Tom Anderson: Columbia River Gorge Fishing, Windsurfing & Building Burnewiin

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 333, Tom Anderson...

Meet Tom Anderson and the Columbia River Gorge

Tom Rowland: What's up, everybody? Welcome to the show today. Man, we're gonna learn a little bit about the Pacific Northwest. I've never really fished up there, but I want to. The Deschutes River, the John Day River, all of these places that I've heard about, some really incredible stuff. And I've got a friend, Tom Anderson. He lives out there. He owns a company called Burnewiin, and he's going to talk to us today about all kinds of stuff — the health of the salmon fishery, sturgeon fishing, all kinds of stuff. So buckle up and get ready for Tom Anderson. Tom, what's up? How are you?

Tom Anderson: I'm well. How are you, Tom?

Tom Rowland: Man, doing great. Tom and Tom. How's the weather out there where you are?

Tom Anderson: You know, it's interesting — it's actually been really cool for this time of year for us. The Northwest is a hard thing to ask about weather because we're kind of on what's called the east slope of the Cascades, so usually it's very sunny, hot, and dry here all summer. And right now it's been incredibly windy, which is great for the windsurf and kiteboard crowd.

Tom Rowland: Right. And that's you, right? Do you like to do that?

Tom Anderson: I do. That's part of the reason I ever came out here, thirty years ago — that scene specifically. I don't really do it too much anymore. I'm kinda a little bit up there in my years, and it's probably good to stay away from it.

Tom Rowland: When I grew up, I liked to water ski — competitive water skiing, so a slalom course — and then I got into barefooting and all of these other things that are very harmful to your body. And then along comes a technological marvel called wake surfing, which is much, much easier on your body. So is there a step where — is it all or nothing with the kite surfing? Is one of them way easier on the body than the other? Do you go back to just windsurfing on a board?

Tom Anderson: It's interesting. Windsurfing is terribly addicting, and I think part of the reason is that it's a really difficult learning curve. I'd say in some ways kiting has a bit of a quicker learning curve than windsurfing, but it's probably a little more forgiving on the body, just because of the dynamics — when you're kiting, you're separated from the kite, which is up in the air, whereas windsurfing, you're hooked in at waist level directly to the sail. But either way, they're pretty demanding. They're pretty exciting sports, though, and we happen to live right in the epicenter of the windsurfing and kiting scene here in the US.

Tom Rowland: And that's a particular canyon, is that right?

Tom Anderson: It's called the Columbia River Gorge. Beautiful area — it's one of the only national scenic areas in the country, and it cuts a sea-level path through the Cascade Mountain Range, which is a series of volcanoes running down the Pacific Coast. The cool, dense air off the coast puts pressure up against the coastal range, and then just east of us here, about twenty miles, is high mountain desert, which gets really hot, and that air rises. So the only sea-level path through the Cascades is the gorge, and it's literally a wind funnel. Pretty cool dynamic.

Tom Rowland: And is there good fishing there, right in that windy area?

Tom Anderson: It's fantastic — unfortunately the wind kinda messes with it a fair bit. Historically, the Columbia River was one of the primary salmon fisheries in the country, and it's still a pretty impressive fish scene here, but there's a lot of politics involved, like everywhere. Over the last century, a lot of dams have been built that turned it into a slower-moving river at warmer temperatures, which isn't great for salmon, but there are still some pretty incredible runs. As far as fishing regulations go, it's a bit of a quagmire, like a lot of places. Unfortunately for us, it's not a huge destination fishing zone, because you could show up here and get blown off the river for your whole vacation by the wind. So we have a lot of tributaries — the big thing here really is the tributary fishing.

Steelhead, Chinook, and the Klickitat River

Tom Rowland: And the tributary fishing, that's where the salmon are?

Tom Anderson: Salmon in the main stem as well, but the Klickitat River, for example, where I live, is the longest undammed river in the Northwest, and it comes off the glacial fields of Mount Adams. There's a fish hatchery up at the mountain — they raise primarily Chinook, but there's also an incredible winter steelhead fishery there. They close it down in the winter to protect the breeding season. Most of the rivers up the Columbia system have steelhead or Chinook fisheries, as well as some incidental trout — a lot of the "trout" you catch might actually be steelhead smolt.

Tom Rowland: Do you like the steelheading in the winter?

Tom Anderson: I love it.

Tom Rowland: That's very addicting. I've never done it myself, but the people I know who are into it are really into it — like permit fishing, or bonefishing, or tarpon fishing for us. They just go all in. It's all they can think about.

Tom Anderson: It's pretty addicting here in particular. The prime steelhead fishery runs pretty much from July through November, with the height of it maybe September, October — they're really summer-run fish that breed in the winter. Then as you get more toward the coast, that's the classic scene: it's sleeting, raining, snowing, and you're out there for hours freezing your hands off, floating a jig.

Tom Rowland: Well, the last time we had lunch you were telling me about all the other recreational opportunities you have out there — mountain biking, kiting, the fishing. That's an area of the country I've spent almost no time in, but the way you described it sounded amazing. I even forgot about the skiing. What else do you like to do out there?

Living in the Gorge: biking, skiing, and wine country

Tom Anderson: It's a pretty well-rounded place, and that's why so many people — the gorge is about an hour east of Portland, Oregon, where we're located — it draws people from all over the world. I moved here back in the mid-nineties. My first exposure was the windsurfing scene, and that's why I was coming out here on vacations, but I would have never moved here just for that. One of the things I like to do a lot is mountain bike, and the biking here is spectacular — I'd say here, Moab, and Whistler are probably three of the premier areas in the country, and you can do it year-round. The ski area on Mount Hood, up at Timberline Lodge, which is where the movie The Shining was filmed, is open all year pretty much, so there are a lot of ski teams from around the world that spend their summers on Mount Hood training. Windells snowboard camp is up there all summer too. Back in my prime, the big thing was to do a three-sport day — get up in the morning, ski until it was slushy, stop and pop a mountain bike ride on the way down the hill, and then windsurf all afternoon. It's just a pretty spectacular area. And then the big draw anymore is really tourism-based — there's an incredible number of wineries here that people travel for, a good day trip to get away from Portland. Of course right now that's been put on a bit of a damper with everything going on, but that's okay by me.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, it's probably a good time to spend some time in the woods, for social distancing if nothing else. But man, what a recreational, incredible place you live in. A three-sport day, that's pretty cool. I've always thought kiting is the perfect complementary sport to fishing in the Keys, because there are so many days it's just too windy to fish, and a lot of the fishing guides are way into that. I had little kids when it was first getting started, so it just didn't fit into the life right then, and most of my clients were people who'd come all the way down here — we're going fishing anyway. So, tell me about your company, Burnewiin.

The story behind Burnewiin

Tom Anderson: Well, Burnewiin — we're born and raised here in the Columbia Gorge. In some ways, for somebody from Florida, it might seem like a strange place for a company like ours to exist, but just like our sports scene here, our fishing and boating scene is quite varied. And the other neat thing about this area is that because of the international draw of people who want to locate somewhere for the lifestyle, there's an incredible amount of talent and skill here in the gorge, in the Northwest in general. Burnewiin, by the way, is an old Gaelic term for blacksmith or craftsman — it was really designed in the conception of our company to connote that quality, that old-world craftsmanship. In a lot of industries, especially hardware, there's been kind of a race to the bottom, whether it's tools or boat hardware or whatever, so we wanted to represent something done a little more in an old-school way, with attention to craftsmanship and detail. That's the history of the name. But the reason we even exist is that most people — I mean, they want to be Tom Rowland and Rich Tudor every day, or Scott Walker or somebody, every day. But the reality is that all of us, even my own aluminum fishing boat here in the Columbia Gorge, do all kinds of different things — not just different types of fishing, but recreating and hanging out too. It seemed like in the marine industry there'd been a lot of great innovation in boats, boat propulsion, electronics, and the things we use on boats — fishing rods, reels, downriggers — but in a lot of cases people design these great products and the last thing they figure out is how to mount it on the boat. Those mounting systems were often an afterthought — you had to just get something, get it on the boat. So Burnewiin really arose strictly from the need for a nice, well-designed system that lets people reconfigure different things on their boat depending what they're doing that day. We're primarily fishermen, but here we might be oversized sturgeon fishing one day, salmon fishing the next, bass fishing the next. If you live near the coast you might be running for tuna in late summer, or throwing some crab pots. That's kinda why we exist — though of course we could talk forever about our products.

Tom Rowland: What you have is pretty cool. If you don't know the company or the product, it's basically something old kind of reinvented. The old part is a rod holder — everybody's got rod holders on the boat, and they're basically just a hole in the boat with a tube in it. You stick the rod in there and it pretty much holds it. But yours has a different design that allows multiple accessories to be mounted on top of it very securely. Is that fair enough?

Tom Anderson: That's absolutely fair.

Tom Rowland: So what was the first thing you designed this type of rod holder to hold?

Tom Anderson: We're really careful not to call our mounts a rod holder — they're mounts, a universal marine mount. We didn't just piecemeal it; we spent three years developing an entire product line, because if we're gonna have somebody put one of our mounts in their boat, we wanted it to actually be a versatile thing. So there's a whole series of rod holders and adapters, for people who do things like downriggers. Honestly, in the Northwest, where people use downriggers quite a bit, that's one of the most common entry points into our mounting system — you just don't want to screw that downrigger plate to your boat permanently. Myself, I don't love downriggers, but occasionally you need them, and actually we're seeing a lot more business out of Florida from people trolling for wahoo with them. What we found is that people throw it down, or they're in a gimbal mount on a traditional thirty-degree rod holder, and they break the gimbal pins at the bottom. I know so many people, myself included, who had a bolt in there before we existed because they broke the factory pin — they're sloppy, a little loosey-goosey. That's one common application. And then the other one is: all of a sudden you're out on a Saturday tuna fishing hardcore with a bunch of guys, and on Sunday you just want to take somebody out for a cruise — you don't want all that fishing gear stuck under your boat all the time. So that was really the impetus behind it, and you kind of hit the nail on the head — the thirty-degree flush-mount rod holder. They're just prolific, everywhere. Every boat builder puts them in the boat whether customers want them or not, and you can go back years in the marine industry and find companies who surveyed their customers and found a lot of them don't even use them. In certain fisheries you never use a thirty-degree rod holder — the rod's sticking straight up in the air. And thirty-degree rod holders are the whole reason bent-butt rods even exist, because you need to get the rod into a position where it can work for you — the rod is there to take up slack, keep that line tight, and if it's sticking straight up in the air while you're fishing down, that's just not the right position. So they created bent butts to get the rod more horizontal to the water. All of our rod holders that work in our mounts do that — they articulate horizontally a full 360 degrees, and then vertically, quickly, with a trigger, to go from horizontal to full vertical in some cases, or at least 45 degrees in others, like the ones you've used.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, they're great like that, because not everybody's got bent-butt rods. Rich and I are mostly inshore fishermen who occasionally go out and deep-drop for swordfish, and he's really gotten into the deep dropping for barrel fish and queen snappers and all the other tilefish out there. That sometimes requires a whole new line of rods — the big butts and everything — not because the rods we currently have aren't heavy enough, but because they don't have the bent butt. So that's where we started using your rod holder, to get that rod away from the boat and into a horizontal position, and that's worked great.

Deep dropping for halibut off the Oregon Coast

Tom Anderson: That seemed to be what — I went out on the boat one day with Rich, and we were, I guess as you call it, deep-dropping, which is something I'd done way in the past down in the Keys, and I used to spend quite a bit of time there. It's really no different than the way we fish halibut off the Oregon Coast — you pick a key spot, you set up a drift, you want just the right drift speed so you're covering some ground but not too fast, so you can keep your bait on the bottom. Whether you're two hundred feet deep off Islamorada or eight hundred feet deep off the Oregon Coast, same technique, and it's really important that the rod be horizontal to the water. Some people look at our high-end stainless products as big-boat, Viking-class products, but on that twenty-six-foot boat we fished that day, it really let us get a nice big spread. We were using long leaders — twenty-foot leaders, I think, that day — with live bait fish, maybe an eight-ounce lead, just tapping bottom. With the rock of the water we could get it set just like we do for halibut here, so the rod tips would indicate every now and then that you were touching bottom, and get a good spread out. The factory thirty-degree rod holders in the back of the gunnels typically point straight back, and the rods stick up, and as you drift your lines tangle in the outboards — it's just not the right setup.

Tom Rowland: Certainly not the right setup for that. It's pretty good for trolling for dolphin and stuff like that — that works fine. But in this situation, what I liked is we could use the rod holders in the front and really get spread out, with one of the bow-mount rod holders in the same position — put two rods out — and that worked great. I'm interested in the halibut fishing, because when I was a kid I always liked flounder fishing. I thought flounder were a really cool fish — way more aggressive than I expected when I was first learning about them. I thought they'd just be bottom dwellers. So is halibut basically the same fish that grows to really big sizes? Are they just as aggressive? I've never fished for them.

Tom Anderson: It's interesting — we don't catch what a lot of people think of as halibut, the big Alaskan barn doors, the big hundred-and-some-pounders that take a lot of hard cranking because they have so much surface area — big, broad kites. What they'll do is go nose-down and just sit there and work against you. They're not big runners, but they're really hard crankers. I wouldn't say they're an exciting fish to fight — the bite's kind of neat, it can be a really soft bite, you have to be sensitive not to disrupt it, but once it goes, it's game on. It's more of a heavy grind than an exciting fight.

Tom Rowland: You guys are fishing those in roughly eight hundred feet of water?

Tom Anderson: It depends. The openings here are weird — they have three-day openings every so often until the Pacific fishery quotas are met, and some years that closes quicker than others. That's the all-depth season, so we'll be out in five to 850 feet of water. Then throughout the summer there's the forty-fathom fishery, which is all near shore, and in those cases we might be fishing at a hundred feet, 150, something like that.

Tom Rowland: And you said your fish aren't the size of the Alaskan ones — what's a good one in your area?

Tom Anderson: Opening day this year we were out, and you could keep one fish per person per day. We had six guys in the boat, we each limited out, and we actually released a number until we got ones we were happy with, ranging from 38 to 46 inches — that's mid-thirty, maybe forty pounds.

Tom Rowland: That's a lot of meat — those fish are mostly meat, like flounder. That's a good fish to eat. I love those things. They seem aggressive because they're not that good at catching stuff, so when something comes over they've gotta get it right now or it's gone — not like a tarpon or a wahoo that can chase anything down. It's more like a largemouth bass, sitting in wait to ambush. But those halibut have gotta be one of the best-tasting fish ever. When I went to Alaska I ordered it everywhere after the first time.

Tom Anderson: I love it too. Ling cod is probably a close second in terms of coastal fish.

Tom Rowland: Ling cod — there's a lot of fish people call "ling," like they call cobia a ling too. I don't know where that came from.

Tom Anderson: I don't either — that's a good question. They're pretty radical fish, though. I love ling cod.

Tom Rowland: How do you fish for those?

Tom Anderson: Pretty much what we do for ling cod is fish closer to shore, whether it's up off Vancouver Island or the Oregon Coast, bottom fishing with jigs and big rubber tails — literally jig fishing on rock piles, watching the big Pacific pinnacles that come out, like at Cannon Beach with the big Haystack Rock, or Pacific City where the whole dory fishery fleet is. You watch those and fish the pinnacles that continue out into the ocean.

Tom Rowland: And you're doing that with a medium-heavy rod? How big are these fish?

Tom Anderson: You're happy if you get a 36-inch ling cod — probably fifteen, eighteen pounds.

Tom Rowland: Like with a big bass rod, a grouper rod or something?

Tom Anderson: Pretty much, a medium-heavy — it has to have a pretty conventional reel because you're constantly adjusting. It's a real jagged bottom, so if you're out with people who haven't done it much, you're just constantly getting hung up. Unfortunately the guy piloting the boat typically isn't gonna be fishing, because it's constant work keeping the drift right over these spires and humps — you've got real potential for snagging, and you've gotta stay on the bottom. They kind of live in little holes, like I remember barracuda doing in Florida — they live in these holes and things go by. We're typically using a sixteen-ounce lead jig head with a giant hook and about an eight-to-ten-inch rubber tail.

Tom Rowland: And those are as good to eat as halibut?

Tom Anderson: I'd say a very close second. It's super fun, and you get a bunch of the same spots that hold other rockfish, like black sea bass — so above the jig head we'll tie a couple of shrimp flies on some copper loops, and you'll double up or triple up on sea bass sometimes while you're getting a big ling on the bottom jig.

Tom Rowland: So sea bass is another really good eating fish — you're gonna have a good day if you catch all three of those.

Tom Anderson: Absolutely, especially if you drop your crab pots outside the jetty on the way out. We almost always drop some crab pots when we cross the bar through the jetties — it's usually your saver. If you have a bad fishing day, you come in and pull up a couple pots full of crab.

Dungeness crab and albacore tuna

Tom Rowland: And what kind of crab is that?

Tom Anderson: It's Dungeness crab.

Tom Rowland: In Florida, each person can have six stone crab traps — you don't have to be a commercial fisherman to have that. A little family could have eighteen between them. What's the regulation out there?

Tom Anderson: Two pots per person, but it's a fifteen-crab limit each day per person. If two guys go out — we typically run a boat out of a twenty-three-foot center console because it's really efficient — sometimes we'll just drop two crab pots, but big commercial-style ones. If two guys bring in thirty Dungeness, and the Dungeness are big — the limit is they've gotta be six inches across the back — that's a lot of crab meat. The body and the legs are some of the best part to me, though some people think it's more work.

Tom Rowland: When you go to Red Lobster you only get the legs — they keep the body meat for themselves, probably. That's what the fish want.

Tom Rowland: With the crab traps, what's the season?

Tom Anderson: It depends where you're at — the Puget Sound is its own whole deal, with a lot of summer crabbing. The prime season for the commercial guys, when the crab are biggest with nice full shells after molting — the commercial season on the Oregon Coast is any month with an "r" in it, but usually the peak is right in winter, December, January, February. All the schools around here, our local school up on the mountain, has a fundraiser every year — a crab feed, always around the third week of January, which is the peak. We live kind of remote up on the mountain, and the school runs over on a Sunday and picks up all the crab; they presell all the tickets. They actually cook the crab at the crabbery for us — it's easier — and then we bring it out. Some people want it hot and throw it in a hot-water boil; most people eat it cold. It's fantastic. And we crab all summer while we're tuna fishing — our tuna season usually runs mid-July through late September, and we'll always drop pots on the way out.

Tom Rowland: And the tuna you're catching, is that yellowfin?

Tom Anderson: Nope, it's all albacore.

Tom Rowland: Albacore, right on. How big do those get where you are?

Tom Anderson: It's really interesting — I'm still trying to learn more about them. It's one of the few fisheries a lot of people agree is currently sustainable, and my personal belief is that's because we don't catch them big here — if we catch 25-to-30-pounders we're really excited, but you catch a lot of them once you get into them, which is the exciting part. I think the reason is that up here in the northern Pacific we're really just catching juvenile fish, not breeding stock, which is part of why it's sustainable. I know albacore can get big — we just never see them big here.

Tom Rowland: Does anyone fish for them commercially, and what's the method?

Tom Anderson: Oh yeah. They'll do different methods, but most put out a big troll spread, and when they hit on the troll they'll stop, chum the water, and live-bait fish with what they call jack poles. They also hand-line them, with a bunch of hand lines out on spools — one guy constantly chumming, and these guys run jack poles, which are eight-foot solid fiberglass sticks — like tenkara fishing, if you've heard of that, Japanese tenkara. A jack pole is a super stout stick with a long wrapped handle, almost like a rail rod they use in Southern California, with a long leader about the same length as the pole tied to the end with a live-bait hook. They stick it in the water, and when a fish hooks they jack it into the boat and swing it up to the guy unhooking them and throwing them in the hold — it's called a jack pole because they jack them in like that.

Tom Rowland: I've seen the videos — that looks like it'd be a great job for a college wrestler, somebody who really likes to lift weights. There's definitely a technique to it — you can see somebody who's really good at it, almost like a pole-vault pole, where they wait just a second and let the jack pole get slightly loaded, and when they come back it unloads and basically shoots the fish behind them over their shoulder. The guy next to them not using the same technique is trying to muscle them in, and they barely clear the rail. But the guy who's good at it, man, it's like a cartoon. And I always wondered — some of them look like they're just shaking what looks like a giant fly, since there's no bait on it. Is there feathers on it? Is there a technique to getting the hook out — do they use a barbless hook?

Tom Anderson: There's gotta be. I don't jack pole myself — I have one, because every year we say we're gonna jack pole some this year just for fun. Of course the danger of doing it on a 23- or 25-foot boat is you hook your buddy in the back of the head. There's a group called the Ilwaco Tuna Club — it's a really cool scene out in Ilwaco, at the mouth of the Columbia. The tuna scene here is pretty neat — there's a show called Battlefish that's about the commercial tuna fishery out of Ilwaco, Washington, which is the nearest town to the Columbia Bar, where the Columbia River exits into the Pacific. It's a really cool little town with a long history of commercial fishing, and the US Coast Guard's extreme boat-piloting school is right there, because the Columbia Bar is one of the roughest ones in the world — there are some fun YouTube videos of the Coast Guard's self-righting pilot boats flipping on the bar, and the guys, tethered onto the boat, just hang on till it comes back upright.

Day-boat tuna and the story behind Battlefish

Tom Anderson: Battlefish is really about — they feature four or five commercial tuna boats, and all but one are your traditional big, old, steel, kind of gnarly commercial fishing boats that go out sometimes for up to a week, with refrigerated quick-freeze units below that can hold tons of fish. But a group of guys who were primarily sport fishermen started doing what they call day-boat tuna — they run a forty-foot Dorado converted with triple outboards, three three-hundreds on it, and go out just for the day. They fish tuna, come back in, have their own little processing house, and that night it gets delivered to restaurants throughout the Northwest, and they also pack, can, and dry fish to sell at local markets. The show focuses on the drastic difference between these guys doing the day-boat program and the traditional commercial fishermen, who shunned them quite a bit at first — "there's rich guys in this fancy speedboat." But what they're doing is pretty cool, because it's raised awareness of our local food source, the albacore tuna — when you go to the grocery store, any canned tuna labeled white tuna is albacore, and most people, even in the Northwest, had no idea we have this incredible tuna fishery here. It's like a lot of other things in the food industry — there's a great movement with beef, pork, and chicken toward farm-to-table, buying from local producers, and a group called Trailfin Foods is specifically raising awareness of this local food source we have here in the Northwest.

Tom Rowland: Changing awareness and making people value it more — kind of like farmer's-market food from local farms versus commercially produced food. Does that make the price go up?

Tom Anderson: Naturally — it's like going to nice restaurants here in the Northwest, most of which serve seasonal, locally sourced food, and that's typically a little more expensive, but I think people see the value in that.

Tom Rowland: So these guys doing day-boat tuna — was the idea to beat the market, since the other boats go out for a week and bring in week-old fish, while these guys bring in fresher fish in one day? Or did they just not want to be out for a week?

Tom Anderson: It was the former. I think ultimately they hoped to make money doing it, because the world runs on money, but my understanding is they really wanted to do something different and make fresh seafood more available locally, to people who live where the food is caught — because most commercial catch probably goes to canneries and big processors.

Tom Rowland: And a boat like that, how many fish can they bring in?

Tom Anderson: Good question, I don't know exactly — I'd have to ask those guys. They actually run some Burnewiin mounts on that forty-foot Dorado, so I talk to them pretty regularly. They also have some long-line permits, so when the long-line season hits they put all their long-line hauling gear — big hydraulic gear — into their mounts, fish for black cod, and then pull that off and go do their tuna fishery.

Tom Rowland: That has to be a real testimony to the strength — that sounds like some heavy gear.

Tom Anderson: It is — you should see this stuff. The company in Astoria makes all this long-lining gear commercially. But their permits are based on total poundage, so their daily take isn't limited by the permit, it's limited by how much they can physically handle and how much they can responsibly ice — albacore has to go on ice immediately. For us, in our twenty-three-foot center console, my buddy and I fish that boat, and recreationally you can keep twenty-five tuna a day, but honestly all we can bring in and properly ice is about twenty-five fish, depending on size — and two guys bringing in twenty-five tuna, you've gotta figure out who to give it to so you can convince your wife to let you go again next weekend. When we have good seasons it varies — two or three years ago, all up and down the Oregon-Washington coast, everybody was catching nine-pound albacore on average, just all nine-pounders for some reason.

Tom Rowland: When something like that happens, do the scientists rush in? Who would you even go to, what agency would be in charge of figuring that out?

Tom Anderson: In the Northwest, like other places, it's complex — the tuna fishery is kind of an international issue.

Tom Rowland: Same on the other side of the country — I was talking to people up in Maine about the same thing, where Canada wants to do one thing and the US wants to do another, and they can't make a decision, so the fish just get pounded.

Tom Anderson: It's kind of the opposite here — typically they default to more conservation-minded regulations. Take salmon, for example — you've got Canada, you've got BC as a province, you've got Washington, you've got Oregon, you've got the Pacific Fisheries Commission, and then all the native tribes and the native council that represents all of them. When we fish up the west coast of Vancouver Island, which we'd normally do this time of year but couldn't this year, all the fish we catch up there are Columbia River-run salmon, but you're fishing under Canadian regulations. So you've got all these different agencies and states, plus the sport-fishing concerns and the commercial fishing concerns and gillnetters — there's still a gillnet commercial season on the Columbia River. The tribes have tribal fishing rights up and down the Columbia. Just last week they closed steelhead on the Columbia, but the last couple days all of a sudden all the native gillnets were out up and down the river, and once that happens your numbers just drop dramatically. We're fishing about a hundred and some miles upriver from the ocean, but those fish, the upriver brights, are going all the way up into Idaho and who-knows-where — really, they're the tribes' fish, so should they have a say in how we fish here? Arguably they probably should. It's a very complex equation.

Tom Rowland: It sounds like it. The native fishing with the gillnets — are they doing that commercially, or for their own use?

Tom Anderson: Both. There's the historical, subsistence-fishing argument for that season, but most of the ones I know do it commercially too — there are fish-processing houses up and down the Columbia they sell to, and you can go buy fish there and they'll sell it commercially. There's a fish-processing house just three doors down from us here on the Columbia.

Dams, salmon, and the Columbia's complicated politics

Tom Rowland: With so many politics involved — the dams, the different types of fishing like the gillnets, plus international politics, state politics — as someone who lives out there, do you think the future is bright for the salmon? Is it hard to understand what's going on, or what's the status?

Tom Anderson: I don't think it's dismal, but "bright" — what does bright even mean? Bright for the guy who wants to catch two fish for his family? I do know that if you really study it, it's a difficult equation that I don't know mankind will ever really balance out, because we've created a river now — it used to be this world-class, incredibly huge, high-water-flow river with rapids and everything, and now it's a slow-moving river that's, on average, much warmer than it would be naturally, and some of these fish have to get a thousand miles up into their tributaries. So you've got people calling for the removal of all the dams, which, if you think about it, would probably be good for the fish, but I don't know that it's practical — there are so many potential downsides. And then there are other political forces, like the resident herd of orca whales that live in Puget Sound around the San Juan Islands — there are tour boats that go watch them, they've all got names, and there's data showing they're in decline, the theory being they're short of food, since they eat salmon primarily. So people in favor of the orcas, way up in Puget Sound, are calling for removal of dams way up the Columbia, because those are typically the fish the orcas eat. It's so complex that I don't know if anybody's truly objective about it. I always try to back up and look at the bigger picture, forget the details a little — I think it's unreasonable to think we can satisfy every need out there, so you have to decide which interests you're willing to not fully satisfy. There are people who'd argue that all we've gotta do is do whatever's right for the salmon and adapt to that, but then the question is, how do you determine what that is?

Tom Rowland: Is it even realistic to think you could get rid of the dams? Some might be good candidates, but others would be very difficult given the cities and towns built up around them.

Tom Anderson: I think logistically it would be tough. The Bonneville Dam was one of the first ones here, between Portland and us — that's the last dam on the Columbia, built in the thirties, not too long after the Hoover Dam. The Dalles Dam, the next dam upriver from us, about twenty miles, was built in the sixties, and it flooded a lot of native sacred ground — Celilo Falls was this incredible falls system on the Columbia, and that whole village got buried by the water. If we just built that dam in the sixties, we could probably figure out how to take it out. But the impacts — I don't know what they'd be. Commercially there's incredible barge traffic transporting things up and down the river. I suppose all the towns that remain would be well above high water now, and there's a lot of ports, and our local timber company here is huge, family-owned, with big facilities right on the river that float log rafts down to the pulp mill. So logistically I think it's challenging. There have been a number of dams removed on the tributaries — just downriver from us, on the White Salmon River, which comes off Mount Adams, about eight or nine years ago they removed the Condit Dam, which was in this incredible canyon. It was quite spectacular — you can find the video on YouTube — they excavated below it, tunneled a big channel, maybe ten feet in diameter, in the bottom until the walls were thin enough, then blasted it, and within about five hours it drained the whole reservoir that had been formed in the thirties.

Tom Rowland: Did it take the dam out as the water started flowing underneath it, or did it just continue flowing under?

Tom Anderson: They then took the dam out. They left the powerhouse downriver, since it's on the National Historic Register, but it doesn't disrupt the flow of the river. It was a pretty spectacular project.

Tom Rowland: And that was about eight years ago — fast forward to today, what does that look like?

Tom Anderson: The river now free-flows from the mountain all the way to the mouth, so rafting companies now raft the whole river, all the way to that canyon, where before it was just a lake. I know a lot of guys who go up there now and steelhead fish above where the dam was — there's steelhead running up there now. Whether they're breeding up there, I don't know, but there's evidence of a return of salmon runs up that river. What happened, really, was that FERC — the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — issues permits for dams, and Pacific Power owned that dam built in the thirties. They had a ninety-nine-year lease, and when it came up for renewal, because of pressure from environmentalists, FERC put a bunch of new regulations on it — if they wanted to keep the dam and get re-permitted, they'd have to put a fish ladder around it. The cost of doing that, in that kind of slot canyon, was incredibly high, and the amount of power they got out of it probably wasn't very significant, so it really came down to a financial decision to remove it instead.

Tom Rowland: That's where the most effective decisions usually come down to. When we look at the water issues in Florida, if a good decision for the environment can also be a good decision for the wallet, it's a lot easier to push it through. That's what the guys from Captains for Clean Water have done a really good job of — every time there's an issue, they don't just bring in fishermen, they bring in restaurant owners, real estate agents, everybody who lives or dies by the health of the water, whether they know it or not, and explain it: if the beaches are ugly and dirty, nobody's coming, and if nobody comes, the house you're trying to sell is worth half of what it was worth. Sometimes that's what it takes to get people to understand what's going on. It sounds like the same kind of thing out there. Do the fish ladders work?

Tom Anderson: Yeah, it's pretty cool — anytime anybody visits, I take them over to the Bonneville Dam, and you can go down inside the spillway where they've set it up like a theater, with the whole wall glass, and you watch the salmon swim by, going up the fish ladders through a series of chicanes. And they've got a room where you can go online anytime and look up what they call the seven-day fish counts — it lists every dam up the Columbia, all the species, and how many went through that day, and you can look at the history. That's what we use as fishermen to gauge the fish runs.

Tom Rowland: Is that automated, or is someone sitting there counting the fish?

Tom Anderson: No, there's people who sit there — it's like an aircraft control center. They sit in a room with windows the fish have to swim by, and they're really educated on identifying the fish by shape, and they just tick them off. Right now we've got the American shad run going, which is non-native, and just last week we were up to 500,000 shad a day coming through the Bonneville Dam.

Tom Rowland: How big do your shad get?

Tom Anderson: We go fish for them this time of year, some just for fun, but mostly we use them for sturgeon bait and crab bait — they're really the largest herring species. You can bank-fish for them below the dams with a little tiny shad dart, pitch out with a piece of pencil lead and drift-fish just like drift-fishing for salmon or steelhead, and catch fifty or sixty in an hour and a half. They're typically three to six pounds.

Tom Rowland: We have shad on the East Coast too, and they can be really good fighters — they jump like a little tarpon, and you can catch a ton of them. That was my introduction to a "trash fish" as a kid. I went fishing with my grandfather, who was all about largemouth bass — he thought largemouth bass was everything, and wanted to be a professional bass fisherman even though he wasn't all that good. He was a jeweler by trade, and honestly did better staying in the jewelry business. Anyway, I caught this awesome fish — best fish we caught all day, it jumped, it ran, my drag had never pulled like that — and he's like, "Ah, it's an old shad, throw it up on the bank." And I was like, why? This thing's the coolest fish ever. Now I understand it's non-native and all that, but that was my introduction to trash fish — jack crevalle, barracuda, sharks, all kinds of fish people call trash fish. But man, they're daymakers more often than not. You don't catch a bunch of bonefish every day, but you can stop by the jack crevalle spot and catch five or six, and somebody goes home super happy. Same with a nurse shark — most people who come to the Keys have never even seen a shark before, and you can either play it up — "cool, look at that, eight feet long, that's a huge shark" — or downplay it, "eh, just a nurse shark." That reaction is the difference between somebody feeling like they caught something amazing or feeling almost embarrassed about it.

Tom Anderson: It's interesting — I think that's where guides, and I've had experience with guides down in the Keys of all different sorts, it's important they gauge their customer's experience and interest. Oftentimes they might be taking somebody out who really just wants to be on the water and catch some fish, so in that case they should say, "Wow, that's really awesome, was that fun?" — "Yes, it was." Throw him back because he's no good eating, but take some pictures.

Tom Rowland: Like, the customer's always right — if they're happy and having a good time, awesome. But a lot of people don't want to go back to the dock and say they caught three nurse sharks and not look so good.

Tom Anderson: And nobody in the Keys wants to be known as the nurse-shark guide.

Tom Rowland: But if you've got a small family and you got a five-hundred-dollar tip because you caught three nurse sharks and made it sound pretty cool, it's all about your priorities.

The Everglades and Captains for Clean Water

Tom Anderson: Speaking of Captains for Clean Water — I recently watched a show about the whole Everglades system. I know that's its own whole subject, but I'm fascinated by it. I spent a bit of time in Southwest Florida, and years ago I used to spend two weeks every winter in the Keys, camping at Bahia Honda back in the eighties, fishing and diving. I was always fascinated by the Everglades, but I never realized how big an issue it really is. In this show, there's an issue with the natural flow of fresh water south into the Everglades, spilling out into the saltwater — that's something I'm interested in learning more about.

Tom Rowland: The Captains for Clean Water guys really helped me fully understand the situation — or at least understand it a lot better. If you're a guide or an angler who lives at the mouth of the Caloosahatchee River, on the west coast of Florida, or on the other coast, Okeechobee is sending water out both sides of the state. If you live there and never go to the Everglades, the problem with Okeechobee is that effluent, fertilizer, and all kinds of stuff is exiting out, getting pushed out the Caloosahatchee and out the other side, creating algae blooms and all kinds of problems — way too much fresh water that was never designed to flow that way, plus other things that create algae blooms and accentuate red tide. If you live in those areas, that's the problem you see. But if you live in the Florida Keys, those problems aren't really part of your daily world — occasionally you'll get an algae bloom moving south. The big problem for people who like to fish the Flamingo area and the Keys is that Okeechobee used to be called the River of Grass — a laminar flow, very shallow, that flowed across almost the entire state south, water bubbling up and channeling through, moving into the Everglades area, down through Flamingo and the Cape Sable area. That area should get a constant flow of fresh water, but because of roads, dikes, dams, and other projects, that water has stopped flowing south, almost completely. So it's like a saltwater aquarium — if you put saltwater in and everything's beautiful, your tropical fish swimming around, and you let it go for a month or two, evaporation happens, and the water gets saltier and saltier as the freshwater evaporates out, until the coral dies, until the fish die, until everything dies. So there are really two problems with the Everglades: one, when it rains too much they have to send water out the sides; two, at the same time, water isn't flowing south the way it's supposed to — a disruption of flow, and an increased flow going out both sides. And to my friends at Captains for Clean Water, I hope I've explained that correctly — it is kind of a weird situation for people who are very close to it, and you'd think everybody associated with fishing would understand the problem in the Everglades, but that's not necessarily true, because the problem people focus on is the one they can see: what's making your beach dirty, why are dead fish washing up. And they don't realize that yes, there's too much freshwater here, but there's no freshwater there, and it's creating incredible salinity that's killing the turtle grass and killing fish going south. So you have to do a couple of things — create retention ponds where they can settle the water and send it south more gradually, and they've already been removing bridges and dams to get more water moving south. So there is progress. One of the best things, for my understanding, is that the Captains for Clean Water guys were the first to explain that there is a solution — and not only is there a solution, it's already been decided on, there's a plan, it's already out there, and all we have to do is implement it. To implement it, people need to understand what the problems are, understand there's a solution, and ask their representatives to fight for it — water is important, and we want the Everglades to be better than it's ever been. When I talk to those guys, I can see there's a path where the Everglades, in our lifetime, could be better than it's ever been, and we could leave it better for our grandchildren than we ever saw it. There's plenty of water — it falls out of the sky every day. Where does it go, how is it channeled, does it have fertilizer and other things in it — that's kind of the issue. But it is relieving to understand that a lot of smart people have spent their entire lives creating this plan, and it can be done.

Tom Anderson: It comes back to the money thing you mentioned, though — somehow you've gotta figure out how to pay for it.

Tom Rowland: Exactly. Well, the money's supposed to be there — we'll see if it's there when it comes time to actually do it.

Tom Anderson: I think we should go see that stuff you were talking about from the Keys next time I'm down there.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, that's easy — we go straight north out of Hawk's Cay, or you can run straight across to Flamingo from Islamorada. I used to even run over there from Key West, but that's too far — we'll do it from Marathon or Hawk's Cay, it's not a bad run at all. I'd love to show you that. The Everglades is a beautiful spot, and given a chance — probably just like your river out there, where they took the dam away and now people are up there fishing, and probably the deer and other land animals are coming back, and the vegetation's coming back after eight years — all you gotta do is give it a chance. Same thing with the Everglades — if you get fresh water in there and let nature do its thing, you won't believe how fast it comes back. That's my opinion anyway.

Tom Anderson: I agree. In some ways we see evidence of that out here — I always say if we just gave up tomorrow trying to manage everything, mother nature would reclaim it pretty quickly, in her own time frame. We humans always think in terms of our own lifespan — say we live eighty years — that seems like a lifetime, but it's just a blip in time. You go hiking around here and find old highways that cut through the gorge or up in the mountains that we abandoned and stopped maintaining twenty years ago, and they're just decimated, overgrown, the concrete broken up. In mother-nature time, that's just a blip.

Tom Rowland: It's a complete blip in time. And all of that is gonna be something to look back on a year from now — 2020 has been a really strange year, a strange year for outdoor recreation, with national parks closed in a lot of places and substantially less boat traffic. So what does that mean this time next year? Are we gonna see a giant boom in some fisheries? I wouldn't doubt it — there have been places with virtually no fishing pressure for the first time in forty or fifty years, and it's at a time when the fishing's usually really good anyway. I think that's gonna be interesting. When this thing first started, I was talking to my friend Robert Trasset, and he said this whole thing is just like a reset for mother nature — you take the pressure off and see what happens.

Tom Anderson: Interesting perspective — I don't totally disagree with that either.

Tom Rowland: Have you seen the pressure on the salmon fishing change during the COVID lockdown, with people not able to go, or marinas closed?

Tom Anderson: There was actually quite a bit of that. We keep our boat over on the coast, and we still have it back here right now refitting some electronics. During the first part of the halibut season, Oregon wasn't letting nonresidents fish in Oregon — we live right on the border, so I fish both states — and most of the marinas on the coast had their boat ramps completely closed, with concrete barriers blocking them off. What happened was, right after Washington and Oregon put statewide shutdown mandates on, that next weekend all these little coastal towns got absolutely flooded with people. All the coastal towns here on the Pacific are real small towns, essentially villages, and they got inundated, so the mentality was, well, if we can't go anywhere, why should all these people come flood our town — and I totally got it. All of a sudden Highway 101 to these little coastal towns was bumper to bumper. So in some ways that was a bummer for us, trying to get our boat back out to its slip, but for the most part I think people have been responsible about it. We find when we go fish, we hop on the boat early morning, fish all day, come home tired, and hang out with the same guys we fish with. We'll see how it plays out later this summer — we're kind of itching, because tuna are on their way, within a month now of our season.

Tom Rowland: The fish are gonna be out there, and if there's less pressure, I think it's gonna be pretty good — if you relieve the pressure, the fish are gonna respond.

Smallmouth bass on the John Day and Deschutes

Tom Rowland: Anyway, man, I enjoyed it, Tom, this has been great. How would people find your company, your products, follow you on social media?

Tom Anderson: It's pretty easy — our company name is Burnewiin, which is a strange one to pronounce and spell: b-u-r-n, just like "burn," then "ewiin" — burnewiin.com, and the same name on Instagram and Facebook. We don't do a ton of social media, but we try to do some pretty nice Instagram stuff, making people aware of the range of boats and applications we work with. We're pretty new down in the Southeast, really brand new — working with you and Rich and discovering some of the advantages for particular fishing applications down there has been great for us, and we like to work as much as we can down there to make people aware of the broad range of applications we offer, not just for fishing. Personally, I'm on a bit of a mission to get my cousin in Naples, or on Marco Island, to get his flats boat going — we're gonna experiment with some products on some flats-boat setups, too. So if any of your listeners have a flats boat they want to experiment with, we'd love to partner up and see what we can do.

Tom Rowland: One of the best things I've seen is the way you can mount a fillet table — usually the fillet tables that go on a rod holder aren't the most rigid piece of equipment, and you never want to be cutting on your really expensive boat. That's a good one.

Tom Anderson: That's a good application. For certain fisheries, we bait-fish a lot for salmon here, and it's great to have a bait-prep station — we'll run one on the transom, a rigging station with a couple of our mounts in the upper corners, so you can get a couple of flat lines out the back and over your outboards, and articulate them well for trolling, but also just for bait prep. Honestly, a lot of people who use them aren't strict fishing boats — they'll have cocktails spread out on it, or a barbecue up in the upper corner, and our knives all integrate with our mounts too. It's a pretty slick setup. We sell primarily through boat dealers — we don't have a broad dealership network in Florida yet, we're working with a couple of key new dealers down there. I'll be down setting up a Grady-White Fisherman later this summer for one of our dealers, and of course you and Rich have experienced it on your twenty-six-foot Yellowfin. We're really keen on customer service — we love talking to customers, though everybody hates it because when I get with a customer I end up talking forever about fishing and boats, since I like learning from them. So don't hesitate to contact us — you'll probably get to me. And you should definitely get out here, since you've got some history in Montana — depending on the season we can fish tuna, Dungeness crab, oversized sturgeon, right out in front of our warehouse here.

Tom Rowland: What's an oversized sturgeon, what's the slot?

Tom Anderson: Oversized means they're above the slot limit, which is thirty-eight to fifty-two inches.

Tom Rowland: I wouldn't want to keep one, but I would love, one day, to catch one of those really big sturgeon — that would be awesome.

Tom Anderson: We anchor up in about 125 feet of water and send a whole shad to the bottom on a 48-ounce lead on a slider, sit and wait for a hookup, and when they hook up we drop the anchor — we use anchor balls so you can release the anchor off the boat and drift with the fish. It's not uncommon at all, right out in front of our warehouse, to catch ten-to-eleven-footers.

Tom Rowland: Really? Would a good day be hooking one, or do you hook multiples?

Tom Anderson: Multiples. A good day this time of year is one of the best times for it, because the shad are running and the sturgeon love that food source — we'll typically go out in the morning, and it's nice because it's between our prime salmon season, so there's not a lot else going on other than smallmouth bass, which is really fun here.

Tom Rowland: Oh yeah, I love smallmouth. Is that the John Day River?

Tom Anderson: The John Day is just up north — it's an incredible smallmouth fishery, maybe even a better one. Anyways, the sturgeon — we run out of the marina, anchor up, and sit there anchored, and last summer, the first day we did it, my father-in-law and I brought seven fish over seven feet long to the boat in the first two hours. And you can get skunked too — it's fishing. A bad day is you get skunked, a typical day you might get one to three, a good day you get tired — it's a fight. I've got video of that day — these things are ten and a half feet, we measured one. You can't get them in the boat, you're not supposed to anyway, but this thing comes completely out of the water — you're watching your line, it's bent down like this, and all of a sudden the line starts doing this, and you know it's gonna jump, and however far out there is, that ten-and-a-half-foot fish comes completely out of the water.

Tom Rowland: That's super cool — they've got that weird mouth too.

Tom Anderson: They do. So the bass fishery, real quick — smallmouth bass are non-native here, considered invasive, so there's really no limit or season, you can fish them during the spawn. We fish the main stem of the Columbia a lot when there's nothing else going on, just a calm day fishing the shores, and it's really an incredible fishery — there are bass tournaments now all up and down the river. But the John Day is really neat — it flows through the high mountain desert east of here, on the Oregon side, and you can boat up the mouth of it from the Columbia quite a ways in a power boat, up to the narrows where there are falls. That's a really good bass fishery, but the really neat thing there, for a guy like you who likes the Montana scene, is drift-boat or, more commonly, raft-fishing the upper stretches of the Deschutes — buddies of mine do three-day floats down the Deschutes fly fishing for smallmouth.

Tom Rowland: Now where is that part of the Deschutes? I know the Deschutes is also a good trout river — is it the same area where you're fishing trout, steelhead, and smallmouth?

Tom Anderson: Yep. The Deschutes River is about forty miles east of here, on the Oregon side, and it flows through Bend, which is a pretty popular mountain/desert town. About another fifteen to twenty miles east of that is the John Day River, which comes out of the eastern Oregon wheat fields and canyons — pretty different rivers. The Deschutes is quite a bit bigger, and the John Day, from this time of year on, is a super skinny float, which is why it's mostly rafts, not drift boats. The John Day is a little more known for smallmouth fishing, and the Deschutes is probably more your premier trout and steelhead fishery.

Tom Rowland: That sounds terrific — I'd love to see that. I've never fished for smallmouth out that way, and I grew up fishing for smallmouth.

Tom Anderson: It's a blast. Everybody's so focused on salmon here — I've been here twenty-six years and never smallmouth fished until just a few years ago. It's a great one to take kids out on.

Tom Rowland: Because you catch a lot of them?

Tom Anderson: Absolutely — although you don't always catch a lot of smallmouth everywhere. I know some places, like the Boundary Waters in Canada, where it's every single cast. Where I grew up it was harder, because they were mixed in with largemouth and other fish, so you certainly didn't catch them every cast — though there are other places, like the interior of Idaho, where it can be really good. I grew up in Wisconsin and spent a lot of time in the Boundary Waters. In my young days I spent a lot of my fishing time on Lake Michigan, salmon fishing — when I was a kid the Chinook fishery was so good you always got your limit and were in by mid-morning. But what we were really excited about as kids was getting off the salmon boat and getting right out in our own little aluminum boat in the bays around Washington Island, smallmouth fishing all afternoon.

Tom Rowland: That's funny, that's the way a kid thinks. I was just talking to Kevin Scott Brown about his kid down in the Keys — his son is a great little fisherman for being four years old, and he's caught a handful of bonefish, but he could care less. All he wants to do is catch snappers, because it's like every other cast, and he doesn't care if the thing has teeth or looks cool — he wants the fish that bites every cast. It's funny how kids think, and then as you get older you realize, you know what, that actually is the most fun.

Tom Anderson: It is fun. We take kids out once in a while, and it's a two-hour run out, a long grind on the troll locating schools, and inevitably even the avid fisherman kids are like, can we go in and bottom fish for a while — and in a way, it's way more fun.

Tom Rowland: Yeah — well, I've made a lot of people happy with what we call trash fish over the years. I won't call any of them trash, really — I think anything that bends the rod is pretty awesome. But anyway, alright, Tom, well, thanks, man, I appreciate it, and we'll have to make some of these plans come true — I'd love to do some smallmouth or sturgeon fishing, both of those, that'd be really cool. So I'll let you know when I'm headed to Montana, and if I don't get eaten by a grizzly bear, I'll head over.

Tom Anderson: Sounds good — and then I'll probably see you soon in the Keys.

Tom Rowland: Alright, sounds good. Alright, Tom — that's Tom with Burnewiin, and we'll see you guys next week. Alright, see you.

Tom Anderson: Thanks a lot, Tom.