but he's going to take, oh, beautiful.

That is great.

Oh, nice one.

It's bigger than the net.

Yeah, he hardly fits in it.

That's.

That's a good one there.

Let's get him back in the water.

Right here is where a farmer and then one time, yeah, got hooked.

One and a striper come ate it.

I think you got fish.

I think you're right.

Oh, that's a fish.

That's a fish.

We got a big fish.

Look at a striper trying to look at striper.

Holy cow get out there.

Yeah, there's a lot of weird things that have happened by this rock.

Well, Troy, we've come to the end, and I'll tell you, the Cumberland River did not disappoint again.

It never does.

Every time I float down this river, it blows my mind.

The number of people that come to Lake Cumberland to recreate in the middle of the summer and don't even realize the fishery that's right here.

I know.

It's crazy.

They don't even realize that there's a river here one of the better trout fisheries in the United States is right here in the state of Kentucky.

Yeah, and if anyone wants to learn how to trout fish or wants to just take maybe the most beautiful float in the state, it's right here.

It really is.

And I'm looking forward to doing it again.

And and I just had an absolutely great time.

I'm glad you did.

I had a wonderful time as well.

Thank you so much.

This is Joe Vickers of Cincinnati, Ohio, who was fishing for stripers at Lake Cumberland and caught this lake sturgeon.

This fish was released immediately here we have ten year old Colton with his first deer ever a nice buck that was taken on his dad's property in Campbell County.

Here we have Nicholas Morgan with a nice three pound bass that he caught in his neighbor's farm pond.

Here we have two year old Walker Donnelley from Smith Grove, Kentucky, helping his dad on a family dove hunt in Edmonson County.

Here at Kentucky Afield.

We'd like to take a moment to thank all the great men and women who paid the ultimate sacrifice to give us the freedom to hunt and fish here in the state of Kentucky.

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.

Did you know that Kentucky is home to the largest elk heard in the eastern U.S. with an elk zone twice the size of Yellowstone National Park?

Look how big that animal is.

I mean, this is just amazing.

And we enjoy one of the most diverse fisheries in the country, just as Christine.

Very nice.

And by the way, Kentucky is known for being one of the top five states for trophy white tails each year.

Additionally, more than 100,000 Kentuckians have benefited from our conservation education programs, like the Salato Wildlife Education Center, summer conservation camps, good job and our Learn to Hunt and fish classes.

Or did you know about the 1.6 million acres open to the public?

These are just a few things that Kentucky's Department of Fish and Wildlife have helped preserve.

This is one of several we have on the Kentucky River.

She's got plenty of room in that nest for chicks.

Who pays for conservation in Kentucky?

Well, since the Department receives no general fund state tax dollars, we rely on the sportsmen and women of the commonwealth.

He's been waiting years for that.

So if you enjoy Kentucky's resources, help us manage them by purchasing a hunting or fishing license today, you can do so by visiting F-W dot G-O-V.