I just returned to Canada after a week of fishing in Wisconsin with my brother Colin. We crammed in outings for four different species and captured these adventures on video. I will be posting them on YouTube as part of our “The Road Trip” series under Cooper Gallant Fishing.
This is season five of “The Road Trip,” which is about multispecies, bucket-list fishing adventures. On the Wisconsin trip, we fished with some buddies who also happen to be fishing guides.
Our trip started with a bang on the first day when we fished Green Bay with muskie hammer Doug Wegner. We rigged up with 8- to 10-foot extra-heavy rods matched with Shimano Tranx 400HG casting reels filled with 80-pound Power Pro braided line.
The lines were secured to 10- to 16-inch muskie baits. One was a bucktail inline spinner sporting two big blades. The other was a Bull Dawg, a giant soft plastic swimbait with a long, undulating curled tail.
Doug told us we might not catch a muskie, but if we did, it would be a big one. We caught a 44-incher first thing in the morning. About 20 minutes later, Doug caught one that measured just shy of 55 inches. A 50-plus incher is what all serious muskie anglers are after.
Doug saw the muskie following the bait and triggered it to bite with the figure-eight tactic right next to the boat. That was unbelievable.
We didn’t want to stress the muskie by weighing it and released it after taking a few photos. Doug estimated that it weighed between 40 and 50 pounds.
We caught those fish before 8 a.m. Then we continued chucking and ripping those big baits until 11 o’clock that night without getting another bite. Our bodies were hurting. They don’t call the muskie the fish of 10,000 casts for nothing.
From there, we went straight to the Upper Mississippi River to fish for flathead catfish with Erik Brztowski. When he’s not competing in a bass tournament, he guides for catfish.
He positioned his bass boat in the middle of the river and employed spot lock on his Minn Kota Ultrex to hold us in the current. We set four rods with live bait bottom rigs out over the transom in depths ranging from 10 to 30 feet.
We started in full daylight and fished until about 2 o’clock in the morning. We landed six flatheads, with the biggest going around 20 pounds. Then the three of us slept the rest of the night in the boat on the water.
The next morning, Colin and I drove to Port Washington, Wis., to fish Lake Michigan for salmon with Eric Haataja.
The salmon were just beginning to stage outside of river mouths before heading upriver to spawn. The water was still warm, but we did manage to see the odd salmon swimming around with our electronics.
We were casting 1/2- to 1-ounce Haat jigging spoons with 8- and 9-foot medium-heavy rods and 16-pound fluorocarbon line. We’d make long casts and rip the spoons back to the boat. Our biggest salmon was a 23-pound king.
The final bucket list event of the trip involved heading to a secret location on the Wisconsin River to fish for sturgeon with Eric Brztowski. We fished from the bank and from a boat with the same live bait bottom rigs and tackle that Eric had us using for catfish on the Upper Mississippi.
On the way there, Eric said we were going to crack the sturgeon. That kind of scared me because a statement like that is often the kiss of death. I shouldn’t have worried. On the first night, we caught 26 sturgeon and even had double headers. Four were over 50 inches long, with the biggest going 62 inches.
We slept on the boat the first night and on the beach the next. We drove straight back to Canada after fishing with Eric and got home around 2 o’clock in the morning. Colin and I were exhausted after a week of fishing and sleep deprivation, but I’m already longing for the next road trip.
