S1, Ep 8: An Evening with Salmo Savant Matt Supinski

Marvin Cash: Well, everyone, this is Marvin Cash, and I hope you all had a great holiday season. I want to welcome you to the first show of 2019 with my friend and good fishing buddy, Matt Supinski. Welcome to the show, Matt.

Matt Supinski: Welcome, welcome. Thank you, Hope. Happy New Year to you, Marvin. Hope you're doing well.

Marvin Cash: Yeah, thanks, Matt. And before we start rolling along, I just want to give a shout out to this episode's sponsor. It's the Virginia Fly Fishing and Wine Festival. The event is in its 19th year and will be held on January 12th and 13th in Doswell, Virginia. And if you want to get a little bit more information, if you'll just go to the events page on our website, you can get all the information you need. Well, welcome again to the show, Matt.

Matt Supinski: Thank you very much.

Marvin Cash: Well, I always ask all of my guests, what's their earliest fishing memory?

Matt Supinski: Yeah, you know, it's... I was brought up in Niagara Falls, New York. So I was surrounded by Great Lakes. And we lived pretty close to the falls. I don't know if you ever been there, but it's a pretty spectacular place. And so I used to sneak down to the river. Oh, geez. I was like 6, 7 years old, and my dad was just starting to get me into fishing.

And I'd usually just... Back then we were fishing with anything. Spinners, bait, flies, anything we get our hands on. So I was basically fishing underneath the falls in the gorge near the Devil's Hole area and catching just about anything I could get my hands on.

It was not... We weren't targeting trout or bonefish or tarpon or specific species. We were targeting anything that would bite our offering. So that was the earliest memory. I think it was about like six years old, I think.

And that was, it was pretty cool. I mean, I was really captured by the water. They say that Niagara Falls has positive or negative ions in it. So people are really drawn to water because of the thundering crescendo of the falls and the ion attraction to your body. That's why people just stare at it for hours. Some people commit suicide at the falls because they jump over the falls, the daredevils.

And so it was kind of a cool area to grow up in because it was just... You could always hear them. They were always mist. And so fishing and water was just right in front of me. So it was natural that I got pretty intense into it.

Marvin Cash: That's really neat. And when did you start to focus on the dark science of fly fishing?

Matt Supinski: Well, yeah, so my dad was a Polish officer in the Polish army during World War II. Fought the Nazis, was quite a partisan. And afterwards he made it over to Britain and he became part of the British army as a Polish officer. They had a Polish regiment there of people that defected after the war because of communist occupation. So he learned to fly fish pretty intently. Wing shooting and fly fishing were sort of like officers pastimes.

And so he introduced me to a fly rod. He had several Hardy fly rods that he picked up over the years. And so you fishing wet flies? He took me to a little small trout stream in southern New York state called the East Coy. And that was my first baptism of fly fishing and trying to teach me how to cast.

And very much like a river runs through it where, you know, after a while he got me to cast. And then we'd pack our own lunches and you go one way and I go the other way. And back then we used to harvest fish because we used to like to eat them and catch and release was kind of rare at those days.

And so we'd always come back and look with a little creel stuffed with who had the biggest fish. And of course he always had the biggest fish. And I was getting a little perturbed that I was not catching much. So I went to the general store and bought a little can of red worms and stuck them in my arctic creel and used my Royal Coachman. And I always tip him off with a little red worm, which was kind of cheating. And my dad didn't know about it.

And then all of a sudden I kept coming back with the bigger brown trout than him. And he was like, how the hell could you be catching those trout? You're not that... I'm getting kind of good, you know. And but he didn't really see that little can of red worms that I had.

And one day they fell out of my creel in the back of the trunk and there was ground all over. And I caught holy hell from him in Polish for being a scallywag and a trader. And you know, I just was just ashamed to the sport.

But eventually I... I think I... Well then I just became fly fishing only. And I think I was like fly fishing only from, man, I'd say 12, 14 years old. I was completely fly fishing only Then I went to 100 catch and release when I was 16 years old and been that way since.

But you know, we had a little dark beginnings because I always wanted... It was a competitive thing. And I think the fact that my dad was so competitive and he really just gave me glimpses of what to do in fly fishing. But he never like, really over, over did it. Like a lot of parents today you could see, they come out with me and the kids and they're like jamming the fly fishing down the kids throat so badly to the point where the kid like doesn't want to do it anymore.

So he did the complete opposite approach, which was a pretty interesting psychological approach that he basically baited me to go and fish but wouldn't show me much. And then you would show up and show how big his fish were and made me very jealous. And it was sort of an oedipal complex type gig where I, you know, eventually hated my father so much that I, you know, got good. And look what happened to me today. I've gone way over the edge at this point. There's no return for me.

But I think that was his plan was to embarrass me to be better than him, but never give me too much and have to make me crawl for more information and poke around fly shops and barbershops. And back then there were books in libraries I used to ice. There's a good story in Nexus of me stealing the first copy of Selective Trout out of our library when I was a little boy because I couldn't afford to buy one. Having a paper route. I didn't steal it. I checked it out, but I sort of never gave it back.

And then my German mother, my Austrian, excuse me, I better watch my tongue, she'd kill me from heaven. My Austrian mother found a notice from the library of a delinquent. Like several delinquent notices that I kept throwing out or hiding. And the book by this time was Selective Trout by Swisher and Richards. One of the first masterpieces of fly fishing to come along back in the glory days of the late 70s, which eventually spurred me on to write Selectivity.

And then I had the great honor of fishing with Carl Richards, who was in Michigan on the Muskegon River and the Rogue River. But it was kind of funny that I stole. I didn't steal, but I checked it out, but I didn't give it back because I just couldn't at that point. The book had no pages left in it and it was like, torn up. But my mother marched me down to the library, made me do hard labor every Saturday at the library, cleaning up waste baskets and parking. And washing the parking lot.

So I paid for my sins, but these are little dark things. And then eventually I went. The story's kind of cute. It's in the Nexus book. Then I went to confession, being a good paranoia Catholic boy who was always in a state of anxiety and guilt. So I went to confessional booth and had to confess my sins that I, you know, took a book from the library and I never gave it back.

And I found out that father Stanley was a fly fisherman. And he says, yeah, I know, I know the passion and can over grip you. So he was. Didn't come down too hard on me. So I think I only got like one Hail Mary and the glory be, you know, those are. That's like, that's like no crime, no foul, no crime, you know?

Marvin Cash: Yeah, that worked. That worked out pretty well.

Matt Supinski: Yeah, it worked out pretty well. So that. That was my gig. Yeah.

Marvin Cash: Interesting. So, who else other than your dad had a big impact on your development as a fisherman?

Matt Supinski: Yeah. So, then I went when I was in Poland. So we moved back to Poland, between the ages of 8 and 10. My dad wanted to go back and get his master's degree in chemical engineering. So the beautiful thing, and it's the first chapter of Nexus is all about that experience, which is really kind of cool. But that's where I got really cemented into loving brown trout and Atlantic salmon and Sea-run brown trout.

Is my uncle Stanley, who was a game warden. And we, we. Our farm was up near Gdansk, Poland, on the northern shore in Pomerania. And we had a beautiful river that came through our farm property called the Viapsha, with a tributary to the Vipsa River. And it was loaded with wild brown trout and had Atlantic salmon and sea-run brown trout that came in there.

So my uncle Stanley was a more traditional type guy. He had German shotguns and he had the English, excuse me, German, short hairs and did a lot of bird hunting. But he also had Hardy rods and, you know, a Hardy reel, and he had authentic House of Hardy flies. And so he sort of mentored me a lot. We built a tree house and we used to look down in the pool and see the browns interacting with the Atlantic salmon, which is in the first chapter of my Nexus book and how I got addicted to that Whole observation. So he was really important. He got me really going.

Then I came back to the States, and then I kept reading everything when we came back to the US and, when I was in Washington, DC in the hotel business, I had a really... You know, I used to fish the Pennsylvania spring creeks almost every single weekend. We got married at the Allenberry. And I fished the Big Spring, the Falling Spring, the Yellow Breeches, all those rivers.

And I ran into Vince Marinaro, the famous in the Ring of the Rise and Modern Dry Fly Code. And I used to follow him around in Fox's Meadow. And he hated everybody. He was a real curmudgeon. And no one could go near him. He only had a couple friends, but they really didn't like him. And he was getting old. He's coming down with cancer, and it was just a tough time.

And so I sort of befriended him by, you know, bribing my way into trying to get him to be a mentor by giving him smoked salmon from the hotel that I used to manage in, good Italian wines, which he liked. And so I bought his mentoring, kind of. And then he sort of hung out with me and let me fish with them and show me some of his flies. And I still got a box of his midges to this day, believe it or not. And so he was a big mentor.

And then, of course, Ed Shank, the very famous sculpting guy, run into him all the time on a retort. And then we have a place up in the Catskills, so I run into Lee Wulff every once in a while and talk to him. And so I had a really. A lot of great people in my life that gave me so much knowledge.

And then, I get to Michigan, and when I was transferred to my last hotel job, and we have the famous Rogue River and Muskegon and the Paramount Cat, those rivers. Then I get to meet Carl Richards, who wrote Swisher Richards, Selective Trout, and a bunch of other books. And he fished the Muskegon a lot, where our current lodge is, for the last 22 years. And I got to drink bourbon. That's the end of the night, sitting by a car, talking about caddis hatches with Carl Richards, and then Dick Popes, who wrote a caddisfly book. Still friends with him. He's still alive. And there's quite a bit of Muskegon.

So, yeah, I just had a lot of great, great historical, famous mentors that I bumped into, by coincidence or I bribed with really good Scottish smoked salmon, you know that, that always seals the deal. So if you want to ever get up, get to fish a piece of property or that's posted, or make friends with somebody, if you've got Scottish smoked salmon that's about as good as gold, it's good stuff to have good wines and good salmon and just to those people that, that always want to fish a piece of property, if you want to go fish that property, always come bearing gifts and you will get permission to fish the property.

Because ever since I've done that, I always bring a nice bottle of wine, say, oh, by the way, this is a token of my appreciation if you can kindly allow me to go down to your property, fish. And I've never been turned out and it depends on what part of the country. Bourbon goes a long way. Scotch goes a long way. But bearing gifts, no one refuses gift bearing people. So if you want to go fish a piece of property that's posted, bring gifts and you'll be well received, trust me.

Marvin Cash: Yeah, no, it's advice to live by.

Matt Supinski: Absolutely.

Marvin Cash: And so how long were you in the hospitality business before you decided to take the plunge and become a full time guide and lodge owner?

Matt Supinski: Yeah, so I think I was like 20 years professionally in the hospitality business. I started off as I went to culinary school and then I did my apprenticeship in Rome, Italy and Europe and then I came back and my first job with Sheraton Hotels, in New York City and the Big Apple and started out as a garde manger chef. And then I had a business background from Ohio State University. So they promoted me to food and beverage director. So I worked for Sheraton Renaissance Hotels, Omni Hotels, and I was in it probably close to, I don't know, I'm gonna say maybe 12, 14 years.

And then I took the plunge. I couldn't take any more working. The thing about the hospitality industry is you work seven days a week, 16 hour days and that goes on for like months at a time. So I only take time off to go fishing. And so I couldn't take any longer. The stress levels and managing a thousand. Some of the hotels I managed were like large convention hotels. You'd have you know, 1100, 1200 employees. So you were stressed out. So I think 37, 38 years old. I just said, I can't take it, I'm going fishing. And I've been doing it since and managing, to pay the bills. So, but it was a great experience. You learn how to deal with people and life is nothing but hospitality. It was kind of cool.

Marvin Cash: And so did you start your lodge at the same time you made the full time guiding plunge or was that something that came afterwards?

Matt Supinski: Yeah, I just basically came in one day after I got invested in my four year tenure and I said, hey, I'm going fishing, here's my keys, I'm building the lodge. Lodges are in construction and we're like, this is what I'm gonna do. You know, I'm just can't take this any longer. And stress, levels I had from hotel this were just crazy. And I just, you know, just couldn't take it any longer. And you just eventually had to like, you know, just like a lot of these stockbrokers today, eventually our bankers eventually become bonefish guys. You know, they just can't take the big cities anymore and they just, you know, grow a beard and get curmudgeonly and start becoming a guide.

So that I became a curmudgeon when I was 37, 38 years old. I was just burned out. I was totally fried, 20 years in advance. So, that's what I did and started that. And it's still going strong. I had the best guide year I've ever had this year. I mean like probably 240, 250 days guidance. It was just insane. So the older I'm getting, I just turned the big six zero. And man, I've never worked this hard in 15 years. I've never guided so much. So I don't know what's going on, if there's an economic recovery or whatever's happening. But it was a crazy year and one of the toughest years guiding because of the weather.

But so yeah, it's still, you're living the dream, but not always. And there's really tough days and there's people that you want to kill, but you have to be with them. And so you got to have, you have to have people skills. And I think that's one part, like a lot of guides don't get is that you got to be well versed in discussing everything from politics to the weather to fishing to. And that's what I think, think what makes an all around guide. So and I enjoy it. So I still get just as excited out there every day. It's like the first day I went fishing, which is really bizarre. I can't explain it. My customers can't explain how excited I get when I'm somebody. Could you fish with me? You know? How crazy.

Marvin Cash: Yeah, No, I remember when we stuck that big steelhead, you were more excited than I was.

Matt Supinski: Yeah, like, all over the map, jumping like a banshee out of the boat. But that's just. That's natural. See, there's a. You know, I always say that, you know, you're not. You don't select being a guide or you don't select fly fishing. The fish selects you. You don't select the fish, the fish selects you. It's almost like a calling, and it's like a curse, and it's a calling, and then you're just like, you know. Yeah, I like. Some people like fly fishing. Some people like, just, I live. And that's a passion. And to me, it's an obsession. And especially brown trout, their obsession for me.

And, you know, I talked to our local biologists here, and they said, it's not a passion for you, it's an obsession, almost like a disease for you. And I said, yeah, it is. That's why I wrote Nexus and, because that just. I just love those fish, and I love the Atlantic salmon duo with them, and that's what we have here.

And then in my backyard, I find out that I knew the Paramount Cat had first stocking of brown trout in the western hemisphere, which is all detailed in my book in the historical checkers. But then this little spring creek that's right down the road from our lodge was actually the first couple canisters, milk canisters of German browns were dumped into that creek, and I could throw stone to that creek.

So, you know, when you write things, I think it's sort of like destiny for you to write these things. They just don't happen. You don't seek them out. They sort of, like, glaringly strike you in the face. And, I think that's why, you know, you have these passionate people, in the industry that just, you know, they forego fame and fortune and living comfortably and living like hermits. Most. Most guides will end up being dying poppers and, like, theater Gordon and drinking, you know, out of a tin cup and living in the woods and skinning animals, and that's. It's almost like a hermit lifestyle. Eventually, people adopt, but it's because the passion over overtakes normality.

Anything that's normal in life, you should be doing this, you should be doing that, is overridden by the obsession and passion for the fish. So it's almost like you're drawn in your curse. Basically. That's the way I feel about it.

Marvin Cash: It's the fly fishing godfather, right?

Matt Supinski: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Marvin Cash: Well, so for people that aren't familiar with, with Michigan and the Great Lakes area, why don't you tell us a little bit about, you know, it's an incredibly rich fishery in terms of species, but give people kind of a thumbnail about, you know, what the opportunities are, in Michigan and in the surrounding areas.

Matt Supinski: Yeah. So, you know, if you could come out here and make guide in the Great Lakes and have an operation, you could do anything. Anyway, so I look at like all these people and they're good at like catching a trout somewhere, or they're good at, you know, Montana, or they're good at Colorado, or they're good at Pennsylvania, or they're good at nymphing, or they're good at dry fly fishing, or they're good at this, or they're good at only throwing big meat streamers.

I, look at all them and they're. And I'm like, I do 20 of those things on any given day in any given value, in any given venue for a host of different fish. So if you want to come to Great Lakes, you got to be prepared to be an incredible caster or pluck a little tiny creek. You got to be able to fish dry flies, nymph streamers, swing flies, spey fish, tight line fish, everything.

This, this to have the most amount of fresh water in the world. Number one, we have more fresh water than any place in the world. We got four Great Lakes, we got 10,000 miles of wild blue ribbon trout streams. We got brook trout, brown trout, rainbow trout, wild king salmon, wild coho salmon, wild pink salmon, wild steelhead, Lake Run browns. That Wisconsin right now is the world record 43 pound brown trout caught in Lake Michigan.

We have it all. And to come out here and if you're just stuck in one venue, you'd be kind of, you have to up your game to every level. So you have to, you have to absorb everything. And that's what the Great Lakes makes you do, is that if you want to fly fishing and then we get like tremendous musky fishing on Lake St. Clair. And then we got tremendous bass fishing, and then we got tremendous walleye fishing and, and then we got tremendous pike fishing and then it's just never ending. So we got more species of fish in more fresh water in more different venues from large tailwaters to small spring creeks to Tiny freestone streams. It is the most cornic is the biggest cornucopia of fly fishing potential offerings, that you could possibly have.

Marvin Cash: Very neat. And kind of talking a little bit more before we shift to the writing stuff, tell me a little bit about kind of how you approach your day on the water. So if someone hasn't fished with you before and they're thinking about coming out and fishing with you, kind of what a day with Matt Supinski is like.

Matt Supinski: Well, that's a loaded question. I'm sure you'll get it from 10,000 different people depending on what spectrum the thing is. But so my passion is always very obvious at what I do. As I'm getting older I'm getting a little more understanding and a little more sensitive to what people actually want to do. So when you first start guiding, you're like, I'm going to get you into a lot of fish, I'm going to find you the biggest fish I'm going to do. It's the same, you know, when you start fishing, it's I want to catch the fish, then I want to catch the biggest fish, then I want to do a bug.

So now I'm like finding out that people want to do things that I have no conception of until I sit down and talk to them. So I always try to grab a cup of coffee and sit down with the person and say, what, what is your goal? What, what do you want to achieve? You know what, do you want to just swing flies or do you just want to just nymph? Or you want to drive like this or you just want to catch trout? You want to catch your first steel or you want to catch your first big brown, or you want to catch your first. You know what most guys, and it's just a matter of maturity and, and having guided for 22 years, I find out that people have total unbelievable expectations. That blows your mind. That makes no sense to you, but okay, let's do it.

You know, I have people that want to come out and learn a technique that I get to get snags out called the estrogen lift. And I had two guys who came up in the Salmon River, wanted to learn, how not to lose flies because I have, I developed a technique for doing that and they're like I said, seriously, I mean, you just came all this way just to want to do that? And they're like, yeah, we don't care about catching fish. Some people really don't care about catching fish. They want to Learn how you read rivers or how you, why do you do this? And why do you tie things down like this? And why do you do this? So learning aspect is the biggest.

I focus on teaching now, so probably last year I taught maybe close to 100 young people between the age of 7 years old and 16 years old how to fly fishing. And I enjoy that because I love to see that sparkle in their eye and how they, you know, just grasp things. And then a lot of adults that, you know, just retired, they got fly rods, they want to learn how to fish, and they, you know, everybody. No one likes to admit that they're maybe not experts, you know, and today, given, you know, YouTube and given technology and, you know, everybody assumes they're going to be an expert and they want to be an expert, and they could use a few buzzwords. But deep down inside, everybody has an expectation.

So whether you want to. Some people say, hey, I want to catch my first delight, or, I want to catch my first brown trout. I want to catch first dry fly fish. You know, a lot of people, you really sometimes have to pry into really what they want to do. And then they'll. They'll tell you. And everybody has an expectation level. And, now that I'm a little older, it's more easier for me to be more candid and be a little more. So tell me what you really want to do. Tell me what you really, really want. You know, it's like, you know, everybody comes to the table and wants you to meet or exceed their expectations.

And I think the biggest thing about what I'm trying to do now is figure out what the person really wants. And I think if you, you know, there's. There's days where I've had the best days of fishing, and I caught tons of fish from my client. And then at the end of the day, they're like, I really wish I showed you. Show me how to tie that knot. That was the most important thing. And you're like, really? I mean, I just got you the biggest fish of your lifetime, and you, you, you wish, you know, it's. It's not about us, it's about them and what they want. So hospitality is very important.

So, and that's, unfortunately, that's just part of the, scenario in the coal mine with guiding is that your enthusiasm and passion sometimes overweighs what the person really wants. And it's your job to not only crack the code of what they really want, but try to give it to them in the best Possible light, but also educate. See a lot of people. I have other guides that I've worked with and work for me and stuff like that. And they're like, clients will come back and say, oh, I had a great day with Chuck or Jim or Trot or Jason or whatever, and we caught a lot of fish, but I didn't learn anything.

And so I think with me and, you know, all the writing that I've done, I'm. I'm a. I'm an analyst. I'm a scientist. I look at everything and I break it down into the minuscule elements. And I like to say the reason I'm pulling the boat up here and parking here and fishing in the spot is because this, this, this, this. This river feature and that river feature and this. This spatial, niche and blah, blah, blah. And in my Nexus book, I really break that down about spatial niches and thermal niches and realized niches and tropics and tropic levels and. And, you know, things that draw fish and why you're fishing there.

So the biggest thing that most guides, they get certified. They're endorsed by somebody. They get on the pro program. They do this. They got big stickers, badges. They look the part, they act apart, they get the equipment, but they don't really know what the hell they're doing. And they don't break things down for people to understand. So I think what most people need to do is break things down and explain, which is constantly teaching. So you're not just guiding anymore, you are teaching. Yeah.

Marvin Cash: It's interesting. Yeah, it's interesting, too, because I have. I always have to encourage new fly fishermen when they fish with guides to really advocate for themselves and try to explain to them that, you know, it's not just one way that Matt fishes. And if you tell Matt what you want, he'll do that for you. But it's really, you know, he's not a mind reader.

Matt Supinski: Right.

Marvin Cash: So. And you've got a great setup. Why don't you tell folks a little bit about your lodge? I mean, it's super convenient, and it's really neat. I've stayed up to there, and, I mean, folks should really check it out.

Matt Supinski: Yeah. So we have the Great Drake Lodge, and we've been there for 22 years. We're on the Muskegon River. It's very comfortable. It's overlooking the river. So you wake up every morning, you're looking down at the river. We also do cuisine. I'm an ex chef. So we try to make you eat pretty good. And it's in here on Manistee National Forest. So it's pretty. We got bald eagles in our backyard. There's a cougar running around now I got a cougar running around like a real cougar. So that's kind of exciting. We got, we got black bear, we got, you know, we got turkey, we got grouse. So you're in a wildlife environment and you got a river in front of you and you got.

The thing is, you get so many options with so many rivers with so many different types of fish. So I mean, literally for steelhead addicts, we can fish for steelhead 365 days a year because we have a fall run, we have a winter run, we have a spring run, we have a summer run fish. And some of our rivers, like the St. Joe and the Manistee, then, you know, we got the big tailwater and like, you know, our tailwater looks a lot like South Holston, very similar to that. Then we got little tiny spring creeks and we got medium sized rivers. We got brook trout, brown trout, rainbow trout, you know, steelhead. Ching, ching, ching. It just, it just, you're in a cornucopia.

So if you came out for three or four days, you could catch the Great Lakes Grand Slam. Like if you came out in the fall, you catch a wild king, up to 30 pound wild king salmon. It's a Pacific salmon catch, coho salmon. You catch landlocked Atlantics like you did up Torch Lake with me. You catch river browns, you know, feeding on size 22 Blue-Winged Olives. It's just like, it's like being in a toy store, a candy store. I mean, it just, the offerings are just crazy.

And when people finally come up here and they time it right, like, holy smokes. This is like the best kept secret in the world, which it kind of is because, you know, we go to Patagonia, we go to New Zealand, we go to destinations to Kamchatka. You could pretty much get all that by a, 12 hour drive from Virginia. I mean, it's not like. And for people that don't like to get on planes because they tend to lose all your equipment and stuff like that, which happens to me all the time. It's easy to drive, you know, to location like this.

And with gas. Now our gas is. I don't know what it is over there, but it's like a dollar ninety here right now. That's just like stupid. You could be there. And so you can leave at 7 in the morning from Virginia and be at 7 at night having bourbon by the fire and looking down at a river full of wild salmon, trout, steelhead. Yeah, yeah.

Marvin Cash: And the great thing is, is if you fish the Muskegon, you don't have to get up so super early to go run to the river because you just put your jacket on after breakfast and walk down the steps, eat eggs.

Matt Supinski: Benedict and blueberry pancakes and walk down the stairs and hop in my new Batmobile jet boat that I got and could cover 14, 15 miles of river in a day and have a great experience. So, yeah, it's pretty cool. It's very comfortable and it's very conducive to being in an environment. You know, I go to a lot of destination travel trips and you wake up that morning and then you got to drive 4 hours to go fish the Beaverhead or you got to go drive three hours to go fish for Missouri or you got to go drive, get in the helicopter and go out to distant place in Alaska. When you get there and you're surrounded by beers and 10,000 other people. So it's like, you know, this is like total. If you get there, you just have to walk and you're right to the spot, you know, it's kind of cool.

Marvin Cash: So Matt, when did you get the writing bug?

Matt Supinski: Right?

Marvin Cash: So you get out of the hospitality business, you become a full time guide lodge owner. And when did you decide that you wanted to start writing?

Matt Supinski: Yeah, so that was kind of a fluke accident. If you told me I was going to be a writer back in college, I told you you're nuts, you know, made no sense. So, you know, so when I was in college, I took a course on creative writing. Was like one of these electives and I didn't even go to class. I just went for the midterms into final, which was 50% of your grade, and it turned 50% final. And there were 350 people in the class because I went to a big Ohio State University, was massive. You were just a Social Security number there.

And so I, I took the course and I had to write a couple like small essays for the, for the exams. And I got the highest grade in the class. And, and the teacher was like, you know, you might want to be a writer someday. I'm like, ah, no desire. I want to be very famous, make tons of money and just be a rock star and making money, you know.

And so then I was in Europe when I was doing my culinary apprenticeship. When I was in Rome, Italy, and other places, I would write back, you know, postcards to my mom, letters. We didn't have email back then. And I was very creative in my writing. My mother's like, man, you should think about writing someday. You know? Then, you know, I just. Just writing just became a passion. Then I got a little article published in National Geographic, was my first publishing gig. I got, that I got paid for that was back in the 80s. And then I got my first article in Fly Fisherman magazine.

That was submitted by Nick Lyons. I don't know if you remember Nick Lyons, but Nick Lyons was very famous Fly Fisherman magazine. He wrote books. He wrote that real funny article on the back of the magazine, always about these funny tales. And, Nick was one of. He was the greatest publisher in fly fishing. He published all the. All the great books by all the great people. Nick Lyons Books. Lyons Bruford Books. I was the. The man, the guy, and I was lucky to publish Nexus with his son Tony and Jake Asal at Skyhorse Publishing in New York City, which is my newest publisher.

And, Nick was sort of my mentor. I met him at the Sheraton Washington Hotel at a convention. He was attending a convention. And I wrote this article about limestone spring creeks. And I gave it to Nick, and I said, hey, could you take a look at it, tell me what you think? And, a couple weeks later, a package arrived in the mail. It looked like somebody just killed an animal because there was so much red ink on it. And he edited it, and it was just like one giant bloody mess. But he said, you got 10,000 words here. You only need 3,000. He said, save the rest for a book someday. And he just chopped it all up. And he sort of taught me how to write, and he gave me, like, sort of a passion to write. And then he got me published. He gave it to John Randolph, and I got published for the first time and got my first $400 check. And I thought I was God.

And, then, just since then, it just been going and going. And, I was a big fan of Ernie Schwiebert's. And, I was so honored that Tom Rosenbauer wrote the introduction for Nexus. And he said that I sort of inherited Schwiebert's mantle, which I was very honored to have that thrown to me. But see, everything to me in fly fishing is just more than just throwing. Put the fly on, go to the river and cast and Catch a fish. I, when I go into the woods, I look at everything. I pick mushrooms, I talk about mushrooms and foraging. In my Nexus book, I talk about when you go to a river, you know, you know, write 10,000 words about a tree. Can you do that? If you take a photography class of like, say, you know, write 10,000 words about this rock or a tree or something.

So my mind works in like analyzing everything to death from, from the way the water is flowing to the way the fish looks too. So I'm a very observant person and I tend, to carry that into my fly fishing. So if I didn't have that, I'd probably be bored with fly fishing right off the bat. But just analyzing everything from the history of the river to where it's at to now. I used to like to go to like little creeks that had little battlefields next to them and shit like that. So it's kind of, you know, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta romance the sport. And that's where we lack today.

What's lacking in our sport, we've become so mechanical and so textbook oriented that most fly fishing books today I just don't even read because there's nothing there other than you tie this nymph on and you drop it in here and you put it in the water and you catch a fish in your. I mean, it's, it's a textbook. We've become nothing but textbook oriented. And yes, textbooks do sell, but we have to romance fly fishing again. And that's what I attempted to do with Nexus and my editor, my publishers were, gave me 100% carte blanche, freedom to be as expressive as I want to.

But it's much easier to teach in parables. Like Christ taught in parables. He would do a parable and then he would try to get a lesson across as opposed to saying, step one, you do this, Step two, do this. Step three, do this. Step four, do this. Step five, put your car here. Step six, go home. I mean, that's. We become so cut and dry that it's actually turned off. Most people from the sport, we don't romance the sport anymore. We don't make it exciting. So we have to romance the fish. We don't have to talk about how many fish you caught. Talk about that beautiful one that you worked so hard for and this is how you did it.

And that's what I did with Nexus with this book is, always try to paint the picture. And then every picture tells a story. So the story unfolds into the technique and unfolds into what you should be observing for. And I think if we have more of that type of literature, as opposed to the boring textbook literature that's been, eulogized for the last 10 years, we're going to have more people excited to go there. I know that young people today, they want to know history. They want to like, they're very, they're very in tune with a lot of details that us old white dudes don't get into. And, I think that's the future of the sport is that young people are very enthusiastic about learning about the history, the process, the romance, which is very encouraging.

Marvin Cash: Yeah. So it's interesting, right? So you know, you, as long as I've known you, you've got it a ton of days. And I think you've written six books. I mean, how do you carve the time out to write? Because I'm always interested in, the creative process, whether it's solving fishing problems or photography or writing articles. So how, you know, kind of when you get the inspiration, how do you create the space in your day to day life to be able to write?

Matt Supinski: I think I'm an insomniac. As you know, if I get like two hours of sleep at a time, that's like three. I'm up to three now, I think. And then I get up and I, A lot of my writing occurs in the middle of night. Like I just get up and I just can't sleep anymore and I'll just turn white on, start writing. And I get a lot of thoughts throughout the day and I make sure that I have my iPhone or whatever to pen them down. But so writing has to be a constant process where if you, if you treat it as a 9 to 5 job and you say, okay, today I'm going to write 10,000 words, I'm going to write 3,000 words. I can plop my ass down from computer and the first word that's going to come out as. And you're going to be stuck because you're not inspired.

So writing has to be an ongoing process. It has to be every, every time you observe a detail that really strikes you, sort of like an artist, jot it down. And, and there's to be an ongoing process and you know, you have to find these little moments when you could, when you could actually do that. And you got to, when you. Even on a guide trip, sometimes I'll just jot down little notes on my iPad or, you know, my iPhone or something that I just saw and I observed it. So your observant mind could never stop. And writing is just a expression of having that observant mind. And that's how I do it. So it's got to come in little increments and has to come throughout the day and has to come early in the morning or late at night or after a couple cocktails.

But by one word of advice. Don't. Don't be. Don't do too much creative writing after cocktails. It really doesn't. Like. It's not usually good to go on Facebook after cocktails, and it's not usually good to do anything else after cocktails except a couple other things that men and women were meant to do. But, you know, because then you. Next morning, you look at it and say, what the hell was that all about? You know, so you have to be somewhat disciplined, but don't discipline yourself to the point of sterilization. To the point where you. You're sustained so dry and sterilized because you forced it. So it's something that can't be forced. It has to be an ongoing process throughout the day.

Marvin Cash: Yeah. So how long did it take you to come up with the initial draft of the manuscript for Nexus?

Matt Supinski: You know, that was like. It started when I was 8 years old in that tree house in Poland, looking down at those fish. And then, throughout my life having all those, you know, mentors that were infatuated with brown trout or Atlantic salmon. And basically, you know, Dr. Bjorn Johansson, who wrote the foreword and who helped, who collaborated with me on selectivity, he's the doctor of salmo, the Atlantic trout. So, you know, it's really amazing that 90% of fly fishermen don't realize that. So brown trout and Atlantic salmon are the same fish. They're exactly the same because they can reproduce together. They could do everything together. They look alike when they're smaller, they look alike when they're spawning. They look like when they're running out of the ocean or the seas or tear that.

So these fish have always been. I. I wrote Steel, Dreams, I love steelhead, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I came back to where my true passion was, and that was what I was. My first trout was a brown trout. My youth experiences were brown trout and Atlantic salmon. So this. This book is just a culmination. And if you read all the stories throughout, it's a culmination of, you know, 60 years of my life just being surrounded by these fish.

And, and then, you know, Then I'm in these places where like the Catskills, which is ground zero. New York is ground zero. The Western hemisphere where brown trout came. Then I come to Michigan and then the first creek that had the first milk canisters of fingerlings thrown in right down the road for me. So they sort of haunted me. So this book was endeavor, but it, the last two years of course took me to write it. But Johansson, his book called the Ecology of Atlantic Salmon and Brown Trout Habitat as a template is a masterpiece. It's a huge 600 page Springer University Press, $300, you know, book. But it's a textbook for his Oswald University ichthyology school. That was an inspiration because he really took the fish as one fish and he calls them the Atlantic trout.

So all over Europe, UK, Greenland, Iceland, Asia, Northern Africa, is that fish that was civilization's founding fish. So when, when, you know, I have a really cool episode in the second chapter talking about how Neanderthal man came out of his caves and went to the stream to try to find something to eat or take a bath or something. And the first fish that Pro Magnum and Neanderthal man stumbled upon was this 35 million year old dinosaur, a brown trout or an Atlantic salmon. And that was the fish that shaped civilization and grew up with civilization and over overshadowed civilization. So it's, it's truly more than just a fish. It's, it's a almost a spiritual type gig. You know what I'm saying?

Marvin Cash: Yeah, I do. And it's, it's interesting, right, because I, you know, I've sort of, I think I read your stuff out of order. So I did selectively first and then went back to Steelhead Dreams and then moved forward. But it seems to me that Nexus is an evolution of selectivity, and a lot of those ideas. But you fish a lot. You've been fishing since you were a kid. You have a lot of days on the water. And it's kind of interesting because we've talked about the writing process. But can you talk a little bit about how you came up with the framework? Because it's more than just how many days he have you fished. And there's that much information about sort of how you started to kind of distill things down into a framework that you could put into your books and that you could use to help your guide clients, be more effective. Because that's, that seems really interesting to me about how you would organize that in your head and kind of come up with the approach?

Matt Supinski: Yeah. So you mean the approach, like the outline for Nexus. You mean like, how do I get.

Marvin Cash: Well, like you're thinking about brown trout, right? So you know, you've, you know, you fish for them your entire life. You fish for Atlantic salmon your entire life. So, you know, the first thing is you got to have the kind of the original idea and the framework about how the fish behave, you know, how to be a more effective angler. And you know, it's more than just being on the water because there are lots of people, I think, that fish a lot that would never be able to write a book like you wrote.

Matt Supinski: Yeah. So, once again, being on the water and being surrounded by these fishes is main, you know, is, is, is kind of paramount. You can't see a lot of people try to write to stuff about things that they're semi familiar with but not totally obsessed with. And that's where like selectivity was. Because I had the fortune of fishing spring creeks and fishing with Marinaro and Richards, who wrote Selective Trout. And then for me, looking from that perspective and then Nexus, of course, being surrounded by these fish, guiding for brown trout 250 days a year and just being around. So familiarity and comfort comes out of growing with these things. And then you see, you see things that just open up your eyes at the craziest times when you're on the water.

So on the water is a real powerful live knowledge gig because you could tell guides that are on the water a lot and you could tell guides that sort of do it semi pro type, you know what I'm saying? And then you see all that. But it's constantly taking notes and constantly observing and then thinking outside the box. So, I think one thing that people never fault me with is for not thinking outside the box because we tend to become creatures of habit. So we tend to just do what, you know, the textbook told us to do. This is how you do it. So I am always one to break the rules and always go the other way.

And what came up with my frameworks for selectivity and Nexus and that is always, How do you say pushing the envelope in English? I think I know how to say it in Polish. But it's sort of like always trying to challenge the orthodox thinking. And that's the framework. If you work in that framework, you're always going to be interesting, you're always going to catch a lot of shit, you're always going to get a lot of, you know, oh, what the hell is this idiot thinking about? That makes no sense. He's crazy. He must be on a scotch high or something. You know, you're always going to get that kind of ridicule because you're thinking outside the box.

So everything in life is a formality and orthodox system. You're. You're supposed to think this way, act this way, be this way. And then those that don't become sort of like weirdo outcasts. And I think we've. We've become into such a conformist society that everybody has to be PC, Everybody has to think this way. You have to think this way if you're that kind of guy. And we don't have enough creativity. And if you look at the, you know, the great Hemingways and the great people and people that made things happen were always creative.

So what I always like to do is try to do something that somebody else doesn't do and try to look at things differently and throw in fly fishing. You could do that by just coming up with a new fly that's just not supposed to be done. We. I started with another guy. We started throwing big streamers for Atlantic salmon up in hallowed waters where you're only supposed to use a Blue Charm or an Undertaker. And we're throwing double Ds and roadkill. And I talk a lot about roadkill. And, you know, this kind of stuff that you fished musky with with, Blane, you know the. That, you know, you would fish that 15, 20, 30, 40 years ago, that'd be. That'd be heresy. Would be heretic.

That's. That's how you come up with the framework. And. But you gotta have those experiences and you have to be there. And just now it's only taken me my whole lifetime, but now I just feel comfortable that I could go anywhere and talk about this stuff impromptu, like I'm doing right now. I'm not even looking at anything. I mean, I just. I just do it. And that comes from experience. So time on the water is very, very important. You know, Skews once said, I think it was what, John Waller Hills or Skews, I don't know which one, but said one must separate the lead live knowledge from the dead knowledge. The dead knowledge is the writing of the Stoics and the, you know, guys sitting around the salons with their pipes and talking about themselves. Or the live knowledge is the guy that's out on the river.

So the biggest problem most flight fishing shows have is most people don't want to go to them because they'd rather Be out fishing or not sitting here talking about it. And so it's it's. You cannot de. Emphasize the amount of time on the water, but you have to have the structure. So when you put together a book, you have to have, you have to start with chapters and you have to start with a train of thought and where you're going from the start to the finish. And that's what Nick Lyons taught me is you have to have format and a carry on of thought. And one of my other editors taught me to stay on point. So you always have to stay on point. Don't veer too much. Always talk about your subject.

So in my reviews of Selectivity and the ones I'm seeing from Nexus is that I'm on point, I'm focusing. Even though I'm talking about insects and talking about, I'm talking about what totally is important to my brown trout. You have to treat your subject matter as the holy grail and do not deviate from your subject matter. Only talk about 10,000 words about your subject word. And actually Nexus was 180,000 words. So that turned out. It's going to be a long read. You're going to be reading all winter anyways. That's it.

Marvin Cash: It's all good. And so who did you have, a, kind of a prototypical angler that you wrote Nexus for.

Matt Supinski: I wrote it for actually. I wrote this book, for historians, for every angler from every aspect from novice to advanced to middle of the road to everything. Because I made this book more than just a textbook. I made this a learning, experience that will appeal. So if your wife buys you this book, I have my couple of my salmon recipes in there for sustained, closed containment, aquaculture to preserve wild species. I have my famous dill Dijon beurre blanc sauce. I talk about how to pick wild mushrooms. I talk about how to pick wild greens and fiddleheads while you're fishing. I talk about the history, I talk about the history of civilization. I talk about climate change, i talk about Eocene epoch, I talk about in depth techniques on how to nymph dry fly streamer fish.

So I, this book appeals to everybody and it could appeal to end of color photography, which everybody likes to see. Nice color photography. And what this book is done is it's a book that you could actually read over a winter and whereas other books you could pick up and read in one day. Whereas this book is, is sort of, you could, you could sit there, I'm Only I'm only on chapter two right now, to be honest with you. And I'm like, did I write this shit? I can't believe it. So I'm going back and reading the book for the first time and I'm like, man, this has taken me a long time to read and. But it's telling a story and the stories keep coming and the last chapter leaves off and gets you more excited about the next chapter. And it keeps telling that story and spinning that story.

And, and people like them, I mean, people, everybody that reads like the Reason and even Steel a Dream, they're like, I like the way you told stories at the same time. So we've lost that. We've lost that ability to, to let the mind wander. And I think because we become such a. Such a mechanicalized technology lies the, society where everything is like immediate A, then B, then C and there's nothing in between. And I think people are yearning for romancing that. That's what's happening, with this book is that you're gonna. It's gonna take you all winter to read it and hopefully you're gonna like it. But you're gonna have everybody cuddle up by a fireplace and sit down and read a book and have a nice libation, glass of wine, a microburr, scotch, whatever you're drinking, and sit down, enjoy something and feel comfortable with it.

And then the other aspect of the book is too. We. We went digital too. We went online. So we had. There's a website called Brown Atlantic Nexus.com that shows the fly plates. So the biggest thing. So the fly plates are in the book. They're at the back of the book. They're not as large as most like in selectivity, the flight plates are really big. I decided that no matter how you do fly plates, you never get the real aspect of a 3, 3D dimensional taking that fly in your hand and holding it up to your eye. So the biggest problem with books that. That have fly patterns in them in fly plates as you'll never feel comfortable on how to tie that fly. So what do people do today when they want to tie fly? You go to YouTube and you learn how to tie by somebody sitting there. So if I want to learn how to tie Kelly Galloup Sex Dungeon, I go to YouTube and I look at Kelly Galloup tying to YouTube, a sex dungeon. And I don't. The materials in a book, it just like, it's like underwhelming because you stack the hair on top this way and you push it this way and then you stack this on the. Yeah, it sounds good, but I really know what the hell you're talking about.

So with Nexus, we took the fly place, we put them online for people to see and then we put the recipes there. But you could micro zoom in with the beauty of pixels and technology to zoom right into how the thread is wrapped. Which you can't do that with print media. That's why print media is really suffering today. Print media is, unless you start romancing print media, unless you start hooking up print media with digital cyber media, Internet media. And that's what I'm trying to do with this book. So I'm going to start doing podcasts on Nexus and I'm, I'd love to have Marvin Cash talk, someday I'm doing podcast. So I'm going to take all people that are in feature. There's probably over 100 people featured in Nexus and do podcasts. I want the book to be a living, real time book.

So the biggest problem with books today is that you buy them, you read them, you toss them on a shelf, they gather dust, you sell them at a garage sale or bargain basin because if you done, it's a dead knowledge. So if you keep something, make it real time cyber, constantly updating it and constantly going back and saying, you know, this is what's happening. Scientific world. This guy's coming up and there's some new patterns that he came up, he had his first pattern in this book, but now you got to make it constantly evolving. And that's what fly fishing is, a living science. It's not a sport. See, sport is something we do by kicking and throwing things. Okay, that's sport. This is art. Form and science combining together is what fly fishing is, whether we like it or not. It's not really a sport, it's an artistic endeavor. And that's what I'm trying to do with this book.

Marvin Cash: That's really interesting. And when did they, You've articulated the problem you were trying to solve. When did the light bulb go off for you that you wanted to do something a little bit different with Nexus as opposed to some of your previous bugs?

Matt Supinski: Yeah, because, well, you know, everything today is through the nut. I mean the blogs, through the net, you know, podcasts, I mean everything is. Everybody goes to the net. And you know, book sales are just diminishing dramatically because they're just stale. There's print is only. You read it and you're done with it and you got it, you got to make something living in life. So I just kept seeing another book published about the same subject with the same boring textbook writing, the same old blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, fly fishing, be honest with you. We've been living in the dark ages for the last 10 years.

The 70s and 60s and 50s, which were much more exciting. And it late 1800s, early 1900s was really exciting. You had Muse and Sawyer, and people were thinking back then, and unfortunately, technology has taught us not to think anymore. It's like, do and produce bigger, better, faster, more now. That's all it is. Bigger fit are more now. Yeah, you lost that.

Marvin Cash: Yeah. What scares me is, you know, you look at the industry data and, you know, almost half the people in the United States that fly fish in a given year only fish two to four days a year.

Matt Supinski: Right.

Marvin Cash: And so you take that industrialization that we're kind of putting into our culture with that amount of, time on the water, and it makes it really challenging to, you know, move the sport forward.

Matt Supinski: Yeah. So I think if we start romancing it and start teaching more, you know, like, they have, like, now in Michigan, we have salmon in the classroom. So we have like, you know, DNR gives the. Each, each pro, each school an aquarium tank, and they teach the kids how to raise salmon in the craft rooms. They come, the American, excuse me, the Atlantic Salmon Federation does it. Michigan does it. So every school in the state has salmon in the classroom. They give them baby wild chinook salmon eggs, and they get to raise them and feed them. And then when they raise them to a certain level, they take them to the stream and they stock them and they go to the stream and they do the stream cleanup, and they learn to turn rocks over and they learn to look at bugs. And that's what, you know, we have to become kids again is basically what I'm trying to promote.

Sounds really queer, but we have to look back and become less mechanical in our thinking and become more, you know, wild, like a child. I mean, because when we used to go out, we used to, like, be fascinated by stakes and turning over rocks and digging this. You know, you're captivated by the natural world. And I think the natural world is begging people to get more in touch with it. And fly fishing is a great way. That's what I did with Nexus. I'm like, next time you go to the stream, take a little bag with you, because you might find some wild mushrooms. You can. Some chanterelles. You can find some morels, you can find this. You can find edible greens, you can find fiddleheads. So if the fishing slow, sit down the river and watch nature performance. It's the greatest show of nature around you. But we just have one thing in thought. Get out of the car, we pound our feet, we run to the stream, we, we pound the shit out of the water like crazy because we're just, we're just productive animals. We do it on our jobs, we do it in the stock market. We do it. Everything we do is a, methodical, you know, and it just gotta stop. Society has to slow down. Fly fishermen have to slow down, soak it all in. And you'll have much more rewarding experience if you do.

Marvin Cash: Yeah, no, I couldn't agree anymore. Where, can folks find your books, Matt?

Matt Supinski: They'll be at the Virginia Fly Fishing and Wine Festival. They could, you could buy them there. Great Lakes Fly Fishing has been having big booth. Glenn Blackwood is probably the biggest fly book connoisseur in the world right now. This guy is, he is a book guru and he's going to have his book set up at those I think both shows. And then of course Amazon, of course Skyhorse. Your local fly shops. You know, go to your local fly shops, try to patronize your fly shops. I mean buy local, buy American, buy local, buy. You know the guy down the street that would love to have your business and and I'll be able, I will be selling them on our new brown Atlantic nexus.com also autographed. I'm gonna be doing a signature series of some of my cool new wiggle nymph patterns and things of that nature. So yeah, it's available everywhere. And it makes good reading for the whole family. I mean there's something in it for somebody especially history buffs and nature buffs and things of that nature.

Marvin Cash: Well that's great. Yeah. And I'll drop a I'll drop a link to some of the places you can find them online in the show notes. And I'm sure you know, I know you're going to be in Virginia at the Virginia Fly Fishing and Wine Festival. What other shows are you heading during the show season in early 2019?

Matt Supinski: Yeah, so I'll be there. Then I'm to, going, going to be doing a banquet at Miami Valley Fly Casters, meeting in Dayton, Ohio, then off to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Donegal TU that Wednesday. And then I'm going to Upper Marlboro, fly fishing show that weekend and Then, then to Edison Fly Fishing show, then to Farmington, River Valley Associations meeting and then to fly Fishing Wing Shooting show and then to his Texas, Bose Texas show and then a ton of speaking engagements between those, although. So I'm going to be moving around a lot this year. So, and off to Europe this summer to promote in Scotland and in Germany, Austria. So I'll be around, I'll be in your neck of the woods.

And then, just to note, I'm doing a really quick, cool specialty class on Friday about how to catch big brown trout in tailwaters, spring creeks, little tiny streams. At the show. It's a first come first search. Attendance. It's a private clinic for people that want to learn how to catch big brown trout and trout in general. Through my process of selectivity and nexus, which I combined the two together and it gives you a framework to really understand how to catch and it really appeals to the Northeast, to the Mid Atlantic because, you know, Virginia has great rivers. I fished the South Holston last year. I was totally amazed how great that river is. I mean that, that is one beautiful tailwater with wild brown trout. You got Mossy Creek, you got spring creeks, you got mountain streams, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania. I mean that whole Mid Atlantic is saturated with awesome brown trout fishing and spring creeks, tailwaters, freestone.

So I'm doing a class on Friday. Sign up now. Get in touch with Virginia Fly Fishing Wine Festival's website. This is going to be a cool in depth. I'm going to be doing programs throughout the show, but this one's pretty in depth on how to combine selectivity and nexus into really understanding the mind of a brown trout and how to get into their brains and learn a lot in a short period of time.

Marvin Cash: Well, that's fantastic. Yeah, I'll put a link to your class in the show notes too. And I assume that a lot of your speaking engagements are on your website and you've got one for the lodge and one for the book. You want to give those to folks so they can jot them down.

Matt Supinski: Yes. So my appearance dates are going to be at Brown Atlantic Nexus website. So if you go to Brown Atlantic Nexus, all one word, that's the website for the book and there's a, there's an appearance calendar on there so they can look at the appearances. And we're just updating it today. We're updating it more because I'm just getting more and more program, scheduled right now. So, but that's got the latest. But it'll have more, then I'll be at both show. But you know, it's going to be a fun winner, I hope. Hopefully the weather cooperates. But, that's, that's the plan. But, yeah, so I'm, you know, what we're trying, what I'm trying to do is trying to restore the beauty of what was back in the 70s and 80s and 60s and 50s and that's what Nexus tells the tale. So it's sort of like retro, like retro music became popular again. And I had a publisher that actually his dad was, you know, he understood the concept and it's technical. I mean it's as, it's as technical as you want to be because there's some pretty crazy stuff in there, technical wise, but then it's simplicity and combining that is one giant, you know, artistic canopy that you have the ability to take what you want out of it at any given point in time.

Marvin Cash: Well, that's fantastic. Well Matt, I really appreciate you joining me and look forward to seeing you in a, in a few weeks, up in Virginia.

Matt Supinski: Very good. Well, it's great talking Marvin, and can't wait to fish with you again. And I'm sure we'll get together for a drink or something in Virginia and keep up the great work.

Marvin Cash: No, I appreciate it. And just give a shout out to our sponsor, the Virginia Fly Fishing and Wine Festival. And everyone, thanks for joining me in the new year. And I'd love it if you go to iTunes and review the show and you can find this podcast pretty much much anywhere podcasts live, if you don't want to do that an easy way, if you go to the website and subscribe to the mailing list, you'll get all of our blog posts and all of our podcast episodes, every Saturday morning delivered to your mailbox. Thanks everybody in tight lines. Have a great day, Matt.

Matt Supinski: Take care now.