Hello and welcome to Kentucky Afield.

I'm your host Chad Miles.

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

This week we're going to take a look back at one of the nicest fishermen I've ever had the pleasure of sharing the boat with.

Then we're going to ride along with biologist to find out a unique way that they're counting deer.

But first, we're headed to the Cumberland River to grab a fly rod and do a little trout fishing.

Today we█re out here on one of my favorite trips that I try to take every year.

And that's floating the Cumberland River.

And I'm here with Troy Humphrey, with Cumberland Trout Guide.

You know, we fished a couple times together.

Yep.

Usually it's in the middle of the summer.

Today, this is the first day of fall, isn't it?

It is the first day of fall.

I always love this.

And in the summertime, this is the best way to beat the heat to catch fish.

It really is.

It's at least 15 degrees cooler down here on the river with the fog going on.

And so it is a great place to be until it gets hot.

And when it gets hot, it gets hot.

When the fog goes, sun comes out, it's hot everywhere.

It's hot.

Yeah.

I was talking to you before we got started today.

And you said this is your 21st year guiding on the Cumberland River.

Yeah, I mean, it's just a beautiful place.

And the fishing is awesome.

One of the best trout fisheries in the state.

Or is the best trout fishery in the state.

It doesn't get any more beautiful than this.

It really doesn't.

Except for when you got a fish in your hands.

That█s right.

Kentucky at its finest.

So Troy, we're using an indicator here.

This a little different than the last time we came, right?

Yeah.

Well, we're what I call fishing foam.

Foam dropper.

A lot of people call it hopper dropper or something like that.

It's just basically a terrestrial bug that, you know, is on top of the water floating along, and they'll come up and eat the top.

Or if you get one on the dropper, which you have a single dropper down below, you know, that'll act as an indicator, just like a bobber, which set the hook when you see it disappear.

Starting at the Happy Birthday things coming in.

60 today.

Yeah, I don't look a day over 59.

No, I guessed 58.

So, you actually are doing two years better than my guess, so that's good.

Oh, right in front of you.

Oh, there you go.

There we go.

What do you got?

A little brook trout?

That what we got?

Yeah, it looks like it.

I'm always impressed with how strong they are.

Oh these never stop.

They won█t stop in the net, either.

It's like trying to grab a snake.

So that's a brook trout, huh?

Is that about average size?

For right now.

Yeah.

You know they just stocked them again this year I think for the first time they had in a few years.

And they're actually seem like they're sticking around a little bit more this year.

Here we go.

What kind of trout we got this time?

Looks like a rainbow.

Rainbow trout.

There you go.

Nice fish.

That one there came up and didn't play with it.

He just took it.

That fish right there, is that fish six months old?

Two years old?

What are we looking at?

It was probably it█s earlier this year.

It is definitely a stocker this year.

Okay, so this year's fish.

Here we go.

Come on up here, fish.

Lets see you.

Nice.

Nice fish.

Another rainbow.

Yep.

There you go.

I'm impressed with your ability to hold onto those fish without them flopping out of your hands.

If you hold them real loose, they don't flop around.

You go to squeezing on them, that's when they, you know, it█s like anytime somebody is squeezing on you you're going to get away from them.

I need to learn that trick.

Here we go.

A little brook trout.

Is that what we got?

A brook trout?

I can't tell.

He's kind of spazzing.

No, that's a little rainbow.

There we go.

Oh you waited too long.

I saw him come up, and I was like alright let him take it, and I think I just waited too long.

We need us a good one, though.

We need a big one.

Oh.

Is that another brook trout, maybe?

It kind of had that color.

They're starting to get their fall colors.

When you talk about the fall colors, what are we looking at?

The orange belly is starting there and they'll get really bright orange.

The males will anyway.

And you can kind of tell this one's a male.

It's got a little bit of a hooked jaw.

Hard fighting fish aren't they?

Yeah.

These things hardly ever stop.

Eagle.

Yep.

Sure is.

That is a bald eagle right there.

Trying to see if we're having any luck.

It's a fisherman checking in on a fisherman.

Pull it in.

Let's make another run down.

Okay.

Oh!

Dang.

Oh, there you go.

There we go.

It is a little better fish.

A little bit of a better fish.

That's a rainbow it looks like.

Definitely a rainbow.

There we go.

That was a fun catch.

That's a pretty good little fish.

A little thicker than a couple of the other ones we've been catching.

Yeah, we're getting a little bigger.

Yeah.

What are we looking at there?

14 inches probably?

Maybe a little less.

12 incher.

Yeah.

Nice one.

Yeah.

It is amazing to me that this water can be as clear as it is, and how well they can camo in, and you still not see them unless they move.

I know.

Yeah.

You can drift over hundreds of them and think, well, there ain't no fish in here.

And even when you do see one, it looks like a ghost.

Yeah.

Here he comes.

Get ready.

Yes.

Nice.

What about that?

We got to sit there and watch that fish come right up there.

Good timing on that one, Chad.

Nice one.

That's what we've been looking for.

That good fish.

Man, so that was on the top.

That was on the top fly.

That's our best fish of the day that hit the top.

Yeah.

It was so clear.

It just came up there and just sucked it in.

Thank you.

And I say thank you to him.

So that was a nice fish.

Yeah.

I bet that one's probably close to 20 inches.

Yeah.

That's a great fish.

That was fun.

Here we go.

This is a good fish.

It could be.

Oh, yeah.

It's a good one.

It's a good one.

I was asleep at the wheel.

Asleep at the reel.

I was 100% asleep at the reel.

He said not quite so fast.

He█s not ready yet.

Got him.

To be able to come down here and do this is really special.

It is.

It's a special place.

Troy, it█s your birthday.

Pick up a rod.

You got to catch a fish on TV for your birthday.

You have to do it.

It's your birthday, and you're out here showing us a great time and have a little bit of fun for yourself.

I wouldn█t rather spend my birthday right out here than any other place.

Well, it's a beautiful, beautiful spot to do it.

Oh, there he is.

A little brownie.

You got a brown?

Sure do.

Oh, right in the basket.

Got him.

A brown.

Well, we've got them all now.

You caught you a brown trout.

Great job Troy.

Thank you sir.

You want me to turn it loose?

Yeah.

Go ahead and let him go.

Alright.

Well Troy, it was a blast.

We caught a couple good fish today, and you got to catch a fish on your birthday.

I did, I actually got to fish for once for myself.

I did a little bit of paddling, and that's not as easy as it looks.

You do a great job.

Boat control is key and you are the man when it comes to that.

Oh thank you sir.

Well, let's take it up, put it on the trailer and call it a day.

What do you think?

Sounds good to me.

Let's get out of here.

Bobbie Gentry was one of the very first guys I had on Kentucky Afield when I took this job.

He was a great fisherman.

He was a joy to be around.

He was a musician, a family man, and he is going to be greatly missed.

Today I'm out here on beautiful Dale Hollow Lake with the gentleman who wrote the book about fishing Dale Hollow Lake, literally.

It's been quite a good experience.

I've had people say, when are you going to do a book?

You know, I said, well, I probably could write one, but I got to have somebody help me.

So I done stuff with Ed Harp with bass masters.

We took all the questions that's been asked over the years and put down into print.

We've kind of put a bunch of years of experience together.

You know, I absolutely love this lake, and I try to spend a lot of time down here, mainly in the winter months.

But we're at the end of March.

This is the time of year to potentially catch a true Dale hollow giant.

Yeah, this is a real day.

Some days it's chicken.

Some days it's feathers.

But, you know, it's, you've got to enjoy what you're doing.

And enjoy the hunt.

Well, let's go find us a first spot and make a couple cast, and, we'll converse and hopefully catch a couple fish.

We'll get it done.

All right, hold on.

Let's get rolling.

So Bob, what are you going to start off with?

I'm going to throw a spinner bait.

Just a little bit.

Make a little bit of noise.

All right.

I think I'm going to start off with a swim bait.

You know, Bob, we got about 52, 53 degrees.

You still need to fish slow because that's cold water.

But it's that time of year that you can start speeding up a little bit.

Yeah, we're in a good transition.

And that's really what it is this time of year.

They're changing weekly sometimes daily.

But they're starting to speed up some.

Got it?

Got one.

All right.

Oh it's a large mouth.

Caught a Green Fish today.

There we go.

First fish of the morning.

There you go.

I usually catch about 8 to 10 small mouth for every one large mouth.

And that's just mainly because of the areas that I like to target down here.

You know what that means?

Yeah.

That means we're going to catch 8 to 10 small mouths, because we got you largemouth.

Because you caught a large mouth, that only makes the numbers right?

Yeah, it's all about math.

Hey, look at that belly.

I know that, that's a pretty healthy fish.

Almost as good as me and you.

Oh, you got a way to go to catch me.

We'll take it.

That's a nice fish.

Good job Chad.

There you go.

Bobby, how many years have you been guiding now?

I've been guiding for around 25 years, but, 22, 23 years, been full time.

You know, I had a lot of people that I knew fish professionally.

And something I've done since I was a kid.

So it just seemed like the right thing for me to do.

I'm sure you've probably got lifelong friends that you've met out here in the boat.

Absolutely.

Oh, there he is.

I don't think I have very good hooks set here Bob.

Going to try and try to keep this fish low.

Pretty decent little small mouth.

Here we go.

Good job.

I cast it up here and got hung in behind rock and was shaking that thing loose.

Must have been just.

Fish took it off the rock for you.

It sure did.

Sure did.

Well, here we go.

It's pretty smallmouth.

Hey, you know what?

Considering these conditions, if we can get a couple bites when this water's flat.

Think what it's going to do when the wind blows.

It'll only get better when we get some wind.

Nice, beautiful little brown fish.

He bit me.

He bit me.

That fish bit me.

Oh.

We got a fish on.

Oh my goodness.

Finally got one on spinner bait Chad.

You█ve been telling me you catch one during daytime.

I night fish spinnerbaits all the time.

I really don't throw them in the daytime down here very much.

But look, you got one.

We got to try them to know.

Yep.

It's a daytime color for a spinnerbait right now in the spring.

And I use it pre-spawn, post-spawn, so.

Yeah.

There we go.

Let's get that one back in and see if we can't catch another one.

Alright.. What do you know?

That ain't coming up.

This might be a large mouth.

No brown fish.

Here you go.

Thank you.

Good job Chad.

He wasn█t going nowhere.

Punched it right through the top lip.

That's where you want them.

That's where you want them.

Right there.

We'll take it.

There we go.

Good one?

This is a better fish.

Come here, Joker.

It's a good fish.

There you go.

That's what I'm talking about.

I'll tell you what, Bob.

We found some aggressive fish.

Here we go.

They're going to eat.

Just got to bait the right place.

Right time.

Yeah.

That belly don't stay like that by not eating, does it?

No.

There's one.

Oh.

Got it?

Yeah.

That's a pretty good fish there.

Now, what's that on, swim bait?

On a swim bait.

There you go.

Take him all day.

Swim bait█s turned things around, hasn█t it?

It's all about learning something new.

Because we came out today, we drug some baits on the bottom.

Caught a couple in the morning, sped up our retrieve as the water warmed, and got shallow.

The tip of the day.

You've got to keep trying different things until you figure out a pattern.

Here we go.

Coming to us.

Oh, that's a good one.

That's a chunk.

That fish hit and felt like a ton of bricks and then swam right to the boat.

I mean, just absolutely took the wind right out of that.

That swim bait.

That is a toad.

Look at the thickness on that fish.

That's a prime, pre-spawn, Dale Hollow small mouth right there.

That's what you're looking for.

I tell you what.

I'm going to get a weight on this one.

I'm going to say 4 pounds, five ounces.

I'm going to guess over four and a half.

4-14.

That's right at a 5 pound fish.

I like when they're bigger than I think.

Whoa.

This is a good one.

That's better than good Chad.

Oh!

Oh, that was back-to-back cast.

A 4-14.

And what do we got here?

Five.

That one there's going to go 21in.

That's what i█m saying.

21.5.

5-1.

9 pounds, 15oz.

In two cast.

I'm glad you read my book.

Before hitting the woods this deer season, make sure you check your guide.

Several county zones have changed, and here's one of the ways they collect data to help make those decisions.

So tonight we're using thermal cameras.

They're roof mounted, and we're going to run about 15 miles of routes here in Garrard County.

So we base every decision that we make for deer off of a myriad of things, one of which being our population reconstruction model that we do.

And there's a lot of different inputs that go into it, but basically that spits out a number as to whether or not there's too many deer, too little deer, or just the right amount of deer in a county.

And before we go and bump a county, either more liberal or more conservative bag limits, we like to get some actual data on the ground.

And that's what we're doing tonight.

So we're we're doing a deer density survey, much like a spotlight survey, but with some, some new technology.

And we'll get out here and see what we can find.

You ready?

Yep.

So when we start, you're going to click route.

Yep.

Okay.

When we see a deer, you're going to click unknown deer.

And then you got to click done up in the right hand.

So if there's a big group, you got to remember that.

Unknown, done.

Unknown, done.

And we're going to click the record button on the computers and the route button at the same time.

One, two, three.

All right.

So now we're recording video and we're recording the route.

Garrard County, the county that we're in, there's different types of habitat.

You know, there's a lot of cattle country, but there's also big chunks of forest.

Basically, we looked at a map and did our best to draw these routes to encompass a representative area throughout the county.

You know, it would take months to try and count every deer in the county.

So we try and get a good sample based on the landscape and how that represents the county as a whole, the management unit as a whole.

So for Garrard County, we've got a mixture of cattle country like we're looking at right now and then we're going to get into some more wooded area that's going to represent another section of the county.

Yeah, there's a bunch of cows right there.

Hey, there you go.

There you go.

There's four deer right there.

Check that out.

We're going to mark that we got a deer.

Like that.

That█s what we're looking for.

The app gives us the ability to not only track the route and track the deer that we see on the route.

Drops a pin right where we see the deer.

but it takes weather for us, wind, how fast we're moving, all the metrics that we would have to stop and take during a traditional spotlight survey.

They're all being recorded right now as we're driving down the road.

So it's making this process a lot more efficient for our staff, and it's making the data a lot more reliable, where we're going to be able to come and run these exact routes year after year, do the exact same thing and have data that we can, you know, reliably compare year over year over year.

That█s a deer way out there.

Yeah, see?

There's a deer down on the creek.

See it walking?

There's a deer.

Yeah, there's one bedded up on the hill right there.

Then let's bump on up.

I think that'll be another one there.

So that's a second deer that's bedded on this hillside right here looks like.

And then can't really tell what's in here.

That looks like at least two, maybe three something.

So we'll mark that, go back and look at it on the video to see.

Coyote.

Pull on forward.

There he is.

There he goes.

Okay.

I got three deer over here.

One, two, three.

And that is a rabbit or something like 20 yards ahead right there but those are deer.

We just finished out here in Garrard county.

Last route of the night.

We're gonna download and log all these videos, compare them to the real time counts that we took tonight.

and kind of come to a consensus on how many deer we were able to see.

We'll take the routes that we ran, put them into our mapping software, and figure out how much we were able to see.

and then from there, we'll be able to get a real time density of what's going on in Garrard County.

Quite a few deer tonight.

Excited to get back to the office and see what it all comes out as.

All right, so we are back, at headquarters this morning after the Garrard County thermal survey.

We've had time to review the footage, and we were able to pick out quite a few more deer than we thought we saw.

So that's a good thing.

The ability to be able to come back and review the footage and count deer again just to confirm.

So now we know how many deer we saw on these routes.

What do we do now?

From there, we'll take the route that we ran off of the app that we used during the survey.

we dropped the route into this mapping software, say how far the camera was off the ground, and it uses a lidar layer in our map to to determine what we were able to see depending on the topography, vegetation.

This was our visibility on the route that we ran right here.

So now thinking back to math class, you've got your area, you've got the number of deer inside that area.

So now we can figure out our density.

Turns out this survey was really supportive of our population reconstruction estimate.

It indicates that the county has reached a threshold that it probably needs to be bumped to the next zone, a more liberal zone.

Zone 2, to try and get some deer taken off of the landscape.

The main reason that we are trying to keep deer at a manageable level is for the herd health and the landscape health.

So, you█d imagine you put too many cows in a field, they're going to over graze it pretty hard.

Same thing happens to the landscape when we have too many deer.

That's our goal in the deer program, is to find that balance between having enough deer for hunters to be satisfied.

When they go out there seeing deer, they're harvesting deer, but also keeping it at a level that is manageable to where they don't overpopulate and don't start causing all the problems that come with overpopulation.

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 Tom waters, who took a nice buck in Oldham County with his archery equipment and donated it to hunters for the hungry.

Great job and thank you.

Check out seven year old Corbin Saint John.

He's got a nice largemouth bass that he caught at Cedar Creek Lake.

This fish was caught on a crankbait.

Nice fish.

Here we have Kiran with a nice blue catfish.

This was the very first fish he's ever caught.

And it was caught in the Kentucky River near Carrollton.

Nice job.

Check out this beautiful striper that was caught by Kathy Williams on the Cumberland River.

She caught this fish using artificial bait.

Great fish.

If you're a youth hunter or assisting a youth hunter and hitting the woods this weekend, good luck and be safe.

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.