Angler Of The Year Busted With 14 Bass the Night Before Tournament 🎣

ven•a•tic: fond of or living by hunting

NORTH AMERICA’S MOST-READ OUTDOOR NEWSLETTER

I’m currently at the “it’s Thursday already?” phase of the workweek and am unsure as to whether or not that is a good thing as of yet.

With that in mind, let’s all take a minute to grab a coffee or whiskey (no judgement) and get this Thursday morning dispatch out the door.

Here's what's worth reading about today:

DUDE HAD A SHADY PAST
FIVE-TIME ANGLER OF THE YEAR BUSTED WITH 14 BASS THE NIGHT BEFORE THE TOURNAMENT

Before he was able to make the first cast in one of Wisconsin’s biggest one-man bass events, the gig was already up for former Angler of the Year Adam Eisele. With the Wisco Crown Bass Championship set to kickoff on Saturday morning, tournament officials came across an extremely suspicious livewell the night before, setting off a firestorm for Eisele who never made it to launch.

According to reports, fellow competitor Dave Van Ert was staying at the same house, noticed Eisele’s boat lights still on, walked over to shut them off, and noticed that his livewell was pre-stocked with 14 nice-sized bass. After making the grim discovery, his first call was to Wisco Bass co-owner Kyle Carpenter, leading to an official request to search the boat….

🐺 Mollie’s Pack Walks Home Just as Wyoming Wolf Season Opens. You’ve got to admit, the timing is damn near cartoonish at this point. Just days ahead of Wyoming’s ultra-controversial wolf season, the infamous Mollie’s Pack, led by their 12-year-old celebrity wolf 1090F, have returned to the safety and security of Yellowstone National Park.

After venturing out and denning up in a Wyoming hunt unit inside the Shoshone National Forest last spring, the pack made waves as far-off fans offered a $10,000 bounty for information on any hunter that took aim at the pack. That ridiculous social media-fueled threat made by a dog trainer in Texas soon turned into months of controversy and (equally ridiculous) counter threats made by some in the hunting community.

With the season kicking off on Tuesday and Game and Fish trying to nudge the pack back into the park without advertising a location, the pack did the work on their own and apparently walked themselves back into protected boundaries. With the season running into December, it’s still anyone’s guess as to whether the pack remains in the park for the entirety of the season. If they happen to venture out between now and then, they are once again, fair game.

⛰ Easement Locks Public Access on 20,000 Acres of Montana Timberland. The state of Montana just locked up another 20,629 acres of Stimson Lumber ground across three northwestern counties. Trust for Public Land, Montana FWP, and Stimson finished their fourth conservation easement together, putting nearly all of Stimson’s Montana timberland under permanent easement. What that means is that the company still owns it and still cuts it, but are now unable to subdivide it. In return, the public gets free year-round access across the whole property and a guaranteed walk-through to adjacent Forest Service and state land — including the Wanless Lake trailhead into the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness.

That’s the part of this $29 million deal that matters to hunters and anglers. The parcels already see about 6,000 hunting days a year and now those days are permanent, along with 39 miles of stream, riparian corridors, and wetlands that hold bull trout, elk, deer, and moose.

Is it wilderness? Not quite. It’s working forest that stays working, which sure as hell beats cabin lots and and locked gates. And for a region that lives on timber and public access, that’s a pretty clean trade.

🕵️‍♂️ Rifle-Killed Bull Elk Found Antlerless in Bingham County; IDFG Asking for Tips. Idaho Fish and Game is asking for help after a bull elk was illegally killed in Bingham County earlier this month. Officers believe it was shot the night of Sept. 4 or 5 with a centerfire rifle during archery-only season. The bull was hit several times and the antlers were taken. That’s both an illegal method and wanton waste.

Anyone with information can call Senior Conservation Officer Mitch Newhouse at 208-576-1572 or the Citizens Against Poaching hotline at 1-800-632-5999. Tips can stay anonymous, and a reward is on the table if they lead to an arrest.

🐍 This slippery fella absolutely BOOKS IT after snagging that bait. Watch as this watersnake takes this angler’s last minnow and makes a mad dash to the water.

I mean, I wouldn’t be stopping him…

🥼 Doctor Bills: Now that the dove opener is officially behind us, it’s a good bet there are a few participants that physically felt the spent shot from high-angle or distant pass-shooting. Hopefully these “light” sprinkles of lead or steel rained down harmlessly. Though there is nothing funny about being peppered with No. 7 ½ bird shot, it routinely elicits a few annoying and nervous chuckles. Falling or stray birdshot can be seen as a rite of passage and has been a presence since people started organizing known dove shoots over a 130 years ago.

The first known treatise on dove hunting came from an October 1895 reprinted article from an anonymous writer in a San Antonio, TX newspaper, that originally was published in a German-language magazine. It was reported that “hundreds and thousands of wild doves came flying from all directions … into the sunflower and millet fields, and watering holes … where they delighted the hunters’ hearts with ample shooting …” Read the full story.

👴 A Gentleman’s Passing:  My grandfather died while I was home on mid-tour leave from Iraq. With the “Surge” into Baghdad in full swing, I felt I shouldn’t have left. However, as the lowest ranking of my troop and with a mid-tour leave schedule to adhere to, I left my friends to spend two weeks at home. I remember surprising my mother, who immediately burst into tears, only to dry her eyes, smile for a moment, and then return to tears to tell me about her dying father. I remember my anger. I found myself angry a lot in those days.

I’m unsure whether my grandfather's death or the insurgency lay at the root of it all. Either way, I distinctly recall looking up at the giant painting of his father, an avid quail hunter, flushing birds with their German Shorthair Pointer. It hung beneath his aged Remington Model 12 on their living room wall, memorializing a past long gone.   Read the full story.

🦆 Death of the Red-Winged Mallard: It took Robert Lee Briggs five years, working off and on, to slay the red-winged mallard. The pursuit got to be so much of a passion with him that it hurt his business, for he was a market-hunter on the southwestern coast of Texas. In summer he caught red-snappers, pompanos, sheepsheads and turtles. All winter he shot ducks, snipe and wild geese, which he sold to produce dealers in Corpus Christi. He put in so much time trying to kill the drake with the crimson feathers that the dealers were wroth. They said he was ruining one of the brightest careers that ever opened before a young man in the Southwest.

Briggs believed that to look straight over the gun-barrels in all sorts of weather, to judge correctly, distance, speed of the firing quarry and wind velocity; to be wise in the habits of beasts and birds, to be able, by a glance at the sun, to tell the time of day within five minutes; to be expert in the building of blinds and the use of decoys, were enough for any man. Nature was his book, and he studied it. Read the full story.

Oh, and one more thing…