Where Saint Schwing was born and raised, people live by the words “work hard and play hard.”

The New Iberia native practices that motto to the max to this day while living in Denver, where he moved 2 ½ years ago to begin his career in medical device sales.

“I work during the week and have fun weekends,” Schwing said.

Add holidays and vacations to the mix and the all-around outdoorsman, a passionate hunter and angler, gets outdoors a lot. To wit, the avid big game hunter took off a week to hunt deer on public land this fall in Oklahoma, harvesting only one doe for the time and effort, but shot his first-ever pronghorn antelope, a trophy that earned a European mount, the first week of October in Wyoming.

“It wasn’t that big but it was a nice one,” Schwing said about the pronghorn, a species considered the fastest animal in the Western Hemisphere.

He had Thanksgiving Day circled on his calendar for a while despite a wintry mix of freezing temps and snow in the region the last week of November. He was dressed for the occasion, gung-ho to try to outsmart brown trout.

“It’s that time of year. They’re about to start spawning and they get really aggressive,” Schwing said.

“I know. It was cold as hell. It was 7 degrees, I swear,” he said for emphasis. “It warmed up to 23 degrees in the middle of the day. It was cold, man. Snow on the ground.”

Schwing, a 26-year-old medical device sales rep for Zimmer Biomet, talked about the frigid Thanksgiving Day fishing trip while driving back Sunday afternoon, Dec. 1, from a rewarding duck hunt at Swanson Reservoir State Recreation Area, Nebraska, which has 3,000 acres available for public hunting, according to Nebraska Game & Parks. Typically, the area is popular among waterfowlers and, more importantly, ducks.

Schwing enjoyed the weekend duck hunt with his hunting and fishing buddy, Amaan Husain of Denver, while staying at a nearby hotel Friday and Saturday nights. They got out early to hunt Saturday, bagging four ducks, then spent much of the day scouting, which paid off big time the second day with a two-man Colorado limit of 12 ducks, mostly mallards and widgeon.

The two outdoorsmen hunted until 3 o’clock and left for home at 3:30 p.m. As Schwing drove alone, he was eager to talk about his bone-chilling, skin-numbing but thrilling trout fishing outing a few days earlier in the holiday week. Schwing and Husain fished the Blue River, a tributary of the Colorado River, near Green Mountain Reservoir.

“I love it. It’s peaceful out there on that river,” Schwing said.

Their “hotspot,” which usually is very crowded, was approximately a two-hour drive from Denver. They pretty much had the river to themselves on that freezing holiday inside the White River National Forest.

“Since we were there on Thanksgiving morning, it was me, my friend and one other guy we didn’t know, and he didn’t catch a thing,” Schwing said.

The Catholic High School graduate, a defensive standout on the football team, caught eight brown trout before getting off the water around 2:30 p.m. to get back to Denver.

Husain hooked and landed six brown trout. However, his best catch was 28 inches long, the biggest brownie of the trip with an estimated weight of 5 pounds.

Schwing’s fish all bit on a Copper John Nymph Fly with a sprinkling of black/white feathers in it on a Size 22 hook. It’s one of the most popular trout nymphs across the country and around the world.

“I was pumped. It’s always a good day being in the outdoors, especially when you catch fish like that,” he said.

He started tying flies as a boy soon after his parents returned from a fly fishing trip to Alaska. They gave him a fly rod and, later, a fly-tying kit, which he started using right away and making his own flies.

Schwing, the son of Armond and Jennifer Marks Schwing, practiced often with his new fly rod and his own handtied flies on ponds around Squirrel Run.

However, he wielded a different fly rod and reel when he coaxed those eight beautiful brownies to bite on Thanksgiving Day. The 9-foot long Orvis (6 Weight) fly rod and reel combination was gifted him a few years later, he said.

He plans more outdoor adventures the rest of the winter but with an emphasis on duck hunting.

“I’ll definitely be duck hunting,” he said, noting few if any fishing trips might be in the future until the spring.

However, his love for turkey hunting will take over then and, probably, squeeze out the fishing trips.

“Maybe in the spring but then I’ll be chasing turkey,” said the young man who is one turkey subspecies shy of a coveted grand slam – an Osceola.

Schwing has bagged three of the four subspecies in the Eastern, Rio Grande and Merriam’s.

“I still need to make it down to Florida. I just don’t have time,” he said, pointing out the Osceolas live in Florida.

He’s proud this past spring he brought his dad on a turkey hunt in South Dakota, about 15 minutes from Mount Rushmore. The elder Schwing, CEO and chairman of Schwing Insurance Co., shot and killed his first Merriam’s turkey on the trip.