The DrakeCast #69: Wisconsin’s Locomotive Fishing History

I first met Israel on a steelheading adventure in Southeastern Alaska back in 2018 (a trip we documented in an earlier episode of the podcast). It had been a while since we had seen each other so this past summer he drove sixteen hours north to join me on a search for the best fishing Wisconsin has to offer: smallmouth bass on poppers. It took a couple of days but we eventually found an entire river teeming with willing, surface-feeding fish. But seeing as he had driven all that way, on day three, we decided to shift gears. Or as Israel phrased it, “We absolutely waylaid smallmouth all day yesterday on poppers. So we figured why not kick ourself in the [expletive] and try and go after musky today.”

Israel with a fine Wisconsin smallie taken on a deerhair popper mere yards from the takeout

In this episode, we ride in my rinky-dink raft with Israel as he searches for his first musky. Along the way, we will chat with journalist Bob Willging about the early years of fishing in Wisconsin’s Northwoods and take a trip to the Mid-Continent Railway Museum to learn about the role trains played in the Badger State’s fishing history.

Many thanks to Bob Willging for sharing his reporting on the trains that helped build Wisconsin’s fishing resort industry and the the forgotten history of the fish cars. Willging originally covered these stories for Wisconsin Outdoor News. You can find links to Willging’s books here.

An equally grateful thanks to Jeff Lentz and Becca Madero of the Mid-Continental Railway Museum for showing me around the museum’s handsomely refurbished fish car, which I’m pretty sure is the only original fish car still in existence in the entire country.