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Wednesday, April 24, 2024
Outdoors Sports

Personal-best walleye: One of thousands of Illinois anglers fishing Minnesota earns Fish of the Week

Robert Cockrell, of Mokena, is one of thousands of Illinoisans who fish Minnesota annually and he caught his PB walleye while fishing there.

By  Dale Bowman
   
SHARE Personal-best walleye: One of thousands of Illinois anglers fishing Minnesota earns Fish of the Week
Robert Cockrell with his PB walleye. Provided photo

Robert Cockrell with his PB walleye.

Provided

Robert Cockrell caught a 28-inch, 7-pound walleye while trolling a DHJ12 Rapala earlier this month in Bovey, Minnesota.

“Biggest walleye I’ve ever caught,” the Mokena man emailed.

Last week Kinsey Link earned FOTW honors for her lifetime-fish, a muskie caught with family in Minnesota.

With the last two FOTW coming from Minnesota, I wondered how many Illinois residents buy fishing licenses in Minnesota. Try 28,145 in 2020. So far this year, the number is at 20,845, according to Kim Pleticha, assistant communications director for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.

FOTW, the celebration of big fish and their stories (the stories matter, as this one shows) around Chicago fishing, runs Wednesdays in the paper Sun-Times. The online posting here at https://chicago.suntimes.com/outdoors goes up at varied days of the week, depending on what is going on the wide world of the outdoors.

To make submissions, email (BowmanOutside@gmail.com) or contact me on Facebook (Dale Bowman), Twitter (@BowmanOutside) or Instagram (@BowmanOutside).

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