 Freshly organized and ready to dangle. Happy New Year and welcome on back to the channel, Fishing Freaks. Today we're taking out the Silver Bullet. We're gonna be doing some winter time ledge fishing. We're gonna have a catch and cook and we're gonna see if this new filet knife that I got is worth the money. So welcome on back. Let's hit the water and get it going. There are our victims. There they are right there, y'all. I gotta get that little one down there. Kind of passing through. They're on the move. That's what I love about this spinning rig. You just quickly get that baby down there. You know when it's at the bottom. Since this is winter time, I'm gonna go a little bit slower than I normally do. Slow lifts, just got hit. In the winter when the water's cold, like in the 40s, 49 right now, I like to give pauses on my spoons. I just got hit again. When it's really cold there, he hit it all while it was just sitting there. Oh, it came off. Their mouths are all so harder. So you wanna use sharp hooks in the water. Who's gonna be the first fish to be caught? 2021. What a nice juicy one, please. Mine need to switch colors because they're bumping it, not really eating it good. Oh my, the graph. It is exploding. We're switching up to gold here. Oh, yeah, come on now. Don't just, yeah, eat it. Oh, man, they're just being little finuglers. That's a new word I haven't even used. I'm gonna go with classical spoon, just to make sure we're not missing the program. Oh gosh, connected on the spoon. First dropper roo in the 2021. Fish is not a big one. Wow. Look, that's the size down there. I don't wanna have that. I want those big winter monsters. There's like one down there. He was even tapping it. There he is. Wow, bam. They want that just do nothing for his entache. Oh yeah, the old cold fighter, about 28. Pretty deep. I'm looking for them on these ledges out here. So, I mean, that's where the shad are. So what's going on, little man? Yeah, I just like to take my spoon, get it down there at the bottom, and they're pretty much glued to the bottom right now. Yeah, you too. Got them. Got them on that blade. Solid one. Oh, a large. Yes, sir. Oh my gosh, no way. I'm caught on my other spoon. No, I get them all. Okay. There we go, large mouth. And that is why I love the blade bait. Ladies and gentlemen, hey, fun times. Look at that deep, cold bass. Pale, got red lips. Cold one. I would say one of my favorite winter techniques, besides throwing jerk baits, like deep clear water, is to get out on those ledges. And you can do this like a visual ledge that you can see throw up towards the bank and work it out like a stair step. Just like that. That's a white bass. He's kicking to work it down that ledge. Or you can do it, do how I'm doing it right now. Just kind of band casting out on a flat that's off a ledge. That one got it on the move. Baddie, and then I got kind of a regular one. Looks like we got, oh yeah, we got some white bass running beneath us right now. So I'm just going to drop down here. Really having to pay attention to the electronics. Got him. On the little, little guy. It's a keeper, but I'm going to throw him back. Basically just keeping hogs. Hogs only here. Looks like that school is already moving on. Give it one more drop, see if I can snag one, and then I'm going to fan cast again. There's one. Might have snagged him. Felt a nibble on him, pulled up, got him in the chin. Oh, that's a big one. That is a big white bass. That's the kind of one we want right there. Mega eaters. Yeah, gosh, he's so big. He almost looks like a hybrid. Nope, got him right in the mouth. Woo! That is a couple of golden crisps right there. Looks like that school's gone. Fan cast again. What are we dealing with? Big old white bass. Well, he's skinny. Skinny, throwing him back, fatties only. Right there under the boat. Feel some head shakes. What do we have? That is going to be the old white bass. And a dandy. That's the old Eater McGee. Nice little new year day we got going here, folks. Fun times, as in me would say. I'm thinking we got enough to make a couple of fish sandwiches, y'all. Good way to start off the new year. Kind of a slow bite, typical winter deal, you know? They were feeding a little bit. And we got a little boat that's large now. It's been a while since I put some grease in the bottom and I always enjoy white bass in the winter when their meat is just more, I don't know, just tastes better. Tastes better than like a summer one, you know? Gonna get a little stanky. The dangle and woodcraft cave where a man can be a man. Kind of like that slogan. That slogan? Slogan, slogan, mix the two up. I probably spend like 30 minutes to an hour when I'm home at night. I just sit in here, I organize tackle. I do a lot of, I love knives, as many of you know. One of these days I'm gonna do some knife videos, but I do a lot of my sharpening. And just outdoor tool organization and stuff like that. Recently just built a new section onto my tool area over the Christmas, New Year holiday, little section to hold my drill and driver sets and just extra tools and stuff like that. Built myself a couple of Quivers, full D-rings on them just to hang on the trees outside when I'm shooting arrows and just organizing arrows in here because I literally just had them scattered throughout my tackle. What we came in here to discuss is this. Now normally if I only have four fish like I have today, I'm gonna take one of my fixed blades, like this baby right here, just a nice little fixed blade, the filet knife. I like the feel, but I'm not doing a whole lot of fish. When you got a bunch of them and you just gotta eat down to business, you don't have a lot of time, you gotta go with electric, you know, 20, 25 fish. You get 15 crappie, it gets a little old when you're trying to get to other things throughout the day, you know, it takes a long time. So typically what I've used is the standard Rapala filet knife. I think a lot of people have the electric one. Bubba blade, I've seen them, they make some pretty good fixed blade products. I've used some of them before, but I saw that they came out with a electric filet knife and they have a cordless model, which is what I have right here. And I said, I gotta give that sucker a shot. This setup that I have right here with the two rechargeable lithium-ion batteries and the full blade set with the case and everything was like, I wanna say 125 bucks, it might've been a little bit more, but got it off Amazon. Just for comparison, I think I paid the same thing, maybe even a little bit more for this custom filet knife right here with I think that CPM 154 steel. So, you know, a nice little custom filet knife, of course it means more to me, obviously. And this is an air loom that I can pass down and everything like that. I love knives, so I'm willing to spend that much money, but this is normally, I mean, this is a lot for an electric filet knife. So, hopefully it's just worth the coin. Certainly feels good. The quality feels really good. I like that rubber grip and everything, but let's put it to the test. A nine inch flex, a nine inch stiff, a 12 inch stiff, just sounds weird saying that on camera. The stiff have a thicker blade. We'll do the nine inch flex. Looks sharp, looks like it's coated in some sort of non-stick material. She's ready to roll. No cords. You can see the flex on this one's really good. So, we'll see how this one does on some Mondo white bass. Going to make them golden grispies. So, they've been on ice overnight. I think I am gonna play around with the different blade types, just to kind of see here. The only thing we're not gonna be able to check is the longevity, because we only have four slides through. Nice. This is where the flex comes in handy. Oh, wow. Okay, we went right through the spot. Sharp, sharp, sharp. Tell them a mistake, redirect that. I don't know if I really like the flex for this. I mean, it is really flexible. Came out pretty good. Not a whole lot wasted, besides my boo-boo. All right, let's try not to boo-boo this side here. Okay, this one, definitely not my best work. It's just staying on. Yeah, that's dangerous. Hang on, the tank is going on here. Little buddy, it's just going off right now. Oh, there, it's not in a locked position. Okay, well, bubba, we may have an issue here. Not safe, there's a lock button right here. And when you lock that, that holds it in place. But what's happening is it's just locked in on its own. I don't know how to get that out of there. It's just going. Well, while this thing is in such a cutting mood, I'm going to go ahead and put the nine inch stiff end, which still has quite a bit of flex. And we're going to see how that goes. Cut the rip cage out with a standard knife. Standard fixed blade will never let you down. It might be a little slower, but it'll never let you down. I cut through this one too. Totally butchering these things. Wow, I'm not enjoying this, to be honest with you. That's the worst job I've ever done on a white bass ever. I mangled it. Okay, I'm going to set this one to the side for a second. I'm going to have to use my standard blade on all this. Try this one more time. This is a big one right here. Good blade, female, you can see the row inside of there. Take the battery off. I'm going to unscrew this thing and figure out what the problem is when I'm done with all this, but yeah. Right now, I'm just not impressed. Go give this row to the chickens. Okay, my little darlings. Got me, protein. All right, y'all. It is now time for my favorite part and that is eating the golden crispies and popping a little beverage midday. Check out that special koozie right there. I have no idea if these are still available, but pretty cool. You want to get yourself a little collector's edition. The squad faces. So here's what we got. I've got a, I believe this is a 12 inch cast iron. It might be a 10, I don't know, but it's just your standard cast iron with a white tail on the back of it. All right, that's why I chose it, you know? We're going to put that on the flame with the burner outside here on the old Camp Chef sidekick. And over here, I've got my fillets. I've patted them dry and I've also added just some all-purpose flour, a couple of scoops of that. And I have some wing dust, some Cosmos Q wing dust. I have lemon pepper and I have buffalo. I think I'm just going to go straight buffalo and flour. I'm feeling in a spicy mood today. So that's going to be our mix. Show you guys how to do that. This is simple, easy, just basic shore lunch style fish. The golden crispies that we all love. Add a few cups of oil. This is literally oil that I have used and reused. I got this out of my big tub. This oil is probably six months old and I just keep filtering it so you can actually reuse your oil. Kick that gas on, add a little heat. Got our flour here. We're going to add our wing dust. Obviously this is meant for wings but it's a real nice fine powder. You can use it for this too. Little bit goes a long way. Oh yeah. Yeah, it's spicy. Once I got used to that filet knife, I was able to get a couple of decent ones. First ones I definitely butchered. The thing is just a carving machine. So I'm going to go straight into the flour and then into the grease. I padded these dry by the way so there's no more water on them. So that flour is going to stick to them nice and good. Make sure we get them in there real coated. Just a good old thin layer. You can thicken it up, you can add milk, you can do egg, whatever you want to thicken up your flour coat, your coating. But I like mine pretty thin. You can test your oil temp. I like mine around 300, 350, 350 is optimum but you can use a little flour. Just old school test. If it starts sizzling and bubbling when that flour hits it, you know it's ready. So it is, now we're going in. Hey baby. There's just enough oil in here where I can tell when these things start to float and when they start to float, they're done. I've got a big industrial-sized fryer but when you only have a few fish this is much easier, much easier to clean up too. Now this is how I like to start out the new year, y'all. When they're golden, you're golden. Time for extraction. Lord have mercy, that's some gorgeous golden crispies. It's time to dine, y'all. Beautiful golden color on these. I think they turned out really nice. Let's see how that little buffalo wing dust turned out. I can taste it. Unfortunately, y'all, getting over this virus, I don't have my taste buds fully. They're like at 50% so I can't get the full, full indulgence here. I can't really smell a bass right now either which is unfortunate, but light flour so you get the full taste of the fish. You get a good texture. There's not a lot of extras, crust and crabs, healthier that way too. This formula satisfies every time. Catch a fish, let them sit on ice, cook them the next day. Awesome, man. Whew, man. What a way to start off the year. The flay knife, I'm gonna have to go to work on. I'm gonna take the screwdriver to it, open it up, see if I can fix that thing. I just, it needs some getting used to. It's like when you freshly sharpen your chainsaw teeth, y'all, you go out and it's like sawing through logs like crazy. I gotta get used to that feel but there's really no replacement in my opinion for a well-sharpened standard flay knife. You get more meat off the fish. You get a better feel. I'm gonna give the Bubba Blade another shot if it doesn't go into full autopilot. Thanks for tuning in today, guys. This is a nice little fishing warmup. I am definitely in the fishing mood now. Get prepped, get ready. And I'm ready to tackle all species in 2021. So stay tuned, subscribe to the channel so you don't miss the action this year. Go ahead and smash the like button, too. You know, just give it a good, hard thump. Just like that bass, gonna hit that jig this year and hopefully get one in. Double digit, baby! Hee-hee! See you guys in the next episode. We're working again.