From Heel to Hook: Fishing with Human Flesh

Dustin recently surprised his buddy Jason Salyer in Georgia for his birthday and Jason surprised Dustin with a little impromptu adventure where they test an Amazon fishing hack using real human flesh.

Wazoo Gear deployed during adventure:

• Cache Belt
• Technora Cord to pull electric bikes from river
• Hooks from Adventure Kit
• Fishing Line from Adventure Kit
• Duct Tape from Adventure Kit to secure fishing line

ABOUT JASON

Jason’s brand On3 provides training virtually and in-person real-world survival skills using a unique adventurous “What’s the worst that could happen” spirit.

Jason was a Navy SEAL and Division 1 atheletic trainer and has been on National Geographic’s Called to the Wild and History Channel’s ALONE: The Beast.

Jason provides free training via Youtube through the On3 and Survival Dispatch channels and has recently started hosting in-person adventure and survival events which can be found on his website GoOn3.com

NOW FOR THE STORY

Jason is always down for an adventure, and so when I flew in to surprise him for his birthday, it was no surprise that we’d get after it like two 12 year old buddies, during 90's summer break.

If you haven’t seen the 4 part series when Jason came to Colorado, and we both “survived” in the mountains with only what we were wearing. Check it out HERE or click the thumbnail below, we surprised a lot of people with all the different ways we used our Wazoo gear.

The “plan” which Jason proudly posited was, in fact, to not have much of a plan, in order to facilitate an "adventure," was to bushwhack through the thick Georgia mountains with electric bikes and find a body of water to fish…with human flesh! (spoiler, it worked!)

Fun fact, the name of our Adventure Kit was inspired by the quote by Patagonia founder, Yvon Chouinard.

“The word adventure has gotten overused. For me, when everything goes wrong – that’s when adventure starts.” -Yvon Chouinard

The “plan” worked perfectly as un-planned, and we found the “adventure” we were looking for when the upstream dam was discharged and the river rose a couple feet within minutes. We had just finished fjording it with the electric bikes just minutes before. Had we been caught mid-river when that had happened, it is certain the fancy electric bikes would have turned into poorly designed rafts and continued down river…perhaps alongside us.

Skip to my dramatic jump/fall down the hill to rescue the bikes before the river got them:

We ended up getting the bikes out of the water just in time.

We then rigged up a 2:1 pulley system to help pull the bikes up the embankment using the Technora Cord from our Cache Belts along with my load-bearing Randall’s Adventure and Training wire gate carabiner that Mr. Jeff Randall gave me and that I every day carry (EDC) on my Blue Ridge Overland Gear Bum Bag.

The pulley system was a success and we continued on our mission to catch fish using… fresh human meat.

Wait! Before you report us to the authorities, let me explain…

Both Jason and I had both heard independently about a tactic supposedly used in the Amazon to catch fish. I had first heard about it from expedition leader Paul Rosolie.

Using a dead skin callus cut off the foot as bait, one can catch feeder fish like piranha, which then can then in-turn be used as bait for larger fish.

Folks like Jason and I that wear sandals most of the year, will often develop a callus on the back heal of our foot and little did we know we’ve been walking around with emergency fishing bait for years!

And it works!

We had tried a small pond with little luck, but then went to a larger lake and caught 2 Bluegill within minutes.

Here’s Jason deploying his Hooks and Fishing Line from his Cache Belt and then cutting off the callus off of his heel as a bait.

And here's me in disbelief with monster fish caught on Jason’s Salyer’s heel skin:

Speaking of monster fish…now that these fish have tasted human flesh. Did we just create a lake full of fish that now crave human meat?

God help us all.