August 30, 2025 • 51 mins
This week on the Talon Outdoors Show, Charlie Strickland, JD Johnson, Captain Paul Tyre, and Fred Conrad welcome special guests Dale Bessy and Jim McClellan. From swapping tractor tales and redneck ingenuity with buckets and hose clamps, to diving deep into the fate of the Apalachicola River, the crew covers it all. Jim shares the long fight against dredging, the river’s history, and the stakes for Florida’s future.
Thanks, as always, to Captain Paul Tyre for joining the show. If you’re interested in going fishing with Paul, visit his Facebook page.
Check out our archive of podcasts here: https://ihr.fm/36mzYjf.
Follow the Talon Training Group and Range on Facebook @TalonRange.
Listen live to the Talon Outdoors Show from 10-11 a.m. ET on 100.7 WFLA!
WFLA Tallahassee Live stream: https://ihr.fm/3huZWYe
Follow WFLA Tallahassee on Twitter @WFLAFM and like us on Facebook at @wflafm.
Thanks, as always, to Captain Paul Tyre for joining the show. If you’re interested in going fishing with Paul, visit his Facebook page.
Check out our archive of podcasts here: https://ihr.fm/36mzYjf.
Follow the Talon Training Group and Range on Facebook @TalonRange.
Listen live to the Talon Outdoors Show from 10-11 a.m. ET on 100.7 WFLA!
WFLA Tallahassee Live stream: https://ihr.fm/3huZWYe
Follow WFLA Tallahassee on Twitter @WFLAFM and like us on Facebook at @wflafm.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
And welcome to the Town Outdoor Show. I'm Charlie j D.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Captain Paul Tyr and Dell and I'm grabbed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
There we go, Fred Fred Fred had something he had
to do today, unfortunately, I think he had attend the funeral.
So and uh, but we are not in that. I'm
not attitude with him not being here. I'm actually a
little sighted. I might get a word in edgewise.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
I'm gonna hide that. I'm gonna hide that thing over there,
just in the corner for when Fred comes back. I
got something for him. He just don't know what it is.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
All like loud noises and you sure made one. But anyhow, well,
welcome to the show again. He appreciate y'all. Just mose
it on in here, filled in at a great time.
We might have a guest later in the show. We
just got to wait and see if he shows up.
But as always, we're glad to have you here. Well,
that's good to be here, man.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
I'll tell you what I was gonna tell all y'all
about fishing with old Captain.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Paul last Sunday. That was fun.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Yeah, I went out there on the Big Lake and
caught some bass. It's called some big bass.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Really, yeah, that's that's you normally catching red fish and.
Speaker 4 (01:11):
Were getting even like in this baths.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
We're going, we're gonna be doing that Sunday. I got
a trip playing Sunday going after red fish.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
I'll tell you what. This weather's turning a little nice.
Speaker 5 (01:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Somebody somebody called me to us says, hey, I need
to get some birds and quail from you. With this
nice weather, I want to put some birds out. And
I went, nice weather, what's he talking about. I got
up and walked outside and went, oh cow, this is
nice weather, sixty something degrees in the morning. I was like, oh,
I like this. So I went and caught him some
birds to go work with his dog a little bit.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
I hope it holds out because as this show is airing,
I'll be riding that massy ferguson with a with a
bush hog and a and or a tiller behind it,
playing food plots.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Oh well, talking about I got on my daddy's tractor
that I've been working on, you know, for forty John
Deer and I've been working on it for a while
and it's been We had it over here at to
range for a while and took it back home, and
you know, it's just an old nineteen seventy eight, seventy nine,
old school John Deer with no electronics, no death nothing,
(02:15):
old school, the most common John Deer out there when
they still made them, you know, without all electronics and craziness.
And uh, man, I put I put a bunch of
money in that thing new. It's got a cab, air conditioner,
all new parts on it. And I'm kind of I
fit when I work on air conditioners, they work about
ten percent of the time. But I got out there
with a sprayer. I had the old tractor. I had
(02:37):
another old tractor, and I said, I'm gonna get out
here and spray, but it's an open cab, and I said, man,
I really don't want to be breathing these chemicals like
I used to. And I looked over there at that
tractor and I said, you know what, I'm I'm done
with that thing. Let me go get on that big tractor.
And I got out there and went out and sprayed
round up on about sixteen acres to kill everything I planned.
(02:59):
Because it didn't come up right, I'm just gonna start
over again in the spring with some new new grass
and just riding that old tractor just felt good, you know,
got daddy's tractor, got a new cab, kid in it,
foamed and all that stuff just being on on my
daddy's tractor that I used to drive on right on
when I was in high school. And uh, there he is,
I guess just showed up. Well we wait nowhere he
(03:22):
missed first. He can be on the second segment, so
we uh, We're gonna talk about some river related stuff
here in a minute. But anyway, it was an awesome
It was an awesome feeling to go out there and
actually do something. I put a ton of money in
that tractor just so like go spray one field. I
don't know if I'm gonna.
Speaker 4 (03:37):
Use it again after that, but everything worked right.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Yeah, Yeah. I got to go back in the top
of the cab and readjust some are blow or motor
stuff that I apparently didn't bolt down right. I hit
a couple of bumps and then things started squeeling, so
I got to get up there and resecure some things.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
But all Baylor wire, you know.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Uh, so I got some elect defence are there, and
I was thinking about driving to get some self tapping
screws and some wire and putting a loop in it
and holding it down with that, or the more modern
equivalent of that.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Is hose clan clamps use hos Doug tape.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
But I found I found on Amazon this. They got
a roll of the hose clamp cabling with the little
spiral stuff the hose clamp material, and then it comes
with the little screw parts that tighten it up and
you cut it to length and.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Then man, that can build a house. I hadn't known
about that.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
I didn't know. I've never seen that before. We used
to take like seven of those hose clamps, straighten them
out and connect them off where you had to have
different places. And then yeah, but now it's uh now
you can get it by you can get it to link. Yeah,
and uh, man, I got I'm using that for all
kinds of stuff. That's what I would have. That's what
I would have used. I mean, you use hose clamps
(04:54):
like mountain flagpoles on stuff. And and h I found
that the hawks woul leave my chickens along if I
get this little sparkly tape and hang it to a
piece of PVC pipe over the chicken coop, really flapping
in the wind.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
And stuff, or do they hit that tape?
Speaker 1 (05:08):
So cowbirds off of your dock too, so they don't
crap all over the dock rail down out of pond.
I'm just saying now it looks like some white trash
lives there.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
But well, oh well.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Get me some some tires and bar them in the
yard and paint the white. Put some pink flamingos.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Out there with the shoe fits.
Speaker 5 (05:26):
Put.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
I just offended somebody. Somebody just said, well, I always
had them growing up.
Speaker 5 (05:31):
That's a trailer park.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
I grew up in Man.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
My granddaddy Johnson used to grow He used to grow peppers.
And he found an old washed up an old washing
machine somewhere. Yeah, take the old galvanized or that enamel.
Back then it was a little tub enamel plated or
enamel coated. The tubs out of the water and had
holes in them and everything makes great planters. They were
half a dozen of them all around his yard with
(05:55):
peppers and flowers and whatever else growing then. I'm not
just sunk down in the ground and filling with dirt.
And they drained well because they've got holes in them.
And uh, there's what a group peppers in So it
is what it is. That's that's the thing about rednecks.
They can make do with the all kinds of stuff that.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Theyll if you're on how about stuff to put stuff in.
Like if you go to loads or home depot or
anywhere and you get those little three dollars blue buckets.
Those things are awesome for about six months and then
they dry rotten apart. But if you are on a
farm and you got hydraulic fluid or motorol and you
get those five gallon buckets. Now, they used to have
(06:30):
to cut the top those little slots and pry that
thing off. They make tools to do that with. Nowadays
they got like a little zip plastic thing. You just
pull it like a table and zips around there and
you can pull it off of your hands. Those buckets
right there, man, those things to steal. The steel buckets
might have plast them. It's just a thicker, heavier, better
(06:50):
because they have to put motorol and stuff in it.
It's not like those cheap ones that you use for
for shopping. I mean, I got to loads, I always
get a bucket because you throw everything.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Well, back in the day, paint used to come in
steel five gallon buckets for commercial painters would buy paint
that came in a steel five gallon bucket lid came
off of. And my best friend Donovan growing up, his
dad was a painter. He that's what he did. Mister
Weeks painted, he painted. If you needed a house painted,
he painted. You know, that's what everybody in Chatahooche hired
him to paint stuff. And so Donovan always had a
pile of them steel buckets and we used to go
(07:23):
run sucker nets and fish at night and it was cold.
I mean, you run sucker nets in the wintertime and
catch some old humpy suckers in Ochi se pond. And
we take them steel buckets and put about six inches
of dirt in the bottom of it, fill it up
with charcoal and lighter fluid, lighter fluid over in there,
(07:44):
and set it in the middle of the boat. Well,
you got the sand on there that keeps the boat
from getting hot. That you warm you get man, you
talk about a great heater. That was a fantastic heater.
So we had our own little portable fire pit, if
you will. And that's how we stayed warm out there
at thirty degree in the middle of the night, running
running running sucker nets.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Be careful not to burn your boat down.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Well, no, you it's insulated with it.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Yeah, you're right, you know, so you can't do that
with a plastic bucket.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
That's why I thought, that's what I thought you was
talking about one of them steel buckets. Man, you do
all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
You can still there's still stuff that comes in steel buckets. Yeah,
it's like, you know, different kinds of barn.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
I just taught everybody. I just I just taught everybody something.
You have a You didn't know it, but you had
a portable fire pit, right, Put you some, put you some,
put you some charcoal rekeets in there and light them up.
Speaker 4 (08:32):
There you go, I'm gonna try I'm gonna try that.
It's winter in the pond ting boat.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
There you go, I'm gonna do it. You just make
sure to put the sand in there. Don't put it don't.
You gotta put the sand in the bottom of the bucket,
because one you don't want it to turn You don't
want it to turn over in the boat. So you
put all about six eight inches of sand in the
bottom of it. So you got a good heavy bucket there,
and then that sand is going to insulate the.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
So you don't have like a milt pasture turf on
the bottom, Okay, because because he had that, then that
metal might conduct enough heat that melted or.
Speaker 4 (09:02):
Do have dry digg it's rubber?
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Yeah, well, yeah, you might want to. This was in
an old luminium john boat that we were doing this,
an old aluminum john boat that we had paddled out
there in the middle of the night.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
You know, we just set it on top of some
cinder blow.
Speaker 4 (09:14):
Now you got those they got heaters with a propane
I'm thinking, yeah, we don't knock that thing over catching
a big.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
Those propane heaters, you knock them over, they'll turn all this.
But I did have one of them. I was me
and my son Justin when he was a little boy.
We were in the groundbline out here one morning. It
was about twenty degrees frost everywhere. We're in that ground
line and the only can I could find, the only
propane can I could find, I had a little bit
of rust around the uh, the threads on it. Long
(09:40):
story short, that thing caught fire. With me and him
in the ground line. I removed the ground line and
we ran like this. Lad's gonna blow us up. It
caught fire. There's like the scared us of did and
you didn't kill anything of that, but no, we did not.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
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restoration dot com. And we're back, So let's go ahead
and get started. We have Jim mcclell and our old
(10:57):
buddy back again. Last time you want to show, we
were talking about the book I found at the CVS
one day about the Apolotic Cola River and all the
old school stuff, and we had I encourage you all
to go back and listen to that episode. Was a
good show. And since that time I started following you
in detail. Well not too much to thank stalking you're
(11:18):
nothing to me, but stalking. We you know, we started
reconnecting and everybody in here is of like mine. But
uh I noticed. But before we get to the business
of the day, you know, I do know that you're
the chairman of the Riparian County Stakeholders Coalition, which is
a nonprofit. I guess I only know if I said
(11:38):
that right, you said.
Speaker 5 (11:39):
It absolutely right, and if I'm chairman, and if I
accomplished one thing in that organization, it's going to be
to change the word Repairian to river.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
H Yeah, because I don't know where perian means. Well,
it means along the river. And I told the guy
who came and that should be reverian. I'm not ripairing,
because unless you're trying to fix it, you are trying
to fix the river. So I mean, there you go,
we are repairing the apple that's Cola River.
Speaker 5 (12:04):
That's exactly the issue I run into frequently there.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
But what well, I was wondering where that county was
because there's six seven counties in the state and I'm
pretty sure that ain't one of them. But you're six
counties together, So I was thinking, well, maybe it meant
something about to do with sick. Maybe it's an Indian
word for six counties or something. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
So y'all just stop.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Hey, you from where we're from, you know what this.
I know you're in communications and marketing and all that
for a living. So y'all, y'all use big words. Not no,
we don't. Oh you know, well, you just got back
from Scotland.
Speaker 5 (12:36):
I did it did. It was a wonderful trip to
leave ninety degrees one hundred degree weather in Florida and
be cold in Scotland.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Was that was one of the best parts of Did
you take the right kind of clothes with you?
Speaker 5 (12:52):
I did? I was actually cold one night and then
they had what they considered a heat wave for the
last couple of days we were there, which it got
up to eighty.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
Bless their heart, that's winter time for us.
Speaker 5 (13:03):
They one air conditioner in Edinburgh sky. Those folks were
hating life. They were cussing up and down.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
What's the humidity like there?
Speaker 5 (13:15):
As many? He wasn't all that bad. The last night
we spent in the hotel room with no air conditioning
and we opened the window and didn't do any good.
And it was that night was humid.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Huh yeah. Here I hear BRIT's talking about the heat
waves and as we're dying over here, and you know,
in all fairness, they don't. They don't have to deal
with with it like we have to know how to
deal with it or we die. Uh yeah, they don't.
They don't get it's one hundred and ten and feels
like one hundred and sixteen and you know, oh.
Speaker 5 (13:46):
Yeah, they're good with zero eighty there.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Yeah, so what what's uh? So, let's were we gonna
get through this segment? We got that half their five
minutes at the bottom. We'll talk about something else and
we'll come back in the third segment talk more about this.
But so I was reading I saw your article in
The Democrat, your our opinion piece on behalf of the river,
So most of us don't know what's going on, and
(14:11):
what I've seen in brief, my understanding is that we
and you can give us some history of the river
and what what what it was used for and what
happened to it and what damage it did, and then
tell us about what's going on now. So in this segment,
let's focus on the history, and then when we come back,
(14:32):
we'll bounce back into what's going to happen and what
we What you envisioned could be a better solution.
Speaker 5 (14:40):
All right, well I'm having to do it. You know
that this is all stemming from the fact that the
corp of Engineers now wants to restart dredging on the
Apological River.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
They're talking about dredging, not just snagging, but dredge. Dredging
okay for commercial traffic inficial.
Speaker 5 (14:56):
Now here's the thing. They're pitching all this under the
guise of navigation. We're going to do this for navigation.
We spent one hundred million dollars fixing the dams and
the locks on the system, all good things, fully supportive of.
Then they want to restore navigation. Absolutely, we're good with that.
They want to go back to dredging exactly like they
(15:16):
did for fifty years until Florida finally both the economy.
It was always a losing economic battle, but finally the
combination of the economy in Florida under Jeb Bush denying
the permits to dunk their sand, that's when they stopped.
(15:36):
And the reason that we denied the permit is over
that course, over the course of that fifty or so
years that they were dredging, even more than that, I
think maybe sixty or seventy years, they were blowing sand
out of the river, piling up on sand bars, blowing
it directly out onto the banks. They were clogging up
sloughs and creeks and things like that.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
Used to watch that go on as a kid.
Speaker 5 (15:58):
Yeah, And I have a Callahun County Record article from
nineteen sixty four. If you won't know how I'm taking
I'm a second generation on this fight. My father and
three of the guys from Bluntstown went up to Washington,
d C. In nineteen sixty four to meet with Congressman
Don Fuquay to complain about the corp of Engineers. And
(16:21):
the way my father told the story was Don took
them over to meet the three or four star general
that was in charge of the corps, and he padded
them on the back, said no problem, I understand your concerns,
and by god, I'll have my colonel from Mobile come
over there and he'll sit down with y'all and y'all
can work it out. And so the article is kind
of celebratory. You know, they got up there, they got
(16:42):
the you know, they got the job done well. My
father said, the core colonel did come over to Bluntstown
and sat down with them, and Daddy said, they went
through you know, here's here's all our concerns. You're blowing
all this stuff out there. You're straightening these these challenges.
You're messing up the river, and we need you to
kind of figured out a way not to do that.
And the colonel told him, what are the corp of engineers.
(17:07):
If you don't like what we're doing, get Congress to
change the laws. But we do what we do, and
we do it by our standards, and if you don't
like it, you go pounds in And honestly, to be
honest with what I've seen in the last fifteen twenty
years kind of being engaged in this, you know, at
various various ways in different levels. It's not much changed.
(17:31):
This is an organzam. Go back to this. Everybody would
understand before the Corp of Engineers ever touched that river,
before they ever knew there was a river there to
mess with. For nine months out of the year, you
could reliably bring barges up the river. And you know,
we had paddle boats on the river for years and
years and years barges come up. The problem was that
(17:55):
three months out of the year, navigation up that river
was unreliable. If it was what er, you might not
be able to get your barges up. Now, here's the
common sense part of this word. This is where this is.
I always tell people, here's the situation. Our boats don't
fit on your river part of the year. It is
(18:19):
only the United States Army Corps of Engineers that looks
at that problem and says, well, obviously we got to
fix your river. Yeah. This is an organization that has
been second guessing God for more than two hundred years now,
despite the fact they've been wrong every time.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
Yeah, and absolutely destroy as my granddaddy called it. They
dug that nine foot deep ditch down the middle of
the river and pulled every log and anything that the
bass could hide behind out of it. And you know,
my grandparents moved to Chattahoochee, I want to say, probably
in the really early nineteen fifties when Gulf Power was
(18:59):
putting in the the power plant over there. And he
just talked about the difference between the quality of the
river and the fishing and all that stuff between that
time and when the Core started dredging and digging and
cutting that ditch as he called it. And just you know,
I grew up on it when they were when it
was navigable and had buoys out and dredged it and
(19:22):
all that. It was still good, but it wasn't near
what it had been when they left it alone.
Speaker 5 (19:28):
Well, And that's the thing that a lot of people,
and this is one of the reasons I'm on this
show right now, a lot of people remember that when
there was navigation on that river, things were better. You know,
the oysters were healthy, blah blah blah blah blah blah fish.
But there's two components to navigate. And if I could
(19:48):
put a billboard up and say this, boats floating on water,
they don't float on the ditches. The corp of Engineers
when they restore navigation, they'll tell you about the dredging
and all. What they don't tell you is is that
they also have to then release enough water upstream to
float those barriers. So now our first shot out of
(20:11):
the bag in our first conversations, what we've said to
them is, if you know you're going to have to
release water anyway, why not start with that and then
see what you actually have to dredge to keep a
reasonable navigation window open. Yeah, and what we run into
is bureaucracy and that, and we can get into a
(20:34):
lot more detail about that, but basically that's the heart
of the problem is is the corp of Engineers does
not want to return to They do not want to
do this. They ran into a bus all, they had
to fight with Florida for years and years and years,
have the permits denied, got bad press, and they don't
want to go down that road again. So what they're
(20:55):
offering up now because Congress is making them do this.
Congress has told them you you're going to do this.
So now what they're going to do is, this is
the way I read the situation is they're going to
offer us two choices. Either we do we go back
to exactly what we were doing before two thousand and
(21:16):
four or nothing. And if you've got a different idea,
we have about a month to submit, not just an idea,
a full fledged proposal of how they should do it different.
That is the biggest bureaucratic lazy.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Yeah. Well, have they fixed the locks and all that
the dam and that's in progress.
Speaker 5 (21:44):
Okay, that's gonna take a while, I think.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
So what are they going to do about the Georgia
and Lake Lanier not releasing water from up there to
get down here? Where are they going to get the
water from because that's really the problem with the flint
in the chattoocha is and short stopped.
Speaker 5 (22:01):
They control all of them. Yeah, right there, they can
turn dials up there. You know, there's a guy named
James Hathorne at the core who is the water manager.
And you see barge traffic now on that river and
that's because when they need it, they turned the dials
in a waterfl.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
So below the DWN, you see bars traffic.
Speaker 5 (22:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
Yeah, it's been years since I had spent a lot
of haven't spent nearly as much time over there as
I did my my youth, But it's been a long
time since I've seen a barge.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
All right, well, we're gonna We're gonna be back in
a couple of minutes, and we may change the topic
of discussion a little bit on the bottom of the hour.
So our talent didn't come back to this, so Tyll
has the audience can.
Speaker 5 (22:41):
Pick up on. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
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desk all day? Do you have pain radiating down your
leg or down the arm? Called doctor Joseph Miller, d C.
At the Tallahassee Spine Center and ask about spinal decompression
therapy at eight five zero five eight zero five two.
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in Row Street, one mile south of the Capitol. Visit
the website southside more dot com. Hand we're back. So
when we left, we were talking about, you know, dredging
and the Army Corps and their role with the river.
(23:43):
And so I remember growing up seeing the dredging, you know,
because I thought that was as a kid, I'm like, hey,
that's cool, but what are they doing, you know, And
Daddy was, you know, well, they're trying to keep it
where the barges coming. And then the big barges had
come by, and you know, and I thought that was
cool as a kid because I had no idea about
the environment or anything. It was just it was just,
(24:03):
you know, we're catching fish.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
There's a tugboat going up tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Cool dad. Daddy would just sit there and he, you know,
he'd wait for the wake and then we you know whatever,
and it would go on and I'm sitting there watching
it go off in the distance. Because I'm a kid,
it's like watching the train go by. To me, it
was just the coolest thing in the world, And you know,
I had no idea. But but and Jady and I
were talking the other day about the economic impact that
when they quit doing a lot of that, and I
(24:29):
think a lot of us is a sign of the
times and away transportation worked back in the day, and
so now we've been more reliant on trucks and maybe
trains to do a lot of stuff that barges used
to do. Do you see the ability for barges to
navigate the river and Lake Seminole went all the way
up and back with other methods?
Speaker 5 (24:51):
Oh yeah, it's and even even tri rivers waterway development
and their pot which represents Georgia and Alabama. And I
think a couple of New Jackson and against and may
have a couple of representatives on that. Uh, they're the
ones who are really pushing this and it's their member
of companies who will benefit a lot from it. They
(25:12):
have said, we don't need to return to what we
were doing back in the day. We can there's ways
to do this that are less intrusive than what we
used to do. And so everybody recognizes that technology has
changed and nobody's got anything I don't we don't have
anything against barges. We think it's you know, we're good
(25:32):
with it. We want them to prosper. We don't agree
with them that there's as much economic benefit as they
say there is to Florida. And if we would have
seen that while they were maybe just barges.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
Up, how long would it take for that to even
come back? I mean, because you don't have anything on,
no infrastructure on the river.
Speaker 5 (25:51):
Anymore, it will be it'll be years before they actually
could start doing it. The problem is, if you ever
work with government, is the deceis are being made right now,
The irreversible decisions are going to be made here in
the next year and after that. Yeah, it maybe a
couple more years before they started dreading. But if you didn't,
(26:12):
you know, they were't gonna throw their hands up and say, oh, well,
that was the time to enter in on that.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
Was back in So did it come from Congress as
a bill or something or is this an administrative decision
that the current administration made because that's gonna change.
Speaker 5 (26:24):
Well, the authority was already there. They already you know,
it's in their their rules and regulations now that they
can go back to dredging. I mean, they never lost
that ability. All they lost was Florida took away the
ability to We denied them to permit to dump's in
in the banks after years of negotiating with this wasn't Uh.
(26:47):
This happened under Jeb Bush's administration. But Jeb didn't just
wake up one morning and decide that, oh, I don't
want to I don't like this. Starting when I was
working with Lawton Childs, Uh, we were negotiating in good
faith with the Core, trying it if we were taking
evidence to them and telling them, this is caused by
your treasurment. We've got you're filling in these sloughs, and
(27:09):
we show them pen I don't know that they've ever
even acknowledged that image. But right now what's going on
is we're spending thirty million dollars to restore the slows,
starting from south to north, moving upstream, going in and
digging out all of that sand and all that stuff.
But absolutely, bar traffic is fine. It can be done
(27:32):
with lesser scale dredging.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
Absolutely, So they I read something somewhere they were starting
to release more water to try to maintain a seven
foot channel in the river. Now does that sound right?
Speaker 5 (27:48):
And all I've been told directly is that And this
was from the water manager James Hathorne up at the
Corp of Engineers, who said, if they have bars traffic
coming up, they can release more water. That's an administrative decision.
That's not God on might of your Congress. That's within the.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
Power of the I'm just wondering when that starts. So
they're going to go out there and start digging a hole.
It's like, if you build it, they'll come kind of deal.
I mean, is that what it is? Oh?
Speaker 5 (28:17):
Yeah, you'll see an envier, You'll see an economic impact
study that says, you know everything that you know, Brustol
is going to become the next port of Miami, that
it's going to be the Queen Mary Heart anyhow, and.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
We'll be right back.
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six thirteen forty and we're back. So for anybody listening
(29:43):
that had just tuned in, we're talking to Jim McClellan
about the impact that the Army Corps planned the dridge,
the Applecticola River and apparently Lake Simon Old and everything else,
repair all locks, you restore navigation on the river, which
sounds like a great economic boom to the area. Actually
for these economically strapped counties up and down the river.
(30:03):
That don't really mean back in the day there used
to be ports and this and that. It sounds like
a great plan. But I'm sitting here, we're on the break.
We're talking about, Well, who's who's gonna get money in
their pocket from that? Where did the jobs come from?
And how far out is that kind of impact and
how does that really weigh against the environmental impact that
it can have on the river. Most people don't care.
(30:26):
I mean, they just don't because they don't fish the river,
they don't live on the river. They but but but
they shouldn't care on the other way either way, because
there's not gonna put any money anybody's pocket. Who benefits
from this?
Speaker 5 (30:38):
Well, in theory, you know, Try Rivers Waterway Development Association
represents a lot their economic development organization, and so their
goal is to bring in industries. And I think that
they believe that if they can, you know, get reliable
navigation back for several months out of the year, that
they are going to attract and they may have some
(31:01):
prospects out there that will use that navigation that that
will make the difference between you. If they can get
access to reliable access from the from Georgia to the coast,
that they can attract companies that will do that.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
Where's that information that how do you get that information?
Speaker 5 (31:20):
You'd have to talk with uh tri rivers folks. But
they've done an economic impact study. Now I looked at it,
and I've commissioned a few economic impact studies, and the
time when I was paying for it, it actually agreed
with what my position was. Now that's my cautionary note
(31:42):
about it.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
You can impact, Yeah, yeah, I want an impact statement
that says this and that's what you get there.
Speaker 5 (31:48):
Well, there's a reason why you you all appreciate this.
That's the reason why the same people that do economic
studies don't also do business plans, because you know, this
is a this is fantasy and then this is reality.
But I don't have reason to I agree that there's
a probably a really good economic benefit to Georgia and
(32:12):
Alabama for this, I don't. I think that their speculation
about what we get here in Florida is wildly exaggerated.
You know, and I base that on the fact that
we had to see it before. There wasn't It wasn't
like there was tremendous The demand for bar track was
going down. That was already happening long before we had
(32:35):
stopped raating until two thousand and four. Probably by the
early nineties, bar traffic was diminishing. Now, barrigins are very
efficient in terms of you know, that's another environmental thing.
Look at. They're more efficient. You got to transfer bulk.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Or mostly fuel, fertilizer, and gravel. There's basically what went
up and down that river the more than anything.
Speaker 5 (32:57):
I mean, if you got to transport those things. You know,
boats are probably the best best value per mile per
gallon of fuel bit that.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
You have, especially going downstream exactly coming up.
Speaker 5 (33:09):
I don't know there's benefit there. But then what you
have to weigh that against is okay or is there
another alternative? Do we have to go back and do
this like when the history is no, we certainly do not.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
Well, we've kind of been doing it without barges for
a while. I mean, so what you're where, you were trying,
We're going to benefit one industry, okay, but we're going
to be pulling it from other industries. So I mean
there's a balance. There's only a need for so much gravel,
so much grain, so much stuff. So I mean in
the amount of money that's going to take to build
the infrastructure back for the areas that so we used
(33:45):
to go to bluntsdown and drop off grain down there
at the grain mill there's they had. They would load
barges back in the day when I was a little kid.
And Johns Margie is still down there still collect He's
still you go down there. That's where we get our
corn from. I mean, you know that still exists, what's
left of it after the hurricane and they don't load
barges anymore. I mean, but that's what used to happen
(34:08):
down there in Bloodstown, and so there was an industry there,
but it's gone now, Okay, so all that's gone somewhere else.
So let's say you rebuild it. All right, that's great
for one area, but where's it coming from now?
Speaker 2 (34:21):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
I'm a Jackson County resident, you know, if I could
see some benefit the Jackson County.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
Direct, Well, there was a port in Jackson County right
just between the Gulf Fire Plant and the Jim Wood's
Dam and Chattichy. There was a port there, but it
never was super busy.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
Yeah, but is that going to come back? Is that
going to get It would have.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
To be, it would know it's not. It would have
to be. It would have to be rebuilt because of
the condition it's in and hadn't been operated as a
port in years. It's the pilonds are rotten on it.
Speaker 5 (34:45):
Okay. So now what if you think about though, all right,
in terms of economic development, there's some things that exist
now that didn't exist back then, or conditions now that
exists it didn't exist back then. One of them is
aplech Cola is now booming through tourist Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Absolutely, a lot of.
Speaker 5 (35:02):
You know, fishing boats and stuff like that coming in
out out of there, a lot of people coming down
to Saint George Island. What if you had again a marina, campground,
overnight dock for boats in Bluntstown. What if you had
the same thing and we would hitch go? What if
tour boats like Captain Gill down there, former Vietnam Marine
(35:23):
tour helicopter pilot runs a tour boat down in Aapolo
a Chicola. Captain Gill could come all the way up.
He had a place to go to bring people to
go to dinner. I'll tell you this, one small boat
stopping and buying something is worth every other boat passings
by in going somewhere else. That's a much more realistic
thing that can happen without intensive capital development, which.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
Well i've been. I said something to Charlie other day.
You know, if I was, if I win the eight
hundred million dollars lottery or whatever it is, I'm gonna
buy a dagum paddle boat, rig it out like you
see in Savannah and you see in New Orleans or whatever,
and have a come to Chattahoochee, get on the paddle boat,
go for a dinner, cruise, have a good time whatever
(36:07):
it is, and then come back and go home. And
you would. The beauty of that river to me, eclipses
any potential commerce you might get out of it, just
the sheer natural beauty of that river. And I don't
I don't know. Maybe there's no market for it. Maybe
somebody has done an economical study, economic study to see
if there's a market for something like that.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
But I'll come on down to JD's White Trash tour.
We're gonna get of, We're gonna crack open a beer
and slide down the river and look at it right
on the sand.
Speaker 5 (36:38):
You laugh, you laugh at that. But there are people,
I guarantee you who would dearly love to come back
and have a fish and authentic experience. That's what people
looking for. That's the thing that we have that's starting
to disappear. And if we hold onto it and play
it right, things like that that we think are silly
and we think are routine, there's a lot of people
(36:59):
who think, you know, that's pretty neat.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
How many times you go through the mountains and stop
at some little roadside thing and get out and look
at some of the local you know, the old trades
and the museum type stuff and the things going on
and the cultural things that people go to and they
want to see, you know, homesteadings making a return. Everybody's
going back to that, you know, to do something. I mean,
(37:21):
and you know, I laugh, But what Jad's talking about
is not a bad business plan to do something like that,
because people would go there. They're always looking for that experience.
And know, we ain't mind parently you can go do that'.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
Like I said, if I won, If I win the
lottery there, I'm not gonna tell anybody, but there will
be signs. Yeah, I guys, I do.
Speaker 4 (37:43):
I do numerous ho tours a year. Does people come
and want to not really fish and just want to
see an alligator or an ospray er?
Speaker 5 (37:50):
You know what I mean? And think about here that
a lot It's exactly right, and it seems, you know,
to us who grew up around it, we take it
for granted.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
We we absolutely make it for granted. That's exactly right.
Speaker 5 (38:01):
Here's another thing that I'd love to see pop up
and return again is those old fish camps. Yeah, yeah,
you know those You could revive those things and turn
them into you know, just sort of the back with
like you know, like like you're talking about the mountains.
We got up there and we stay in these cabins
and people just doing that.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
Well yeah, well I mean when we we uh Jady's
take them out Mississippi to duck hunt years ago an
old fish camp Lake Show Tar, Yeah, went up there
and there was a fish it was a fish camp.
Speaker 2 (38:33):
Right, and then Lake Show fish camp.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
Yeah, and they did they did duck hunting part of
a year and most of the year it was fishing
and a nice place to stay. And you know, right
there on one of the lakes along the river. Why
not you know, yeah, it doesn't.
Speaker 5 (38:49):
And and what we're talking about, does it prevent that
from happening. It enables that to happen. We could still
have a port that has a you know, you can
still have commercial cargo coming in. You can still get
it's market. But this is much more realistic and much
more get it done now.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
Yeah, I agree. I hate to see them. I hate
to see them ruin the and they and they did
when they, like you said, because some of the attraction
to me on those rivers are the slews and the
little lakes and the ox bows and places that it
just are still very to a degree, very natural.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
That didn't take me fishing on the river. It took
me fishing up the sloughs. That's where we caught the fish.
You know, we'll be right back.
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Speaker 1 (40:42):
So we were talking a little bit on the break
and can't make these points and they'll brought up something
about the effect on apple atic coal bay and oysters.
So before we get to the channel stuff, what what
is your understanding of I mean, you said on a
break that nutrients feed to oysters. It comes from sediment
and then the dredging can affect that in some way.
(41:03):
What was your understanding of that.
Speaker 5 (41:05):
Well, there's two things. There's all the dredging you're you're
putting sand out in the floodplain, and that is interfering
with the flow of nutrients to the oysters. But one
of the things the CORE did when they ended, when
they when they finally said okay, we're not going to
manage the Apalachical River from navigation, they turned off the
(41:27):
spigot up stream. Now, if you talk to them, they
will say, act of God, it was a drought, we
couldn't do anything about it, or whatever the truth is.
When they stopped navigation, when that wasn't part of their mission,
they turned back toward Lake Landeer and said, okay, now
Atlanta water supply is what we're gonna focus on. That's
gonna be the top priority. And so that's when we
(41:49):
started getting.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
Into you bacialist. Y'all don't need the water down there,
so we're gonna keep it up here.
Speaker 5 (41:55):
Your radio fans won't be able to see this, but
that was what that was.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
Back to your governor, we're gonna choke y'all offt because
y'all y'all shut us down and you mentioned this, I
think it was on the break, that they view the
river and the lake as a project, not as a
river in a lake.
Speaker 5 (42:13):
It's the right of way.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
Yeah, to them, it's a it's.
Speaker 5 (42:16):
An inefficient right of way. They look at think of
them as dot on the river.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
Yeah, it would be. It would be four lanes if
they could make it in high speed in the whole
nine yards, because that's why they view things from an
engineering point of view, not an environmental point of view
or an local impact point of view. You also mentioned
that the six counties need to stick together because basically
everybody upstream is the dog and where to tail, and
(42:41):
they wag us. And if we don't stick together, that's
what's gonna happen. Is down here, we're just gonna take
whatever they send.
Speaker 5 (42:49):
That's absolutely right. We've got there's six million people in
the greater metropolitan Atlanta area. There's one hundred and fifty
eight thousand in our six counties. And so, and if
you're a Georgia Congress Member of Congress from Georgia, it
doesn't matter what letter you've got out as a d
or any other letter you want to put out there.
(43:11):
You work for the Atlanta Regional Commission, which is home
depot Lows. And you got all those folks or in
the Atlanta or Chamber, not the Regional Commission. But those
are big companies, US Southern company companies like that. They
get tons of money. So that's who they all those
(43:31):
companies want something done that it gets done. The congressman done,
he's got you know, he's got the applage Coltre. He's
our only congressman that's got the aplatcha cult river in
his district. So we don't have political muscle out there.
What we've got is and we can't do anything about
what the court does in the river that's there. They've
(43:53):
got a congressional mandate to do whatever they want to do.
The only thing we've got any control over is the banks.
Speaker 1 (43:59):
And so you said there was a softer solution to this,
It might be more localized solution. What are your thoughts
on that?
Speaker 5 (44:08):
I think and just a few people I've talked to think,
but this is an idea that we can't even consider. Okay,
this is not it. They don't even hear this idea.
But here release the water that you're gonna release us.
See what is a reasonable window of navigation. Maybe it's
right now, it's six months. Right now, it starts no
matter what the river level is. Navigation season starts on
(44:28):
January one, ends on June thirty. I think whatever six
months is from that, no matter what. So why don't
you say, Okay, let's look at when you can actually
move water. Only what makes sense if you release the
water that you're gonna have to release anyway, you know
what you're gonna have to release. Let's stop talking about
the ditch and let's start talking about the water. Boats
float on water, not ditches. You got here and dig
(44:50):
a hole as long as you want to, I mean,
you run you John boat down. You gotta have water,
So give us the water. That's what the washers need.
That's what we need in the slews, increase everything else,
and that's what you need to float the boats. Let's
start with that. And I think what they're gonna find
is there's about three or four high spots that need
to be hit every now and then, and then that
(45:12):
reduces from one hundred and seven miles now we're into
single digit miles if that, and from millions of cubic
yards of sin now we're down into thousands. And once
we get there, doesn't it make sense instead of bringing
the boats or from wherever eased a bid that we
get local contractors come in, let them do it. We
(45:33):
can run it through the RCSC. The counties can share
it like the district's share road raider. You know, it
can be done. We got enough common sense in six counties.
We can work something out. We can take care of that.
Speaker 2 (45:43):
Yeah, well, I mean there is a there is a
value to the sand that comes out, and they were
just putting it wherever they could to get it out
of the way. There is an economic value to the sand.
Speaker 5 (45:55):
And if the core is not doing it, we can
recognize that.
Speaker 1 (45:57):
Well, we used to just kick it off to the
side and then settles and so it's it's you know,
it's like building a sand castle at the beach.
Speaker 2 (46:04):
And you know what happens when they were back when
they were dressing, back when they were dredger, they'd go
dredge river out and they start at one end and
go to the other end, and when they got the
other end, they turn around and come back and then
they get that in it back and.
Speaker 1 (46:15):
Forth, and they didn't care where it went.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
And the didn't care about.
Speaker 5 (46:17):
Here's here's what the here's what the core is graded
on now. So I mean we look at that and say,
what didn't make any sense? But if you're the the
colonel in charge of the corp of Engineers, you're ready
to do your your officer your oer officer evaluation reports.
We called it back in my day. That's one of
those things you put moved. You know how many twenty
five million qbic yards of sand out of apple echic
(46:40):
Ol River? You know, never mad it was the same sand.
Speaker 2 (46:43):
Over and over again. Yeah, just recycling the sand.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
Yeah. So I mean, and with technology being what it
is today, I mean you go out fishing with Paul
and you're watching the fish exactly where they are and
you know exactly where to. I mean that you can't
tell me that the technology has in advance since they
were dredging back then to be able to ride that
river and pinpoint the locations go. We need right here,
(47:08):
this two hundred yard stretch right here needs to be
worked on, or that stretch down there. They shouldn't just
like they did back in the day. Just ride and
dig and dig and ride and throw sand off to
the side and block every side road. I mean, it's
like when they grade a county road. If you don't
talk to the road greater. Sometimes it requires a phone call,
but they'll go pull a ditch and it'll cut off,
(47:30):
like with mine right now. Okay, So my pond where
my water, my cows and beside my house. A lot
of the water comes from up the hill across the highway,
runs down the hill under the covert, through the covert,
down the side of dirt road, and I got a
ditch to where it comes onto the land like it
traditionally has and keeps our pond full. It's overhead water
a lot of it is not all of it, but
(47:50):
some of it filters through the woods. It cleans the water.
It's crystal clear when it gets out to the pond.
We had a new road grater guy come through not
long ago, and he pulled the road in a different
direction and he channeled all the water away from that.
And I didn't know it because I said, dirt road
just passed us. I didn't see what was going on.
I wonder why the pond wasn't holding as much water.
And I went over there and I checked it out,
(48:10):
and lo and behold they had pulled the ditch a
different way and blocked off the way the water rent
and that affected me personally affected my cows. And so
I got to number. I called the guy who's over
that department. Two days later, it's fixed because their local organization.
When I saw one of the count of Commissioner's there
and I said, I said, done you. I just want
(48:32):
to compliments your people. He goes, well, I can't really
have it to say so over that, but I appreciate it,
you know, the fact that they're doing their job. I said, well,
part of being in a small town. Now, see if
you can work together on stuff like that. And that's
the problem is if it was the Army Corps running
the road grading around my house, I'd probably still have
a dry pond.
Speaker 5 (48:50):
But you know, you not only have a drive, hon
you would be I just wrote a letter to the commander,
the new colonel in charge of the of the Cores,
and I congratulating on his command. I said, look, we're
about to go down the road nobody we've been down before.
Let's avoid this, Let's work together on this. We've got
(49:13):
there's a third way. There's a lot of middle ground
here that we can talk about and do it if
you guys will work with us. And what I got
in response probably the same thing that you get a response,
was I didn't even get a response to the note
I sent. What I got was a copy paste out
of a document that they put together after their Zoom
call that substitutes for a public Now that's their public outreach.
(49:35):
We're going to the zoom call and you can email
us questions. I got the response to one of their
questions that says alternative ideas must be submitted to Corps
of Engineers by such as such a date. Now, I'm
you know, I'm not fluffing myself up, but you know
six counties here that matter. Yeah, and we just basically
got told go pound send.
Speaker 2 (49:56):
Once again, the second generation of getting told to go
thought to be proud of there. I love government. Be right,
we're from the government. We're here to help.
Speaker 1 (50:08):
Yes, sir Paul, you see any impact on Seminole if
they start dredging the channel back out from fishing.
Speaker 4 (50:14):
Well, there's some areas up there out in front of
the Saunder Slough near the man made Island where they
dug through there, and there's a grass growing and so
that I don't think no barge is gonna make it
through there. They might need to tick something out right there.
But we've had some you know, being a part of
Stewart's Lake Seminole. I do have to say in the
(50:35):
last three years working with the core d n R
they had biologists. It has really been impressive how they're
starting to come around. So I've got someone on a
you reach out to for sure.
Speaker 5 (50:49):
I absolutely hope that that's uh continue. And I know,
and I talked about the coresin and I talked about that,
I'm talking about the words. I know they've got really
good people that were like a lot of their employees.
Speaker 4 (51:01):
But but you're right, that's a government run thing and
we got set things that's interesting.
Speaker 5 (51:06):
We just can't we just can't let them throw their
hands up and say you've got two choices. I totally agree.
Speaker 1 (51:14):
Grant's holding up two hands and all his fingers now
on one hand. That makes you run out of time, j D.
Speaker 2 (51:19):
I guess that means we got to come back next week.
Speaker 1 (51:21):
We'll be back next week and see all that. Thanks Jim,
And welcome to the Town Outdoor Show. I'm Charlie j D.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Captain Paul Tyr and Dell and I'm grabbed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
There we go, Fred Fred Fred had something he had
to do today, unfortunately, I think he had attend the funeral.
So and uh, but we are not in that. I'm
not attitude with him not being here. I'm actually a
little sighted. I might get a word in edgewise.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
I'm gonna hide that. I'm gonna hide that thing over there,
just in the corner for when Fred comes back. I
got something for him. He just don't know what it is.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
All like loud noises and you sure made one. But anyhow, well,
welcome to the show again. He appreciate y'all. Just mose
it on in here, filled in at a great time.
We might have a guest later in the show. We
just got to wait and see if he shows up.
But as always, we're glad to have you here. Well,
that's good to be here, man.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
I'll tell you what I was gonna tell all y'all
about fishing with old Captain.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Paul last Sunday. That was fun.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Yeah, I went out there on the Big Lake and
caught some bass. It's called some big bass.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Really, yeah, that's that's you normally catching red fish and.
Speaker 4 (01:11):
Were getting even like in this baths.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
We're going, we're gonna be doing that Sunday. I got
a trip playing Sunday going after red fish.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
I'll tell you what. This weather's turning a little nice.
Speaker 5 (01:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Somebody somebody called me to us says, hey, I need
to get some birds and quail from you. With this
nice weather, I want to put some birds out. And
I went, nice weather, what's he talking about. I got
up and walked outside and went, oh cow, this is
nice weather, sixty something degrees in the morning. I was like, oh,
I like this. So I went and caught him some
birds to go work with his dog a little bit.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
I hope it holds out because as this show is airing,
I'll be riding that massy ferguson with a with a
bush hog and a and or a tiller behind it,
playing food plots.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Oh well, talking about I got on my daddy's tractor
that I've been working on, you know, for forty John
Deer and I've been working on it for a while
and it's been We had it over here at to
range for a while and took it back home, and
you know, it's just an old nineteen seventy eight, seventy nine,
old school John Deer with no electronics, no death nothing,
(02:15):
old school, the most common John Deer out there when
they still made them, you know, without all electronics and craziness.
And uh, man, I put I put a bunch of
money in that thing new. It's got a cab, air conditioner,
all new parts on it. And I'm kind of I
fit when I work on air conditioners, they work about
ten percent of the time. But I got out there
with a sprayer. I had the old tractor. I had
(02:37):
another old tractor, and I said, I'm gonna get out
here and spray, but it's an open cab, and I said, man,
I really don't want to be breathing these chemicals like
I used to. And I looked over there at that
tractor and I said, you know what, I'm I'm done
with that thing. Let me go get on that big tractor.
And I got out there and went out and sprayed
round up on about sixteen acres to kill everything I planned.
(02:59):
Because it didn't come up right, I'm just gonna start
over again in the spring with some new new grass
and just riding that old tractor just felt good, you know,
got daddy's tractor, got a new cab, kid in it,
foamed and all that stuff just being on on my
daddy's tractor that I used to drive on right on
when I was in high school. And uh, there he is,
I guess just showed up. Well we wait nowhere he
(03:22):
missed first. He can be on the second segment, so
we uh, We're gonna talk about some river related stuff
here in a minute. But anyway, it was an awesome
It was an awesome feeling to go out there and
actually do something. I put a ton of money in
that tractor just so like go spray one field. I
don't know if I'm gonna.
Speaker 4 (03:37):
Use it again after that, but everything worked right.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Yeah, Yeah. I got to go back in the top
of the cab and readjust some are blow or motor
stuff that I apparently didn't bolt down right. I hit
a couple of bumps and then things started squeeling, so
I got to get up there and resecure some things.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
But all Baylor wire, you know.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Uh, so I got some elect defence are there, and
I was thinking about driving to get some self tapping
screws and some wire and putting a loop in it
and holding it down with that, or the more modern
equivalent of that.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Is hose clan clamps use hos Doug tape.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
But I found I found on Amazon this. They got
a roll of the hose clamp cabling with the little
spiral stuff the hose clamp material, and then it comes
with the little screw parts that tighten it up and
you cut it to length and.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Then man, that can build a house. I hadn't known
about that.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
I didn't know. I've never seen that before. We used
to take like seven of those hose clamps, straighten them
out and connect them off where you had to have
different places. And then yeah, but now it's uh now
you can get it by you can get it to link. Yeah,
and uh, man, I got I'm using that for all
kinds of stuff. That's what I would have. That's what
I would have used. I mean, you use hose clamps
(04:54):
like mountain flagpoles on stuff. And and h I found
that the hawks woul leave my chickens along if I
get this little sparkly tape and hang it to a
piece of PVC pipe over the chicken coop, really flapping
in the wind.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
And stuff, or do they hit that tape?
Speaker 1 (05:08):
So cowbirds off of your dock too, so they don't
crap all over the dock rail down out of pond.
I'm just saying now it looks like some white trash
lives there.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
But well, oh well.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Get me some some tires and bar them in the
yard and paint the white. Put some pink flamingos.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Out there with the shoe fits.
Speaker 5 (05:26):
Put.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
I just offended somebody. Somebody just said, well, I always
had them growing up.
Speaker 5 (05:31):
That's a trailer park.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
I grew up in Man.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
My granddaddy Johnson used to grow He used to grow peppers.
And he found an old washed up an old washing
machine somewhere. Yeah, take the old galvanized or that enamel.
Back then it was a little tub enamel plated or
enamel coated. The tubs out of the water and had
holes in them and everything makes great planters. They were
half a dozen of them all around his yard with
(05:55):
peppers and flowers and whatever else growing then. I'm not
just sunk down in the ground and filling with dirt.
And they drained well because they've got holes in them.
And uh, there's what a group peppers in So it
is what it is. That's that's the thing about rednecks.
They can make do with the all kinds of stuff that.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Theyll if you're on how about stuff to put stuff in.
Like if you go to loads or home depot or
anywhere and you get those little three dollars blue buckets.
Those things are awesome for about six months and then
they dry rotten apart. But if you are on a
farm and you got hydraulic fluid or motorol and you
get those five gallon buckets. Now, they used to have
(06:30):
to cut the top those little slots and pry that
thing off. They make tools to do that with. Nowadays
they got like a little zip plastic thing. You just
pull it like a table and zips around there and
you can pull it off of your hands. Those buckets
right there, man, those things to steal. The steel buckets
might have plast them. It's just a thicker, heavier, better
(06:50):
because they have to put motorol and stuff in it.
It's not like those cheap ones that you use for
for shopping. I mean, I got to loads, I always
get a bucket because you throw everything.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Well, back in the day, paint used to come in
steel five gallon buckets for commercial painters would buy paint
that came in a steel five gallon bucket lid came
off of. And my best friend Donovan growing up, his
dad was a painter. He that's what he did. Mister
Weeks painted, he painted. If you needed a house painted,
he painted. You know, that's what everybody in Chatahooche hired
him to paint stuff. And so Donovan always had a
pile of them steel buckets and we used to go
(07:23):
run sucker nets and fish at night and it was cold.
I mean, you run sucker nets in the wintertime and
catch some old humpy suckers in Ochi se pond. And
we take them steel buckets and put about six inches
of dirt in the bottom of it, fill it up
with charcoal and lighter fluid, lighter fluid over in there,
(07:44):
and set it in the middle of the boat. Well,
you got the sand on there that keeps the boat
from getting hot. That you warm you get man, you
talk about a great heater. That was a fantastic heater.
So we had our own little portable fire pit, if
you will. And that's how we stayed warm out there
at thirty degree in the middle of the night, running
running running sucker nets.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Be careful not to burn your boat down.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Well, no, you it's insulated with it.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Yeah, you're right, you know, so you can't do that
with a plastic bucket.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
That's why I thought, that's what I thought you was
talking about one of them steel buckets. Man, you do
all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
You can still there's still stuff that comes in steel buckets. Yeah,
it's like, you know, different kinds of barn.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
I just taught everybody. I just I just taught everybody something.
You have a You didn't know it, but you had
a portable fire pit, right, Put you some, put you some,
put you some charcoal rekeets in there and light them up.
Speaker 4 (08:32):
There you go, I'm gonna try I'm gonna try that.
It's winter in the pond ting boat.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
There you go, I'm gonna do it. You just make
sure to put the sand in there. Don't put it don't.
You gotta put the sand in the bottom of the bucket,
because one you don't want it to turn You don't
want it to turn over in the boat. So you
put all about six eight inches of sand in the
bottom of it. So you got a good heavy bucket there,
and then that sand is going to insulate the.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
So you don't have like a milt pasture turf on
the bottom, Okay, because because he had that, then that
metal might conduct enough heat that melted or.
Speaker 4 (09:02):
Do have dry digg it's rubber?
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Yeah, well, yeah, you might want to. This was in
an old luminium john boat that we were doing this,
an old aluminum john boat that we had paddled out
there in the middle of the night.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
You know, we just set it on top of some
cinder blow.
Speaker 4 (09:14):
Now you got those they got heaters with a propane
I'm thinking, yeah, we don't knock that thing over catching
a big.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
Those propane heaters, you knock them over, they'll turn all this.
But I did have one of them. I was me
and my son Justin when he was a little boy.
We were in the groundbline out here one morning. It
was about twenty degrees frost everywhere. We're in that ground
line and the only can I could find, the only
propane can I could find, I had a little bit
of rust around the uh, the threads on it. Long
(09:40):
story short, that thing caught fire. With me and him
in the ground line. I removed the ground line and
we ran like this. Lad's gonna blow us up. It
caught fire. There's like the scared us of did and
you didn't kill anything of that, but no, we did not.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
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recommend you call Recon Restoration at seven five five zero
six two eight. Are on the web at recon dash
restoration dot com. And we're back, So let's go ahead
and get started. We have Jim mcclell and our old
(10:57):
buddy back again. Last time you want to show, we
were talking about the book I found at the CVS
one day about the Apolotic Cola River and all the
old school stuff, and we had I encourage you all
to go back and listen to that episode. Was a
good show. And since that time I started following you
in detail. Well not too much to thank stalking you're
(11:18):
nothing to me, but stalking. We you know, we started
reconnecting and everybody in here is of like mine. But
uh I noticed. But before we get to the business
of the day, you know, I do know that you're
the chairman of the Riparian County Stakeholders Coalition, which is
a nonprofit. I guess I only know if I said
(11:38):
that right, you said.
Speaker 5 (11:39):
It absolutely right, and if I'm chairman, and if I
accomplished one thing in that organization, it's going to be
to change the word Repairian to river.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
H Yeah, because I don't know where perian means. Well,
it means along the river. And I told the guy
who came and that should be reverian. I'm not ripairing,
because unless you're trying to fix it, you are trying
to fix the river. So I mean, there you go,
we are repairing the apple that's Cola River.
Speaker 5 (12:04):
That's exactly the issue I run into frequently there.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
But what well, I was wondering where that county was
because there's six seven counties in the state and I'm
pretty sure that ain't one of them. But you're six
counties together, So I was thinking, well, maybe it meant
something about to do with sick. Maybe it's an Indian
word for six counties or something. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
So y'all just stop.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Hey, you from where we're from, you know what this.
I know you're in communications and marketing and all that
for a living. So y'all, y'all use big words. Not no,
we don't. Oh you know, well, you just got back
from Scotland.
Speaker 5 (12:36):
I did it did. It was a wonderful trip to
leave ninety degrees one hundred degree weather in Florida and
be cold in Scotland.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Was that was one of the best parts of Did
you take the right kind of clothes with you?
Speaker 5 (12:52):
I did? I was actually cold one night and then
they had what they considered a heat wave for the
last couple of days we were there, which it got
up to eighty.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
Bless their heart, that's winter time for us.
Speaker 5 (13:03):
They one air conditioner in Edinburgh sky. Those folks were
hating life. They were cussing up and down.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
What's the humidity like there?
Speaker 5 (13:15):
As many? He wasn't all that bad. The last night
we spent in the hotel room with no air conditioning
and we opened the window and didn't do any good.
And it was that night was humid.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Huh yeah. Here I hear BRIT's talking about the heat
waves and as we're dying over here, and you know,
in all fairness, they don't. They don't have to deal
with with it like we have to know how to
deal with it or we die. Uh yeah, they don't.
They don't get it's one hundred and ten and feels
like one hundred and sixteen and you know, oh.
Speaker 5 (13:46):
Yeah, they're good with zero eighty there.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Yeah, so what what's uh? So, let's were we gonna
get through this segment? We got that half their five
minutes at the bottom. We'll talk about something else and
we'll come back in the third segment talk more about this.
But so I was reading I saw your article in
The Democrat, your our opinion piece on behalf of the river,
So most of us don't know what's going on, and
(14:11):
what I've seen in brief, my understanding is that we
and you can give us some history of the river
and what what what it was used for and what
happened to it and what damage it did, and then
tell us about what's going on now. So in this segment,
let's focus on the history, and then when we come back,
(14:32):
we'll bounce back into what's going to happen and what
we What you envisioned could be a better solution.
Speaker 5 (14:40):
All right, well I'm having to do it. You know
that this is all stemming from the fact that the
corp of Engineers now wants to restart dredging on the
Apological River.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
They're talking about dredging, not just snagging, but dredge. Dredging
okay for commercial traffic inficial.
Speaker 5 (14:56):
Now here's the thing. They're pitching all this under the
guise of navigation. We're going to do this for navigation.
We spent one hundred million dollars fixing the dams and
the locks on the system, all good things, fully supportive of.
Then they want to restore navigation. Absolutely, we're good with that.
They want to go back to dredging exactly like they
(15:16):
did for fifty years until Florida finally both the economy.
It was always a losing economic battle, but finally the
combination of the economy in Florida under Jeb Bush denying
the permits to dunk their sand, that's when they stopped.
(15:36):
And the reason that we denied the permit is over
that course, over the course of that fifty or so
years that they were dredging, even more than that, I
think maybe sixty or seventy years, they were blowing sand
out of the river, piling up on sand bars, blowing
it directly out onto the banks. They were clogging up
sloughs and creeks and things like that.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
Used to watch that go on as a kid.
Speaker 5 (15:58):
Yeah, And I have a Callahun County Record article from
nineteen sixty four. If you won't know how I'm taking
I'm a second generation on this fight. My father and
three of the guys from Bluntstown went up to Washington,
d C. In nineteen sixty four to meet with Congressman
Don Fuquay to complain about the corp of Engineers. And
(16:21):
the way my father told the story was Don took
them over to meet the three or four star general
that was in charge of the corps, and he padded
them on the back, said no problem, I understand your concerns,
and by god, I'll have my colonel from Mobile come
over there and he'll sit down with y'all and y'all
can work it out. And so the article is kind
of celebratory. You know, they got up there, they got
(16:42):
the you know, they got the job done well. My
father said, the core colonel did come over to Bluntstown
and sat down with them, and Daddy said, they went
through you know, here's here's all our concerns. You're blowing
all this stuff out there. You're straightening these these challenges.
You're messing up the river, and we need you to
kind of figured out a way not to do that.
And the colonel told him, what are the corp of engineers.
(17:07):
If you don't like what we're doing, get Congress to
change the laws. But we do what we do, and
we do it by our standards, and if you don't
like it, you go pounds in And honestly, to be
honest with what I've seen in the last fifteen twenty
years kind of being engaged in this, you know, at
various various ways in different levels. It's not much changed.
(17:31):
This is an organzam. Go back to this. Everybody would
understand before the Corp of Engineers ever touched that river,
before they ever knew there was a river there to
mess with. For nine months out of the year, you
could reliably bring barges up the river. And you know,
we had paddle boats on the river for years and
years and years barges come up. The problem was that
(17:55):
three months out of the year, navigation up that river
was unreliable. If it was what er, you might not
be able to get your barges up. Now, here's the
common sense part of this word. This is where this is.
I always tell people, here's the situation. Our boats don't
fit on your river part of the year. It is
(18:19):
only the United States Army Corps of Engineers that looks
at that problem and says, well, obviously we got to
fix your river. Yeah. This is an organization that has
been second guessing God for more than two hundred years now,
despite the fact they've been wrong every time.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
Yeah, and absolutely destroy as my granddaddy called it. They
dug that nine foot deep ditch down the middle of
the river and pulled every log and anything that the
bass could hide behind out of it. And you know,
my grandparents moved to Chattahoochee, I want to say, probably
in the really early nineteen fifties when Gulf Power was
(18:59):
putting in the the power plant over there. And he
just talked about the difference between the quality of the
river and the fishing and all that stuff between that
time and when the Core started dredging and digging and
cutting that ditch as he called it. And just you know,
I grew up on it when they were when it
was navigable and had buoys out and dredged it and
(19:22):
all that. It was still good, but it wasn't near
what it had been when they left it alone.
Speaker 5 (19:28):
Well, And that's the thing that a lot of people,
and this is one of the reasons I'm on this
show right now, a lot of people remember that when
there was navigation on that river, things were better. You know,
the oysters were healthy, blah blah blah blah blah blah fish.
But there's two components to navigate. And if I could
(19:48):
put a billboard up and say this, boats floating on water,
they don't float on the ditches. The corp of Engineers
when they restore navigation, they'll tell you about the dredging
and all. What they don't tell you is is that
they also have to then release enough water upstream to
float those barriers. So now our first shot out of
(20:11):
the bag in our first conversations, what we've said to
them is, if you know you're going to have to
release water anyway, why not start with that and then
see what you actually have to dredge to keep a
reasonable navigation window open. Yeah, and what we run into
is bureaucracy and that, and we can get into a
(20:34):
lot more detail about that, but basically that's the heart
of the problem is is the corp of Engineers does
not want to return to They do not want to
do this. They ran into a bus all, they had
to fight with Florida for years and years and years,
have the permits denied, got bad press, and they don't
want to go down that road again. So what they're
(20:55):
offering up now because Congress is making them do this.
Congress has told them you you're going to do this.
So now what they're going to do is, this is
the way I read the situation is they're going to
offer us two choices. Either we do we go back
to exactly what we were doing before two thousand and
(21:16):
four or nothing. And if you've got a different idea,
we have about a month to submit, not just an idea,
a full fledged proposal of how they should do it different.
That is the biggest bureaucratic lazy.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Yeah. Well, have they fixed the locks and all that
the dam and that's in progress.
Speaker 5 (21:44):
Okay, that's gonna take a while, I think.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
So what are they going to do about the Georgia
and Lake Lanier not releasing water from up there to
get down here? Where are they going to get the
water from because that's really the problem with the flint
in the chattoocha is and short stopped.
Speaker 5 (22:01):
They control all of them. Yeah, right there, they can
turn dials up there. You know, there's a guy named
James Hathorne at the core who is the water manager.
And you see barge traffic now on that river and
that's because when they need it, they turned the dials
in a waterfl.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
So below the DWN, you see bars traffic.
Speaker 5 (22:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
Yeah, it's been years since I had spent a lot
of haven't spent nearly as much time over there as
I did my my youth, But it's been a long
time since I've seen a barge.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
All right, well, we're gonna We're gonna be back in
a couple of minutes, and we may change the topic
of discussion a little bit on the bottom of the hour.
So our talent didn't come back to this, so Tyll
has the audience can.
Speaker 5 (22:41):
Pick up on. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
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the website southside more dot com. Hand we're back. So
when we left, we were talking about, you know, dredging
and the Army Corps and their role with the river.
(23:43):
And so I remember growing up seeing the dredging, you know,
because I thought that was as a kid, I'm like, hey,
that's cool, but what are they doing, you know, And
Daddy was, you know, well, they're trying to keep it
where the barges coming. And then the big barges had
come by, and you know, and I thought that was
cool as a kid because I had no idea about
the environment or anything. It was just it was just,
(24:03):
you know, we're catching fish.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
There's a tugboat going up tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Cool dad. Daddy would just sit there and he, you know,
he'd wait for the wake and then we you know whatever,
and it would go on and I'm sitting there watching
it go off in the distance. Because I'm a kid,
it's like watching the train go by. To me, it
was just the coolest thing in the world, And you know,
I had no idea. But but and Jady and I
were talking the other day about the economic impact that
when they quit doing a lot of that, and I
(24:29):
think a lot of us is a sign of the
times and away transportation worked back in the day, and
so now we've been more reliant on trucks and maybe
trains to do a lot of stuff that barges used
to do. Do you see the ability for barges to
navigate the river and Lake Seminole went all the way
up and back with other methods?
Speaker 5 (24:51):
Oh yeah, it's and even even tri rivers waterway development
and their pot which represents Georgia and Alabama. And I
think a couple of New Jackson and against and may
have a couple of representatives on that. Uh, they're the
ones who are really pushing this and it's their member
of companies who will benefit a lot from it. They
(25:12):
have said, we don't need to return to what we
were doing back in the day. We can there's ways
to do this that are less intrusive than what we
used to do. And so everybody recognizes that technology has
changed and nobody's got anything I don't we don't have
anything against barges. We think it's you know, we're good
(25:32):
with it. We want them to prosper. We don't agree
with them that there's as much economic benefit as they
say there is to Florida. And if we would have
seen that while they were maybe just barges.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
Up, how long would it take for that to even
come back? I mean, because you don't have anything on,
no infrastructure on the river.
Speaker 5 (25:51):
Anymore, it will be it'll be years before they actually
could start doing it. The problem is, if you ever
work with government, is the deceis are being made right now,
The irreversible decisions are going to be made here in
the next year and after that. Yeah, it maybe a
couple more years before they started dreading. But if you didn't,
(26:12):
you know, they were't gonna throw their hands up and say, oh, well,
that was the time to enter in on that.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
Was back in So did it come from Congress as
a bill or something or is this an administrative decision
that the current administration made because that's gonna change.
Speaker 5 (26:24):
Well, the authority was already there. They already you know,
it's in their their rules and regulations now that they
can go back to dredging. I mean, they never lost
that ability. All they lost was Florida took away the
ability to We denied them to permit to dump's in
in the banks after years of negotiating with this wasn't Uh.
(26:47):
This happened under Jeb Bush's administration. But Jeb didn't just
wake up one morning and decide that, oh, I don't
want to I don't like this. Starting when I was
working with Lawton Childs, Uh, we were negotiating in good
faith with the Core, trying it if we were taking
evidence to them and telling them, this is caused by
your treasurment. We've got you're filling in these sloughs, and
(27:09):
we show them pen I don't know that they've ever
even acknowledged that image. But right now what's going on
is we're spending thirty million dollars to restore the slows,
starting from south to north, moving upstream, going in and
digging out all of that sand and all that stuff.
But absolutely, bar traffic is fine. It can be done
(27:32):
with lesser scale dredging.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
Absolutely, So they I read something somewhere they were starting
to release more water to try to maintain a seven
foot channel in the river. Now does that sound right?
Speaker 5 (27:48):
And all I've been told directly is that And this
was from the water manager James Hathorne up at the
Corp of Engineers, who said, if they have bars traffic
coming up, they can release more water. That's an administrative decision.
That's not God on might of your Congress. That's within the.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
Power of the I'm just wondering when that starts. So
they're going to go out there and start digging a hole.
It's like, if you build it, they'll come kind of deal.
I mean, is that what it is? Oh?
Speaker 5 (28:17):
Yeah, you'll see an envier, You'll see an economic impact
study that says, you know everything that you know, Brustol
is going to become the next port of Miami, that
it's going to be the Queen Mary Heart anyhow, and.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
We'll be right back.
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six thirteen forty and we're back. So for anybody listening
(29:43):
that had just tuned in, we're talking to Jim McClellan
about the impact that the Army Corps planned the dridge,
the Applecticola River and apparently Lake Simon Old and everything else,
repair all locks, you restore navigation on the river, which
sounds like a great economic boom to the area. Actually
for these economically strapped counties up and down the river.
(30:03):
That don't really mean back in the day there used
to be ports and this and that. It sounds like
a great plan. But I'm sitting here, we're on the break.
We're talking about, Well, who's who's gonna get money in
their pocket from that? Where did the jobs come from?
And how far out is that kind of impact and
how does that really weigh against the environmental impact that
it can have on the river. Most people don't care.
(30:26):
I mean, they just don't because they don't fish the river,
they don't live on the river. They but but but
they shouldn't care on the other way either way, because
there's not gonna put any money anybody's pocket. Who benefits
from this?
Speaker 5 (30:38):
Well, in theory, you know, Try Rivers Waterway Development Association
represents a lot their economic development organization, and so their
goal is to bring in industries. And I think that
they believe that if they can, you know, get reliable
navigation back for several months out of the year, that
they are going to attract and they may have some
(31:01):
prospects out there that will use that navigation that that
will make the difference between you. If they can get
access to reliable access from the from Georgia to the coast,
that they can attract companies that will do that.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
Where's that information that how do you get that information?
Speaker 5 (31:20):
You'd have to talk with uh tri rivers folks. But
they've done an economic impact study. Now I looked at it,
and I've commissioned a few economic impact studies, and the
time when I was paying for it, it actually agreed
with what my position was. Now that's my cautionary note
(31:42):
about it.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
You can impact, Yeah, yeah, I want an impact statement
that says this and that's what you get there.
Speaker 5 (31:48):
Well, there's a reason why you you all appreciate this.
That's the reason why the same people that do economic
studies don't also do business plans, because you know, this
is a this is fantasy and then this is reality.
But I don't have reason to I agree that there's
a probably a really good economic benefit to Georgia and
(32:12):
Alabama for this, I don't. I think that their speculation
about what we get here in Florida is wildly exaggerated.
You know, and I base that on the fact that
we had to see it before. There wasn't It wasn't
like there was tremendous The demand for bar track was
going down. That was already happening long before we had
(32:35):
stopped raating until two thousand and four. Probably by the
early nineties, bar traffic was diminishing. Now, barrigins are very
efficient in terms of you know, that's another environmental thing.
Look at. They're more efficient. You got to transfer bulk.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Or mostly fuel, fertilizer, and gravel. There's basically what went
up and down that river the more than anything.
Speaker 5 (32:57):
I mean, if you got to transport those things. You know,
boats are probably the best best value per mile per
gallon of fuel bit that.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
You have, especially going downstream exactly coming up.
Speaker 5 (33:09):
I don't know there's benefit there. But then what you
have to weigh that against is okay or is there
another alternative? Do we have to go back and do
this like when the history is no, we certainly do not.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
Well, we've kind of been doing it without barges for
a while. I mean, so what you're where, you were trying,
We're going to benefit one industry, okay, but we're going
to be pulling it from other industries. So I mean
there's a balance. There's only a need for so much gravel,
so much grain, so much stuff. So I mean in
the amount of money that's going to take to build
the infrastructure back for the areas that so we used
(33:45):
to go to bluntsdown and drop off grain down there
at the grain mill there's they had. They would load
barges back in the day when I was a little kid.
And Johns Margie is still down there still collect He's
still you go down there. That's where we get our
corn from. I mean, you know that still exists, what's
left of it after the hurricane and they don't load
barges anymore. I mean, but that's what used to happen
(34:08):
down there in Bloodstown, and so there was an industry there,
but it's gone now, Okay, so all that's gone somewhere else.
So let's say you rebuild it. All right, that's great
for one area, but where's it coming from now?
Speaker 2 (34:21):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
I'm a Jackson County resident, you know, if I could
see some benefit the Jackson County.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
Direct, Well, there was a port in Jackson County right
just between the Gulf Fire Plant and the Jim Wood's
Dam and Chattichy. There was a port there, but it
never was super busy.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
Yeah, but is that going to come back? Is that
going to get It would have.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
To be, it would know it's not. It would have
to be. It would have to be rebuilt because of
the condition it's in and hadn't been operated as a
port in years. It's the pilonds are rotten on it.
Speaker 5 (34:45):
Okay. So now what if you think about though, all right,
in terms of economic development, there's some things that exist
now that didn't exist back then, or conditions now that
exists it didn't exist back then. One of them is
aplech Cola is now booming through tourist Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Absolutely, a lot of.
Speaker 5 (35:02):
You know, fishing boats and stuff like that coming in
out out of there, a lot of people coming down
to Saint George Island. What if you had again a marina, campground,
overnight dock for boats in Bluntstown. What if you had
the same thing and we would hitch go? What if
tour boats like Captain Gill down there, former Vietnam Marine
(35:23):
tour helicopter pilot runs a tour boat down in Aapolo
a Chicola. Captain Gill could come all the way up.
He had a place to go to bring people to
go to dinner. I'll tell you this, one small boat
stopping and buying something is worth every other boat passings
by in going somewhere else. That's a much more realistic
thing that can happen without intensive capital development, which.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
Well i've been. I said something to Charlie other day.
You know, if I was, if I win the eight
hundred million dollars lottery or whatever it is, I'm gonna
buy a dagum paddle boat, rig it out like you
see in Savannah and you see in New Orleans or whatever,
and have a come to Chattahoochee, get on the paddle boat,
go for a dinner, cruise, have a good time whatever
(36:07):
it is, and then come back and go home. And
you would. The beauty of that river to me, eclipses
any potential commerce you might get out of it, just
the sheer natural beauty of that river. And I don't
I don't know. Maybe there's no market for it. Maybe
somebody has done an economical study, economic study to see
if there's a market for something like that.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
But I'll come on down to JD's White Trash tour.
We're gonna get of, We're gonna crack open a beer
and slide down the river and look at it right
on the sand.
Speaker 5 (36:38):
You laugh, you laugh at that. But there are people,
I guarantee you who would dearly love to come back
and have a fish and authentic experience. That's what people
looking for. That's the thing that we have that's starting
to disappear. And if we hold onto it and play
it right, things like that that we think are silly
and we think are routine, there's a lot of people
(36:59):
who think, you know, that's pretty neat.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
How many times you go through the mountains and stop
at some little roadside thing and get out and look
at some of the local you know, the old trades
and the museum type stuff and the things going on
and the cultural things that people go to and they
want to see, you know, homesteadings making a return. Everybody's
going back to that, you know, to do something. I mean,
(37:21):
and you know, I laugh, But what Jad's talking about
is not a bad business plan to do something like that,
because people would go there. They're always looking for that experience.
And know, we ain't mind parently you can go do that'.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
Like I said, if I won, If I win the
lottery there, I'm not gonna tell anybody, but there will
be signs. Yeah, I guys, I do.
Speaker 4 (37:43):
I do numerous ho tours a year. Does people come
and want to not really fish and just want to
see an alligator or an ospray er?
Speaker 5 (37:50):
You know what I mean? And think about here that
a lot It's exactly right, and it seems, you know,
to us who grew up around it, we take it
for granted.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
We we absolutely make it for granted. That's exactly right.
Speaker 5 (38:01):
Here's another thing that I'd love to see pop up
and return again is those old fish camps. Yeah, yeah,
you know those You could revive those things and turn
them into you know, just sort of the back with
like you know, like like you're talking about the mountains.
We got up there and we stay in these cabins
and people just doing that.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
Well yeah, well I mean when we we uh Jady's
take them out Mississippi to duck hunt years ago an
old fish camp Lake Show Tar, Yeah, went up there
and there was a fish it was a fish camp.
Speaker 2 (38:33):
Right, and then Lake Show fish camp.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
Yeah, and they did they did duck hunting part of
a year and most of the year it was fishing
and a nice place to stay. And you know, right
there on one of the lakes along the river. Why
not you know, yeah, it doesn't.
Speaker 5 (38:49):
And and what we're talking about, does it prevent that
from happening. It enables that to happen. We could still
have a port that has a you know, you can
still have commercial cargo coming in. You can still get
it's market. But this is much more realistic and much
more get it done now.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
Yeah, I agree. I hate to see them. I hate
to see them ruin the and they and they did
when they, like you said, because some of the attraction
to me on those rivers are the slews and the
little lakes and the ox bows and places that it
just are still very to a degree, very natural.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
That didn't take me fishing on the river. It took
me fishing up the sloughs. That's where we caught the fish.
You know, we'll be right back.
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Speaker 1 (40:42):
So we were talking a little bit on the break
and can't make these points and they'll brought up something
about the effect on apple atic coal bay and oysters.
So before we get to the channel stuff, what what
is your understanding of I mean, you said on a
break that nutrients feed to oysters. It comes from sediment
and then the dredging can affect that in some way.
(41:03):
What was your understanding of that.
Speaker 5 (41:05):
Well, there's two things. There's all the dredging you're you're
putting sand out in the floodplain, and that is interfering
with the flow of nutrients to the oysters. But one
of the things the CORE did when they ended, when
they when they finally said okay, we're not going to
manage the Apalachical River from navigation, they turned off the
(41:27):
spigot up stream. Now, if you talk to them, they
will say, act of God, it was a drought, we
couldn't do anything about it, or whatever the truth is.
When they stopped navigation, when that wasn't part of their mission,
they turned back toward Lake Landeer and said, okay, now
Atlanta water supply is what we're gonna focus on. That's
gonna be the top priority. And so that's when we
(41:49):
started getting.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
Into you bacialist. Y'all don't need the water down there,
so we're gonna keep it up here.
Speaker 5 (41:55):
Your radio fans won't be able to see this, but
that was what that was.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
Back to your governor, we're gonna choke y'all offt because
y'all y'all shut us down and you mentioned this, I
think it was on the break, that they view the
river and the lake as a project, not as a
river in a lake.
Speaker 5 (42:13):
It's the right of way.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
Yeah, to them, it's a it's.
Speaker 5 (42:16):
An inefficient right of way. They look at think of
them as dot on the river.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
Yeah, it would be. It would be four lanes if
they could make it in high speed in the whole
nine yards, because that's why they view things from an
engineering point of view, not an environmental point of view
or an local impact point of view. You also mentioned
that the six counties need to stick together because basically
everybody upstream is the dog and where to tail, and
(42:41):
they wag us. And if we don't stick together, that's
what's gonna happen. Is down here, we're just gonna take
whatever they send.
Speaker 5 (42:49):
That's absolutely right. We've got there's six million people in
the greater metropolitan Atlanta area. There's one hundred and fifty
eight thousand in our six counties. And so, and if
you're a Georgia Congress Member of Congress from Georgia, it
doesn't matter what letter you've got out as a d
or any other letter you want to put out there.
(43:11):
You work for the Atlanta Regional Commission, which is home
depot Lows. And you got all those folks or in
the Atlanta or Chamber, not the Regional Commission. But those
are big companies, US Southern company companies like that. They
get tons of money. So that's who they all those
(43:31):
companies want something done that it gets done. The congressman done,
he's got you know, he's got the applage Coltre. He's
our only congressman that's got the aplatcha cult river in
his district. So we don't have political muscle out there.
What we've got is and we can't do anything about
what the court does in the river that's there. They've
(43:53):
got a congressional mandate to do whatever they want to do.
The only thing we've got any control over is the banks.
Speaker 1 (43:59):
And so you said there was a softer solution to this,
It might be more localized solution. What are your thoughts
on that?
Speaker 5 (44:08):
I think and just a few people I've talked to think,
but this is an idea that we can't even consider. Okay,
this is not it. They don't even hear this idea.
But here release the water that you're gonna release us.
See what is a reasonable window of navigation. Maybe it's
right now, it's six months. Right now, it starts no
matter what the river level is. Navigation season starts on
(44:28):
January one, ends on June thirty. I think whatever six
months is from that, no matter what. So why don't
you say, Okay, let's look at when you can actually
move water. Only what makes sense if you release the
water that you're gonna have to release anyway, you know
what you're gonna have to release. Let's stop talking about
the ditch and let's start talking about the water. Boats
float on water, not ditches. You got here and dig
(44:50):
a hole as long as you want to, I mean,
you run you John boat down. You gotta have water,
So give us the water. That's what the washers need.
That's what we need in the slews, increase everything else,
and that's what you need to float the boats. Let's
start with that. And I think what they're gonna find
is there's about three or four high spots that need
to be hit every now and then, and then that
(45:12):
reduces from one hundred and seven miles now we're into
single digit miles if that, and from millions of cubic
yards of sin now we're down into thousands. And once
we get there, doesn't it make sense instead of bringing
the boats or from wherever eased a bid that we
get local contractors come in, let them do it. We
(45:33):
can run it through the RCSC. The counties can share
it like the district's share road raider. You know, it
can be done. We got enough common sense in six counties.
We can work something out. We can take care of that.
Speaker 2 (45:43):
Yeah, well, I mean there is a there is a
value to the sand that comes out, and they were
just putting it wherever they could to get it out
of the way. There is an economic value to the sand.
Speaker 5 (45:55):
And if the core is not doing it, we can
recognize that.
Speaker 1 (45:57):
Well, we used to just kick it off to the
side and then settles and so it's it's you know,
it's like building a sand castle at the beach.
Speaker 2 (46:04):
And you know what happens when they were back when
they were dressing, back when they were dredger, they'd go
dredge river out and they start at one end and
go to the other end, and when they got the
other end, they turn around and come back and then
they get that in it back and.
Speaker 1 (46:15):
Forth, and they didn't care where it went.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
And the didn't care about.
Speaker 5 (46:17):
Here's here's what the here's what the core is graded
on now. So I mean we look at that and say,
what didn't make any sense? But if you're the the
colonel in charge of the corp of Engineers, you're ready
to do your your officer your oer officer evaluation reports.
We called it back in my day. That's one of
those things you put moved. You know how many twenty
five million qbic yards of sand out of apple echic
(46:40):
Ol River? You know, never mad it was the same sand.
Speaker 2 (46:43):
Over and over again. Yeah, just recycling the sand.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
Yeah. So I mean, and with technology being what it
is today, I mean you go out fishing with Paul
and you're watching the fish exactly where they are and
you know exactly where to. I mean that you can't
tell me that the technology has in advance since they
were dredging back then to be able to ride that
river and pinpoint the locations go. We need right here,
(47:08):
this two hundred yard stretch right here needs to be
worked on, or that stretch down there. They shouldn't just
like they did back in the day. Just ride and
dig and dig and ride and throw sand off to
the side and block every side road. I mean, it's
like when they grade a county road. If you don't
talk to the road greater. Sometimes it requires a phone call,
but they'll go pull a ditch and it'll cut off,
(47:30):
like with mine right now. Okay, So my pond where
my water, my cows and beside my house. A lot
of the water comes from up the hill across the highway,
runs down the hill under the covert, through the covert,
down the side of dirt road, and I got a
ditch to where it comes onto the land like it
traditionally has and keeps our pond full. It's overhead water
a lot of it is not all of it, but
(47:50):
some of it filters through the woods. It cleans the water.
It's crystal clear when it gets out to the pond.
We had a new road grater guy come through not
long ago, and he pulled the road in a different
direction and he channeled all the water away from that.
And I didn't know it because I said, dirt road
just passed us. I didn't see what was going on.
I wonder why the pond wasn't holding as much water.
And I went over there and I checked it out,
(48:10):
and lo and behold they had pulled the ditch a
different way and blocked off the way the water rent
and that affected me personally affected my cows. And so
I got to number. I called the guy who's over
that department. Two days later, it's fixed because their local organization.
When I saw one of the count of Commissioner's there
and I said, I said, done you. I just want
(48:32):
to compliments your people. He goes, well, I can't really
have it to say so over that, but I appreciate it,
you know, the fact that they're doing their job. I said, well,
part of being in a small town. Now, see if
you can work together on stuff like that. And that's
the problem is if it was the Army Corps running
the road grading around my house, I'd probably still have
a dry pond.
Speaker 5 (48:50):
But you know, you not only have a drive, hon
you would be I just wrote a letter to the commander,
the new colonel in charge of the of the Cores,
and I congratulating on his command. I said, look, we're
about to go down the road nobody we've been down before.
Let's avoid this, Let's work together on this. We've got
(49:13):
there's a third way. There's a lot of middle ground
here that we can talk about and do it if
you guys will work with us. And what I got
in response probably the same thing that you get a response,
was I didn't even get a response to the note
I sent. What I got was a copy paste out
of a document that they put together after their Zoom
call that substitutes for a public Now that's their public outreach.
(49:35):
We're going to the zoom call and you can email
us questions. I got the response to one of their
questions that says alternative ideas must be submitted to Corps
of Engineers by such as such a date. Now, I'm
you know, I'm not fluffing myself up, but you know
six counties here that matter. Yeah, and we just basically
got told go pound send.
Speaker 2 (49:56):
Once again, the second generation of getting told to go
thought to be proud of there. I love government. Be right,
we're from the government. We're here to help.
Speaker 1 (50:08):
Yes, sir Paul, you see any impact on Seminole if
they start dredging the channel back out from fishing.
Speaker 4 (50:14):
Well, there's some areas up there out in front of
the Saunder Slough near the man made Island where they
dug through there, and there's a grass growing and so
that I don't think no barge is gonna make it
through there. They might need to tick something out right there.
But we've had some you know, being a part of
Stewart's Lake Seminole. I do have to say in the
(50:35):
last three years working with the core d n R
they had biologists. It has really been impressive how they're
starting to come around. So I've got someone on a
you reach out to for sure.
Speaker 5 (50:49):
I absolutely hope that that's uh continue. And I know,
and I talked about the coresin and I talked about that,
I'm talking about the words. I know they've got really
good people that were like a lot of their employees.
Speaker 4 (51:01):
But but you're right, that's a government run thing and
we got set things that's interesting.
Speaker 5 (51:06):
We just can't we just can't let them throw their
hands up and say you've got two choices. I totally agree.
Speaker 1 (51:14):
Grant's holding up two hands and all his fingers now
on one hand. That makes you run out of time, j D.
Speaker 2 (51:19):
I guess that means we got to come back next week.
Speaker 1 (51:21):
We'll be back next week and see all that. Thanks Jim,
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