This week on Kentucky Afield.

The spring months offer some of the best fishing that the state has to offer and we're at the Salt River trying our luck, Next, We're talking to the experts and finding out how native seed mixes can be beneficial for wildlife, and landowners alike.

Then, we're in Eastern Kentucky and fishing for one of the state's most elusive predators.

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.

Spring gives Kentucky outdoors men and women many reasons to be excited, and one of those reasons is the white bass run.

Well, today I'm doing one of my favorite springtime activities here in the state of Kentucky.

That's chasing white bass.

The white bass that are in the lakes will run up the rivers and they will do their spawning in the flowing water.

Well, I'm here in Salt River today here at the Palmer Road Access Area.

Right now, it's Turkey season.

So gives us a couple of other things to kind of consider.

First off, this road is normally open where you can drive all the way up and down and really fish wherever you want.

Today, because the turkey season being open this wall imaginary is open for someone who wants turkey hunt.

It's closed.

So what that means is I've got a backpack, some waterproof boots.

I'm going to grab some gear and we're going to hoof it to the water until I see the right kind of water conditions I want.

We're going to fish our way toward the lake and hopefully locate some white bass.

Well, I will say the water looks pretty good.

This is late in the white bass run.

Typically.

I've caught them before now.

Now that I see the water I'm going to go with about an eight ounce head, something I can cast almost all the way across.

I'm going to pull a little minnow imitating bait.

We use this, and if it doesn't work, I'll be ready to move on to something else.

That's good.

We didn't catch one on catch one.

Don't need that jinx.

So my goal was to walk toward the lake, but due to the fact that the further I go, I'm still not catching fish, and I'm not seeing people, and there's cars up there.

We're going to go the other direction.

You make six, seven, eight cast and area.

You feel like you fan cast it pretty good.

It Doesn't happen.

It's time to move.

sixty or seventy yards and try it again.

Sometimes you got to have some patience and you got to find out where the fish are at, what they want to eat that day, and how fast do they want it.

I mean, sometimes they want it super slow.

Sometimes they want it sped up a little bit.

So once you get those pieces of the puzzle put together, you can go from can't catch a fish to catch in 10, 15, 20 in a matter of 20 minutes.

Here we go.

Not a real big one, but it's a nice, nice male white bass, most likely.

You know, this typical size for a male fish.

The females can get up to you know here 13 or 14 inchers are pretty common, and sometimes you'll even see them 17, 18 inches.

But this is a pretty common white bass right here for a Salt River.

And man these are hard fight and little fish.

There you go.

I'm going to flip this one back, see if we can't catch a couple more out there.

Here we go.

Another one of these males.

Look he hit that one there I mean he hit it dead on, choked it.

Now I've tried a couple of different techniques today thrown a couple other things, but as you've seen so far, they're wanting to hit this little bait in the shallows moving relatively quickly.

So, hey, I'm going to give them what they want.

Look at that.

See that white milky substance?

It's coming down from this fish.

This is obviously a male.

So this fish is actively spawning Here we go.

These are all males and they're all about exactly the same size that one might be a little bit bigger but they're definitely wanting this thing fast, which tells me they're in the riffles, they're right up in there drop in their milt in these really, really fast moving pockets.

All right.

We're going to turn this fella loose.

You know, if we catch a really, really big one, a couple of those, I might keep them.

But for now, we're going to turn these loos.

Oh, here we go.

Look at him running, and this might be a little better fish see what we got here?

This here's a little better white bass, right where that goes from the riffles hit this deeper pool.

He was sitting in there there he is.

Look there.

One cast came back down to this little spot where I'd seen a fish earlier.

I was talking about casting the same spot over and over and over.

Sometimes, you know, if you leave, come back, make a couple cast down there because like I say, there's certain areas they want to be and they'll come in waves.

You'll catch a couple, and then, bam, they may be gone.

But come back and try that spot again.

You might very well get on them.

Here we go this is either really in the current or this is a really good fish.

I don't know what's going on here.

Look there, a little better fish this time.

I"m going to grab him before I pick him up.

A little bit longer, just strong.

Just a really super, super, super strong fish.

I'll tell you what, catching these on light tackle and I said I'm throwing a seven foot medium weight rod on little jig head.

Here is a one eighth of an ounce jig here.

But cast these things out and just pull them up.

Pick them up, change your retrieve.

Sometimes They want it fast.

Sometimes I want it right the bottom.

Sometimes they want it up and down.

They're right in these little seams where there's a lot of current and hey catching them out of the current makes for a much better fight.

I'm here today at Guist Creek Lake with Eastern Copley and Easton, you fish alone quite a bit, don't you?

A lot, yes, sir.

So we're at the boat ramp today and you're going to demonstrate how to safely launch a boat by yourself?

That's right.

It's always fun to fish with somebody.

But, you know, if you want to go fishing and everybody else has got something else going on, there's no reason you can't do it.

Sometimes you do have an option to don't fish for fish by yourself.

So let's walk through all the process of launching a boat by yourself.

So you've got your boat parked up, not on the ramp.

That's right.

So you want to stop in an area where you've got flat ground so that you can do a quick inspection of the boat and make sure that your boat is ready to go.

Right.

Tell me a few things you got to look for Well, the first thing i'm going to do always is go back, put plug in.

That's the most important thing.

After I check the plug, I'm going to take my two back straps off and leave the front strap tied on after I take straps off, take the motor toter off i'm going to lay it in the truck.

I'm going to go through and check all my electronic stuff, make sure I've got power.

The last thing I want to do is get down here to the ramp, have people waiting on me and I'm trying to get the boat started or trying to make sure my electronics are going to turn on.

And if you need to prime your bulb before you start it, that's something you can do before you even pull down here.

And once you back down, get close.

to the water you are going to get out and loosen your strap and then you're going get in and back the rest of the way in.

And once the boat floats, you can put it in park and get out and either start it and pull it off or push it off.

One of the things, too, is a life jacket.

So when you get down here, you got slick ramps.

Getting in and getting out of your boat is when you're most likely to fall.

Try and have your ropes ready to go, because in this situation, there are courtesy ramps here.

So if you have ropes on the deck of the boat ready to go, when you pull up to the courtesy ramp, you can quickly tie off.

Or if you don't have a courtesy ramp, a place where you can pull up and tie your boat off quickly, because if you're doing it by yourself the entire time you're doing that truck sitting right here, your boat and trailer is blocking everyone else.

So we want to make sure that we get it done quickly but safely.

Once you get used to it, it's really not hard.

You know, you really can't speed the process up by going faster or steer faster.

Nope.

It's all about being prepped and ready to go launch your boat and just being courteous to everyone else.

What you do up there is going to make or break everything that you do down here well, thanks for walking through that with me and good luck fishing today.

I appreciate it.

I hope it works out Hey, are you sick of mowing grass and would like to see more wildlife around your place?

Well, maybe planting Kentucky native seeds is a good option for you.

Roundstone has been in business about 28 years.

We started out here as beef cattle and tobacco farmers.

My father's a self-taught botanist, so everything about his life has been based on the love for wildlife.

He saw what we had taught me about it.

We talked about the need for native grasses, wildflowers and wetland plants in our environment.

We decided that we want to try something.

We got five gallon buckets and we set our watches, and for one hour we pick seed to see how much we could pick.

And then we went home that night and we did some numbers and we talked about what the need was and why we would do it to see if it was effective and if it was worthwhile.

We now raised a little over 2000 acres of native grasses, wildflowers, wetland plants, a little over 200 species in total, and all different purposes from wildlife habitat to streambank mitigation and restoration.

So all different types of uses for the types of plants that we grow all right.

This is one of Roundstone Native Seeds production fields here.

So we grow all of our species currently in monoculture so that way we can make you a custom mix specifically for your goals.

So some land owners have a goal specifically for a certain type of wildlife, but mainly when you're looking at here what we're trying to do is you can see how thick it is and you can see how some of its laid over and creating a huge thatch layer.

And typically in this situation, this is where you're going to be wanting to try to do some burn.

So we burn production fields every year, but from a wildlife habitat standpoint, you're probably going to be burning those on a three to five year rotation, but it's going to depend on the environment and the land conditions that you're dealing with.

With this stand here, it's no longer good for things like quail and things that are small, especially early on.

You know, when a quail hatch, they're the size of a, you know, a little bumblebee they can't move through this.

That's the same problem that a fescue field also has.

And it's creating no bare ground.

And like things like quail need a lot of bare ground.

So if production burns, we try to burn late spring.

So we actually want to allow for a lot of cool season ways to germinate.

And so that way we can actually use it to thin those weeds back and promote the native warm season grass growth and allows us to be able to get a cleaner field just with the use of fire there.

We can look out over in here, you'll see a lot more diversity in there.

There's a mosaic of different types of vegetation.

So there's a combination of grasses and wildflowers, and there's also amount of bare ground, and that is actually what is creating that wildlife habitat.

So with native grasses, you have a lot of use by animals, especially like ground nesting birds.

And for a lot of the animals, things like turkeys for the first two weeks of their life, the majority of their diet is actually insects.

So by attracting the insects to this area with the use of wildflowers, it actually helps improve and increase the habitat.

So after our seed comes out of the field, we dry the seed out and then pretty much all throughout the year we're continuously cleaning seed.

So this is one of our main cleaning facilities.

You're going to notice it's a lot of old equipment, but basically we need the old type of equipment to facilitate the cleaning of the types of seed that we have.

Most of of the seeds we have our fluffy and have alms and appendages and are difficult to deal with.

All the seed that we have has to be cleaned and conditioned and tested every nine to ten months, depending on federal and state law to ensure that we're giving people what they're ordering, and about 95% of the seed that we sell goes out into a mix.

So everything comes in to be processed, clean, put in the warehouse.

And then as we get the design mixes for wildlife habitat or whatever that use is, then we blended together and sent our mixes out.

So what we have in this building is a lot of the same types of cleaners.

They do the same things, they clean the height and they clean the shape and they clean by texture.

And weight and that sort of thing.

But these are much smaller machines because some things we raise thousands and thousands of pounds of in some things, for instance, like Cardinal Flower, we may only have 6 pounds for the entire year, and it's almost microscopic at 10 million seeds per pound.

So when we clean it, we want to make sure that we don't lose any of it.

So therefore we have a really clean concrete floor we scoured before we clean, we clean, the process.

If any mishaps happen, we pick it up and we redo it.

All right, so this is our main shop.

We have a lot of different types of harvesting equipment.

We actually have 17 different types of machines like our converted rice harvesters from China that we had to bring in.

We put Cummins Motors in them, we put John Deere components in the back end of them, and then we progress on to larger pieces of equipment like our large case rotary combines where we have 20 foot heads.

One other thing I might mention here in the shop is it's the springtime, so we're going through all of our drills.

We primarily use Truax native seed drills.

There's a lot of other types, but the Truax have held up really well for us.

And those are the same types of drills that the Department of Fish and Wildlife has for landowners to use through some of their equip program and other things.

To help facilitate planting of native grasses, wildflowers for habitat and that sort of thing.

Another thing that's been very popular the last few years, especially here at Roundstone, is creating pollinator habitat.

Nationwide pollinators have been declining.

Behind me here you'll see some honeybees that we have here, but a lot of native pollinators are also declining, and the native grasses and wildflowers actually provide a lot of habitat for those species.

And what we're trying to do now is we're trying to increase the amount of wildflower production that we have to make sure that we benefit those pollinators the most besides just increasing it.

We're also helping landowners learn how to better manage their current native grasses, and Wildflower stands to help improve them for things like honey bees butterflies and the hummingbirds that we consider pollinators.

At Roundstone we're actually pretty broad in what we do, but at the end of the day, all the native grasses wildflowers and wetland plants that we raised are for conservation.

And if you have any conservation needs, whether you want pollinators on your property, you want wildlife or just change it esthetically for the better, whether you need seed or whether you need advice.

And maybe even you just need to know about some of the programs that are out there through different departments of Fish and Wildlife or different agenci When you think of musky fishing, you may think big fish, big water, but you may be surprised to learn that many Musky can be found right here in the rivers of eastern Kentucky.

So, Tyler, we're out here fishing in eastern Kentucky for the largest game fish we have in the state of Kentucky.

Most people that have never done this would expect something a little different.

They think big water, big fish, big water.

Right.

But you, you're born and raised in Clay County.

This is this is where you catch musky isn't it?.

This is it.

This is right here.

It's a little small town river man.

I mean, most people would say it's a creek really.

Yeah.

So what are the areas that you fish in eastern Kentuck for musky?

We fish the Goose Creek, obviously.

South Fork, North Fork, Middle Fork.

And then Buckhorn Lake is mainly our rivers we focus on the most.

Yeah.

So this is where this is where you get the most of your fishing time in is right here.

It's hard.

It's it's hard to beat right here in these little, little small rivers.

And so you really got in to musky fihsing in high school?

High school was when I got my first fish and it kind of just hooked me from there.

And I never looked back.

You know, I remember my first musky, which hasn't been that long ago, and I'm sure that most people who go out fishing, they know every time they drive by a spot.

I caught one there.

I know I got one here.

And you just don't forget them.

You never forget them.

It's a memory you'll never forget.

I'll let you grab that dude right there.

All right.

June, it's warm.

It's a little humid.

These water temperatures, though, are a lot cooler.

This isn't like being out on the middle of the lake where it's 80 degree water temperature.

There you go.

Probably won't be the last time I do that today.

Well, Tyler, tell me what we've got now.

We got four poles out.

We're trolling about 3.2 miles an hour.

It's about the perfect speed.

So we're just going to focus on the channel up through here.

That's where I marked a few fish.

OK, so if we start hearing that tick tick tick tick noise, that's when we know it's about to get busy.

We know it's on.

One person grab the rod and the next one grab the net and get ready.

Get him in the net.

Oh, oh, oh.

There's a fish right there.

Fish on, fish on, fish on, fish on.

Tell me when you got him.

You got him?

Yup.

There we go.

You got a fish on.

Here we go.

Here we go.

Look at that.

Look at that fish.

Keep that rod tip low here.

Bring him right up to me and i'll net him.

Good one.

Here we go.

Got him.

Got it.

All right.

Yes sir!.

Yes, look there.

Awesome.

What a pretty fish, huh?

Love it.

I tell you what.

Fish of 10,000.

They say it's the fish of 10,000 cast.

Oop.

I can't believe I just did that.

It's a good release.

I think he.

I think I saw a hit of embarrassment on his face.

He's like, you guys showed the world that I got duped by that white bait.

I'm out of here.

And he was!

Like I said, that's what that's where we were getting ready to put it.

Anyway.

Well Tyler, we got a fish in the boat.

One in the boat so far.

That's, you know, that doesn't always happen on a musky trip, so that's pretty good.

You know, we got up this morning and we tried to catch them on top water, and you saw a few fish on the graph under the boat in the middle.

We did, they was pretty much suspended right in the channel so I figured trolling would have been a good method today, and it did pan out for us.

Now the last 30 minutes or so we've been watching the graph, we haven't see anything in the middle.

So that means they've got to be I think on the bank.

So let's make a transition.

And you know, a two fish day would just be insane, but.

That'd be great.

We still got good odds.

It's still pretty early, so we can put some lures on there and start start casting at them, What do you think?

Let's do it.

All right.

So, you know, we start off top water fish this morning.

How often do you see a musky or hear musky hit top water?

Early in the morning your odds of catching a fish on top water, you know, it's about like any other fish.

But have you have you just heard them explode on top water while you're fishing?

When they do hit the top of the water It's it's vicious.

I bet Yeah, man, you definitely know that that that was a musky right there, and aint no other fish like that going to blow up on top of the water.

Just like that fish caught here last week, Caught him right there off that log and I bet when I hooked him he come a foot out of the water at that top water and just choked it down.

Now what's that called?

That's just an old bulldog.

Soft plastic bulldog.

Bulldog, OK.

Fish.

Got a fish on right there.

Bait change and a fish on.

Whew he's putting up a good fight.

Ready?

Yep.

Here he comes, right here, right in front of the net.

Bringing him to you.

Got him.

Got him.

Yeah man, There's two in the boat/ Awesome.

One trolling and now you've hooked up with one on a.

On a bulldog.

Just a soft plastic bulldog.

Second musky by noon.

Yes, sir.

That is awesome.

That's the way we like it.

Tyler to be able to come out here in a morning.

We haven't raised a bunch of fish, but we've had two strikes and two fish on.

Two fish on.

To have a 37 and a 34 incher and in a day, in a morning.

Awesome day, can't complain at all.

What a great little fishery you got right here in Clay County.

Yes, sir.

Let's get that fish back in well, I tell you what, Tyler, I really appreciate you bringing us out and showing us your home water.

Absolutely.

It makes me wonder how many people in the state of Kentucky live by a creek or a stream, and they don't even fish because they think it's just probably nothing down there.

I mean, we're we're literally on what looks like a big creek.

Yeah.

And, you know, there's 50 inch fish living here.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

I always say if you can find a hole of water with a foot of water in it, I'de fish it.

There's there's something there.

There's always a chance.

I have.

I have enjoyed this just because it far exceeds your expectations.

The second you look at it, you don't think 50 inch possible fish.

I appreciate your time.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me out.

Now let's check in and see who else has been out having fun in this week's Ones that didn't Get Away.

Here we have Boone Haynes with his very first squirrel.

He wanted to submit this because he said Kentucky Afield is his favorite show.

Thanks a lot Boone.

Check out this beautiful bird taken by a 13 year old Alston Caldwell.

This bird was taken on the opening day of the youth season.

Congratulations.

Here we have eight year old Cruz Ferguson who bagged this big tom on the opening morning of the youth season in Davis County.

Nice job.

We have our first summer holiday weekend right around the corner.

Make sure you make plans now to get outdoors and enjoy everything the great state of Kentucky has to offer, 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.

If you hold a Kentucky hunting or fishing license, then you have helped make possible Kentucky's wildlife management areas.

Places to hunt fish, bird watch, or just let your mind wander.

With nearly 100 dotting the commonwealth, put wildlife management areas in your sights and see more of what makes Kentucky's outdoors outstanding.

Get all the info online at F-W dot K-Y dot G-O-V.