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Two longtime friends from Grenfell are celebrating their new claim to fame.
Rylon Parrott and Koltyn Piller decided to record and post their ice fishing adventures to the popular video-sharing platform TikTok last week.
What happened next was unexpected.
“We got really lucky in the new year with some big fish,” Parrott said. “Fishing slowed down (and) we thought we would try and make a funny video. We put it up and it got pretty big.”
@koltynpiller Flags were flyin and the boys were floatin #fishin #Winterized #canada
The short video of the two teenagers sitting in frigid waters, sipping beer and reeling in northern pike at Crooked Lake, south of Melville, has now been viewed more than 17 million times.
“Tell me you’re Canadian without actually telling me you’re Canadian,” Piller says in the video before showing Parrott sitting in the water with a beer in one hand and a walleye in the other. Parrott also jumps into the water at one point.
Rather than sitting over a small circular hole, Parrot and Piller decided to carve out a massive hole big enough to lay across so they could see the fish approach the surface and bite the lures.
At first, they didn’t think much of it, but once they revealed their setup, they soon realized others might enjoy it as well.
“We thought if we were laying in bed and we saw a video like this, we’d share it with our buddies,” Parrott said. “We just thought we would kind of relay the videos to guys who like the outdoors as well and hopefully that they would catch on to it.”
The video was posted as the pair warmed up in the shack right after recording. At first, traffic to the video began slowing around 15,000.
“We were hoping to do better than that,” Parrott said. “Then my buddy was driving home back to Grenfell and he kept texting me about every 30 seconds saying (views) have gone up about 100,000 each time.”
Reaction to the video posted last week has been largely positive.
“We had a couple of funny ones saying that we were Arctic Floridians,” Parrott said.
Parrott said the video is the first he and Piller have ever created together, and all it has done since is spark other ideas for videos to keep their viral fame lasting a little longer.
“Now we want to hopefully put some plans together that have more thought process into them,” he said.