Tony Dean Passes the Torch to Jason Mitchell
Brad Dokken Grand Forks
Herald
Published Sunday, May 25, 2008
Tony Dean retires
from the TV business
One of the pioneers in outdoors television is passing the torch.
Tony Dean, longtime host of “Tony Dean Outdoors,” has sold the rights
of his popular program to Devils Lake fishing personality Jason Mitchell.
Dean, 67, is helping Mitchell through the transition, co-hosting new
programs that will air beginning in December and teaching the new
host some of the ropes of the trade.
The new show will be called “Jason Mitchell Outdoors.”
Tony Dean, who launched the “Tony Dean Outdoors” TV program in 1985,
is retiring from television but will remain involved in outdoors and
conservation issues.
“Tony has really set the standard for outdoor TV throughout the years,
and he’s been very influential,” Mitchell, 33, said. “I want to continue
the legacy he created.”
In a telephone interview from Jackson Hole, Wyo., where he was attending
a conference, Dean, of Pierre, S.D., said he’d been thinking about
passing the TV show on to someone else for awhile but wanted to find
the right person.
According to Dean, Mitchell was a logical choice. He’s not only a
savvy communicator, Dean said, but Mitchell also knows sales, having
established a successful guiding business and marketing a line of
fishing rods.
“You’ve got to be a salesman, and if you can’t sell advertisers, you
can have the greatest show in the world, and it’s not going to get
on the air,” Dean said. “Jason has proved he’s very good at sales
and likes it, and he’s very good at it. I think he’s going to turn
into a pretty good outdoor communicator.
“He’s a great kid,” Dean said. “From the day I met Jason, I liked
him and saw great potential for him.”
Dean, who launched “Tony Dean Outdoors” in 1985, said he plans to
spend more time working as an advocate for conservation issues and
hopes to establish what he calls a “conservation think tank” aimed
at changing public policy programs and keeping grasslands and wetlands
in place.
Dean says he’s developed a plan for the think tank and is exploring
ways to fund it. He also plans to continue his daily “Dakota Backroads”
radio show and writing occasional outdoors articles for newspapers
such as The Forum and the Sioux Falls (S.D.) Argus Leader.
Leaving the TV business, he said, wasn’t a difficult decision.
“Not really,” he said.
“I had my run, well over 25 years doing it, and it’s time to pass
the torch.”
Focus on stories
A Minot native, Mitchell said he aims to carry on Dean’s tradition
of storytelling. It won’t be a show about how to catch more fish,
in other words, but will focus on people and places across the Dakotas,
Minnesota, Wisconsin and northern Michigan.
Nothing will be staged, he says, and the show won’t be filled with
blatant product pitches.
“You have to be able to promote and sell a product so advertisers
can feel the results, but at the same time, you can do so with a level
of integrity,” Mitchell said. “I think the best way to do that is
to set down the egos and not, ‘I’ve got a TV show, and I’m the world’s
greatest fisherman.’
“There are so many interesting things happening out on the water,”
Mitchell said. “People want a good story. It’s our job to find those
and tell them.”
Where “Tony Dean Outdoors” also included hunting segments, Mitchell
says he plans to keep the new show focused on fishing. Most shows
will feature two segments. The first season features 19 episodes,
and shows in the works include walleye fishing on the Missouri River
south of Bismarck, an interview with Dean looking back on the longtime
host’s career, a historical perspective on Devils Lake and the bluegill
bonanza on North Dakota’s Lake Metigoshe.
Production and filming for the show will be based in Bismarck, where
cameraman Paul Oster lives, but Mitchell said he plans to remain in
Devils Lake. Thanks to the Internet, Mitchell said, he and Dean can
collaborate with Oster remotely.
Mitchell says he also plans to scale back his time on the water as
a fishing guide. The career transition, he says, isn’t scary, and
it didn’t take him long to decide when Dean approached him in October
about taking over the show.
“It’s pretty exciting, actually,” Mitchell said. “I’ve been in the
trenches a long time. I love guiding, but I’m starting to get wore
out. People think, ‘Fishing, that isn’t work at all,’ but you fish
100 days in a row with only one or two days off, and it just wears
you down. And if you don’t guide that many days, it’s hard to make
a living. I’m getting older and slowing down. I’ve got a family now.”
‘Labor of love’
Dean started his broadcast career as a weekend radio host in Bismarck
and later worked in Fort Collins, Colo., Sheyenne Wyo., Cedar Rapids,
Iowa, and Huron, S.D. Before launching his TV show, Dean hosted a
radio program for South Dakota’s Department of Game, Fish and Parks
for 20 years and also spent some time with In-Fisherman Radio.
He said “Tony Dean Outdoors” almost went bankrupt the first year but
survived and eventually flourished.
“It’s been a labor of love right from the start,” Dean said. “I had
an advantage when I started because I already had communications experience.
It was so much easier for me to learn than someone who came from a
totally fishing background to try to become a communicator. I enjoyed
every minute of it.”
As for Mitchell, hosting an outdoors TV show is a far cry from his
early days as a guide, when he’d sometimes sleep in his boat at night
for lack of anywhere else to stay and wrap a drift sock around his
head as protection from mosquitoes.
“I loved to fish so I just got by,” Mitchell said. “If someone would
have told me when I was a kid that I’d be doing this, I’d have fallen
right out of my boat.”
n On the Web:
www.jasonmitchelloutdoors.com.
www.tonydean.com.
Dokken reports on outdoors. Reach him at (701) 780-1148; (800) 477-6572,
ext. 148; or send e-mail to bdokken@gfherald.com.
Crash and Burn
by Jason Mitchell
The bottom bouncer is an incredibly effective and versatile piece of
equipment for walleye anglers.
Over the past few years, there seems to have been an emphasis on using
the bottom bouncer as more of a rigging tool. The bottom bouncer can
become a tool for efficiently presenting a live bait snell or harness
precisely through structure. With this application, the presentation
is often fairly vertical or close to a forty five degree angle. Many
anglers who prefer to use bouncers in this method preach to never
let out too much line or let the bouncer drag. This is generally a
slow and precise method of presenting the rig through rock, following
break lines and generally staying on structure. There are plenty of
other ways to use the same bottom bouncer as this piece of wire and
lead offers a unique level of versatility.
There are a handful of days each summer while guiding where the fish
should be where they were the day before but are not. Frustrating
and mentally exhausting when everything is the same as the day before
except the fish are gone. The reality is that there are all kinds
of reasons after the fact but out on the water, there are no rules.
The fish could move anywhere for a variety of reasons. They could
be up the shoreline, deeper or shallower, off relating to some entirely
different structure. The more frustrated I get as the clock ticks,
the faster I find myself fishing. Very frustrating when you make a
handful of decisions, tried what should work and still can’t get back
on top of fish. By now, the sun is beating into my brain and my customers
start second guessing every decision I make. Unless you have some
really good info, too much running at this point can make the situation
much worst as far as trying a different part of the lake twenty miles
away. I can guarantee you that the fish that were in the area yesterday
didn’t all pack up and move that far. They usually move, but usually
you can see the part of the lake they moved to from where you found
them the day before. Sometimes, dropping water pulls fish out of the
bays and rising water pushes fish back into bays further but you can
bet that the fish are somewhere you can visually see.
I don’t know how many days
where I have been reincarnated from the whipping post by dropping
some heavy bottom bouncers down and moving quickly through areas in
an attempt to find fish. There are a couple of factors that make this
bottom bouncer dragging so effective. First, a heavy enough bottom
bouncer keeps you just off the bottom regardless of speed and easy
to adjust with fluctuating depths. A heavy bottom bouncer and harness
is much more versatile than even a crankbait behind lead core. You
can burn over the top of a five foot hump and fish all the way down
to twenty feet by making minor adjustments to your speed and amount
of line out. You can do the same with lead core but not nearly as
easy.
If you have somebody in the boat that isn’t staying on top of finding
the bottom, the bottom bouncer is much more idiot proof if you have
enough line out and going fast enough where the fish just hooks itself.
Another factor is that the mile and a half to two mile an hour speed
that you can move these bouncers through areas is a really nice speed
for logging sonar data and marking fish with your electronics. The
final selling point, speed is often an overlooked trigger. There are
so many times where we have a tendency to fish slower when we think
we have the location narrowed down. Common sense tells us that sitting
on top of fish makes more sense than moving fast and spending a portion
of our time out of the zone.
When we are fishing memories, we often have the sweet spot dialed
into our heads and we often have a tendency to fish the spot slow,
maximizing our time where we have a hook down where we think there
should be fish. Most days, this strategy makes perfect sense and the
fish make you look good. There are those days however where for whatever
reason, you can fish slow and swear there isn’t a fish within a mile.
Kick up the speed and all of a sudden the same fish that couldn’t
muster the ambition to snip at a squirming leech on a light, dainty
snell will attack a harness sped through the water.
The mistake many anglers make is not fishing heavy enough. Use a bottom
bouncer that finds the bottom. This is not finesse. Also, use a heavy
main line. Many anglers are using a heavy duty Fireline for added
sensitivity but there are also anglers that swear by <?xml:namespace
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/>Berkley 10 pound XT for this application. You want a tough and
abrasion resistant line because when you have a heavy bouncer crashing
along way back behind the boat, you will find snags and you need to
power through them. The snell needs to be heavy as well regardless
of whether you use a plain snell, spinner harness or bead. Plain snells
work well because with a heavier snell, you can kick up the speed
and not worry about your bait spinning so much that the line twists
into a mess. Many anglers are rigging half night crawlers to spin
on purpose.
Ten to fourteen pound Berkley XL is perfect. Even with the heavier
mono snells, the half crawler can still roll and spin seductively,
especially if you use the tail end of the crawler. Just adjust your
speed and adjust your crawler on the hook until you get a nice roll
through the water that really gets the soft flexible tail to flap.
This crash and burn tactic of using heavy bottom bouncers and heavy
line to find fish may seem crude to some walleye anglers but the effectiveness
can’t be denied. If the fish aren’t hooking themselves, you aren’t
going fast enough. No feeding line or dropping the rod way back, the
fish are just bang, bang and on. Dragging the wire and lead is effective
and efficient when the chips are down.
What can really be surprising about using this method is exactly where
you stumble into fish again. Sometimes, fish just end up on a part
of a flat or shoreline and there is no visible indicator that the
fish should be where they are. This aggressive use of bottom bouncers
is a great way to find these fish.
Follow the Leader
by Jason Mitchell
The idea that walleye may indeed follow a lure for a significant distance
before striking surprises many anglers. Many anglers have this mental
picture that fish just lash out and strike a lure as the lure appears,
like an ambush. While there is no doubt that plenty of ambushing is
going on under water, walleyes in particular will often follow a lure
for a surprisingly long time before striking.
There are situations where walleye have a tendency to follow or lurk
behind the lure with what seems like a nonchalant attitude where they
could just as well take the bait or leave it. We have watched schools
of fish follow a crank bait for thirty yards or more, shadowing the
bait nipping at the heals until something tweaks the restraint of
one of the fish. Usually, this trigger might be a stop or pump to
the lure to cause something irregular or perhaps the lure bounces
off a rock. Some slight trigger might be all that is needed to turn
followers into takers. This may explain some of the effectiveness
with planer boards while trolling. The board may give the lure just
a little bit more action; more starts and stops than a rod hanging
out of a rod holder. Because of this tendency for fish to snap on
something irregular like a sudden stop or stall in the bait or a change
in speed, many of the best trollers are always holding at least one
rod, giving the lure more action.
This challenge to turn followers into takers can indeed be a challenge
at any time of the year. Cold fronts or weather changes can just put
the fish into a mood where they aren’t lashing out at baits. Fishing
pressure can also crop down the intensity of a bite. From our experience
however, this following tendency is most apparent in the spring when
the water is cool and many of the fish are shallow. Anglers who can
consistently convert a high percentage of following fish into fish
that chomp are going to catch many more fish come spring.
People often assume that shallow fish are fish that are eating. Yes,
but there is much more to shallow fish than just finding something
to eat. Early in the season, these fish may get active once a day,
late afternoon or early evening after the sun warms the water a few
degrees. The bite becomes a guessing game of timing. Hit a good spot
too early and not see a fish, hit the same spot an hour later after
the water temperature jumps a few degrees and the fish are on the
bite. When the fish are really on the bite, the reality is that it
doesn’t really matter how you go about your day, you are going to
probably catch a few fish.
The key to really catching fish is figuring out ways to turn fish
when they aren’t really on. What we have found is that we can catch
many more of these turned off fish by making longer casts. Back the
boat off the spot and make longer casts. I dare say that a longer
cast catches three times as many fish as a short cast when the fish
are in a funk and aren’t snapping. What is a long cast? I would say
the distance of a basket ball court. Longer casts catch many more
fish early in the season or whenever fish are turned off and the reason
is simple. When the fish aren’t snapping at the baits, you are generally
dealing with a bunch of followers. Fish that just want to follow your
crankbait or jig. Longer casts give these fish more time to eat before
you run out of room at the boat. Often, the change of direction as
a lure begins to rise towards the rod tip is a very powerful trigger
so be ready as you finish your retrieve. A few stalls or pops as the
lure raises towards the boat often snaps the restraint of following
fish for us. So don’t reel the lure all the way to the rod tip.
To back the boat off the spot and fish the area effectively by casting,
you need to use baits that will cast well. On Devils Lake the past
few years, one of our better baits that cast well is a Salmo 8F Perch.
We have caught a lot of big walleye on this bait. Other classics include
the Countdown Rapala, Husky Jerks, Rattling Rogues, jigs with Powerbait
and swim baits. Lighter line can also aid with casting as does a longer
rod. Depending on your height and arm length, a seven or seven foot
medium light action rod is great for getting that whipping action
necessary to launch baits into the upper deck. We have designed a
couple of rods that excel for pitching crankbaits and jigs into still
water. These rods are the Jason Mitchell Elite Series JMSS70MLX and
the JMSS76MLXF. We built these rods out of a hard to find graphite
that is of superior quality which makes the rod unusually light to
hold and helps with the fatigue of fishing all day.
When walleye fishing this spring, be aware of the fact that turned
off fish don’t lash out at baits or ambush but follow and nip. When
you encounter situations that turn down active fish, back off and
be conscience of what is happening under water with how fish are attacking
your lure or bait. These slight adjustments can often help you catch
fish before or after the prime window of opportunity is over.
