Quest For Adventure - Two Men and Two Rivers

[Music] quest for adventure dedicated to people who love the outdoors brought to you by the new Ford Expedition the only way to get there Bass Pro Shops catalog tracker marine fish the finest [Music] you need you need some help on the shore of a river somewhere in the wilderness these two men reenact an age-old ritual that has forged a lifelong friendship you know what I always say when the moon's up like this and the stars are out now the campfire cooking the fish you know is that I'm hungry what I wish you could be down whether that fish it smells delicious two of America's most respected outdoorsmen sportsmen and conservationists Glenn Lau and flip palette have a common bond with their love of the woods the water and especially rivers where my friend flip palette the river that flows through his memory as a special place is wild and unexplored it's any River in America the lure of fish wildlife and adventure captured young flipped spirit and soul it's just funny how at least in my life there's always been a river of some kind it's funny because I really don't come from a place a part of the country where there are lots of rivers but still I grew up on a river and it's hard to think of the Everglades or the river of grass as a river but it is a river for me it always was a river and it always was the river that took me to different places in my younger hood that river led through the central Sweetwater part of the Everglades and float on down into Florida Bay which was where the Sweetwater meant the salt water and when the river of grass led me to that point in my life I discovered a whole new thing and it just led me from one facet of the Everglades to another until finally it sort of dumped me out in Florida Bay and which led me to the Florida Keys and that was the early influence in my life of a river and people don't think of it as a river but truly it is a river I remember early on in my wanderings there were a series of flood control canals and there were a remnant of an early project to drain the Everglades and make it for development and in the early days of those canals as with early canals and early lakes they were very prolific they were full baths and full of other native species so my early days were spent just wandering along those canals because it was easy to keep from getting lost at first and start getting used to the different plants and the different look and feel of everything very few people are hardy enough to pull the canoe off into the Everglades or walk or do what's required to see it but if you can get there it's a subtle world that's just busy all the time it's probably of all places on the planet that I've ever been it's probably the most wonderful part of the natural world fortunately the Everglades National Park Service maintains a series of what they call chickies which is an old Seminole dwelling and these chickies are dwellings that the Park Service was built all through the backcountry of the park so someone coming to the park who really wanted to get off the beaten track and do it safely and do it without having to exert themselves too much could make reservations at these different chickies and take a boat and visit these chickies and camp out in relative comfort and safety and still have a chance to be far enough off the beaten track and far enough back into the backcountry to really see the Everglades at the first opportunity flip went from a pioneer Explorer of the Everglades to become a professional fishing guide throughout the coastline of southern Florida his enthusiasm and hard work gained him the reputation of being one of the very best I had already spent a lifetime learning that country and so I didn't have to go out and figure out each day where I had to guide and what I had to do I found myself guiding men for a long period of time and then suddenly they would start bringing their sons and then they would get too old to come anymore and their sons would come and then bring their sons and I actually had three generations of customers and I knew their family lives and their problems and I would confide some of my problems in them and and it was a real special relationship that lasted all through that at 17 or 18 years that I guided and many of those people are still very close friends today fly fishing and fly casting his flips location and a vocation all rolled into one he is considered by many of his peers to be the very best although in his own modest way he would never admit to that if I do have a business it sits in the area of fly fishing I mean it's what I think of as my business and it's what I think of as my as my first love its fly fishing that has provided me with some of them the best friendships that I've ever had and it's fly fishing that's taken me to some of the most wonderful exotic locations in the world I don't think of myself as a great fly caster but I do feel like I have a pretty good handle on the dynamics of the sport and understand pretty clearly what it takes to perform casting and I think that's what makes me a good teacher of fly casting which is something that I do on a regular basis both privately and at a school in the Florida Keys called the saltwater fly fishing school right under that hand there all right and then what I'd like to see you do is let your back cast go this far back see how we're breaking your wrist here but look where your rod tip ends up now way behind you so that when you come forward to make your forward cast you're coming from way back there instead of up here like this now you're the single most important thing that a fly fisherman can bring to the game are casting skills I think his enjoyment of the sport is directly related to the casting skill that he or she possesses my advice to anyone entering the game would be first thing get your casting skills they'll enable you to perform better as an angler and they'll avoid hours and hours of frustration on your part your guides part and it'll just allow you to immediately begin to enjoy the sport as long as I have known flip he has never lost his love of exploring and discovering new areas to hunt and fish the river that now occupies much of his time is the st. John's as I grew older and moved from South Florida to an area beside the st. Johns River I had another River to learn and another river to allow to lead me to different things which it has done and then there have been some saltwater rivers in my recent life that I've been enchanted by and what's wonderful about them is that they came at a later part of my life at a time when I needed something new to explore something brand-new with my wife I've had a lot of fun exploring these new rivers and I've resisted the temptation to let anybody locally show me anything about the river which would deprive me of the of the fun of discovering for myself up there so she and I together have been bumbling our way around those river systems in the new area of the state where I'm living and so once again in my life rivers are coming into play around the next bend there's something there's no word for it there's no name for it there's no way that you or I could ever explain it around the next bend there's always something and you're always find yourself going further and further further away from the starting point in spite of the fact that you know how difficult it is going to be to get back to where you started but then there's another Bend and then there's another riffle and then there's some tall trees in the distance you can't see them because of the next three bends so you got three bends to make before you get to the tall trees but you have to see the tall trees why there's tall trees behind you you left tall trees I hope we never know the reason for that but it's in there I feel it I know it's there I recognize that it gets me into trouble all the time I love it the moment I met Glenn some twenty years ago I knew that I'd met a part of myself I knew instinctively in that moment of meeting that he and I were destined to share many campfires sunrises and wilderness paths as time passed we've shared all these things and much more I've come to learn that the single most important act in Glenn's repertoire is sharing I grew up on the Maumee River in in Ohio right at the mouth of where the balmy runs into Lake Erie and then as I got older I started realized these are the arteries of life here in the United States our rivers are where the blood flows through that keeps everything else going and if we don't take care of these places then we'll all gonna be lost childhood heroes form what we become without our really knowing it they guide in direct or paths to completely different sets of role models directed Glen's path in my own in directions that would intersect in 1970 and then continued along together throughout a lifetime I remember my heroes my heroes weren't baseball players or football players in fact I didn't even know the names of any of them but my heroes were people like Sam Oakley by larger Edie Cooney people who were the first people to take me hunting and fishing by the time I got through most of my grade school I made up my mind that that's what I wanted to do is be a fisherman and a hunter and in the process what I discovered was that you could do that and get paid for it and if there was a simple answer from that is to become a hunting and fishing guide to start with back in 1958 I won the king of Ohio fishing tournament it was to see who could catch in most fish in 12 weeks and I found out about it when it was six weeks over and I said I can win that and I did I caught 2,900 pounds of fish in a period of six weeks and that was the that really gave me the momentum and a lot of publicity to to start my guide service and I thought well while I'm at it and I'm in probably the best fishing spot in the world which was like Airy I'll guarantee that they catch fish or they don't have to pay and for 13 years I I guaranteed and I never once missed the payday I started scuba diving in 1956 and I utilized that to help me find places where we could catch fish and buy places I mean certain reefs there were a lot of wrecks in Lake area and so I got to the point where I knew if things really got chopped I could go to those places also in 1958 one when I started guiding I bought a camera and it was a Bolex camera and used Eastman Kodak film and I just went out and started photographing things and I found that winner when I put it together that by showing people what we did out on Lake Erie they got interested in it and so I started actually going on tour and showing people my films and it really started when I came to Florida in 1971 to do a documentary called penguin the big mouth documentary is after 25 years still considered by many to be the most significant film ever produced on the lifecycle of the largemouth bass Glenn spent two years creating big mouths and his commitment was inspired by his desire to share his work and knowledge with others and as I moved into filming documentaries and working on on big mouth I realized that what people were missing when you go out fishing all you're doing is looking at the surface of the water you really don't know what's underneath there people who are professionals they learn they see a log coming down they can visualize what's happening there but the average person does not know what's happening outside of what he sees the trees the brush the water what I want to do take them with me down below mainly because I want to share with people what I saw in the outdoor just watch Glenn when he gets near the Rainbow River watch his eyes if you could see through those eyes you would see a rainbow river that few others could even imagine Glenn can feel the rainbows pulse and since it's every mood there's not a nook or cranny along its twisting path that hasn't seen Glenn's tract the Rainbow River is special because it creates it an environment that is so outstanding for fish and yet it's maybe the only place where you can see what happens underwater in that kind of environment because of clarity or it encompasses more of the natural habitat that a fisherman runs into it's called a river but there's Eddie's and places that you go back and little clothes and that that are just like a cold in a lake and just like the natural environment that a fisherman would run into in any way except it's clear it's just a wonderful place to be I would invite anybody to come to the rainbow and see for themselves what's their start with the minute you see that crystal-clear water just it's beyond what you could ever imagine a river to look like what you will see as you travel either up or down the river is an abundance of fish everything from grim and shale crackers largemouth bass but what will probably impress people the most is the overall feeling of the river the culmination of the wildlife and fish clear water that water temperature that comes out of the ground at the head of the spring is 72 degrees and it stays 72 almost all the way down to the Withlacoochee River it's just one of those very unique places that has a little bit of everything and when you're there it pulls you in and you feel like something out of the past especially in the wintertime I love it in the wintertime when that the heat of the water creates a cloud almost like a smoke coming off the water in the morning it's hard to explain to anybody and then feeling I have the passion I have for this river but it's it's just a good clean wonderful feeling about being there having the opportunity to be there and sometimes nobody on the river if it's all in the course of this series quest for adventure I think the television audience is going to learn that it has a remarkable treasure out there that they've not known about and not taken advantage of and that exists in the form of public lands and I think that that what our plan is going to be is to spend as much time as we can on public lands in order to show people the treasure that they have out there to take advantage of there are literally millions upon millions of square miles that belong to all of us that are never used parts of it are really inaccessible and I think that one of the things that I'm looking forward to sharing with people is how much fun it can be just as an activity on its own to get to those places places where there are no footprints places that are absolutely pristine and exists there just as a lure to get us there and for no other reason you need any help I'm getting a look at my dog's got it yep this is Glenn Lau be sure and join us on quest for adventure each Sunday at 6 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on TNN quest for adventure has been brought to you by Ford f-series the best-selling trucks are built Ford Tough Bass Pro Shops catalog Columbia Sportswear company tracker marine fish the finest Panasonic just slightly ahead of our time Realtree America's most versatile camo pattern [Music] for additional information contact our website at wwlp.com

Channel: Flip Pallot Outdoors

Views: 4,426

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Flip Pallot, Glen Lau, Quest for Adventure, Everglades, St.Johns River, Saltwater fishing, Freshwater Fishing, Bass Fishing

Id: xLtiOHxHekg

Length: 21min 36sec (1296 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 26 2019