During Tuesday evening's snowstorm, Luke Konson and Daniel Balserak cruised across the Interstate 94 St. Croix River Bridge into Minnesota. The Honda van they drove had north of 150,000 miles on it, and behind the vehicle's two front seats was enough fishing tackle to catch everything from striped bass to weakfish, brook trout to American shad.
And, with some luck, walleyes.
Konson, 18, and Balserak, 19, had intended to be freshman roommates at Clemson University in South Carolina this fall. But the prospect of living college virtually, one Zoom class after another, held no appeal.
So they decided to go fishing.
"When we got the notice that college was going to be held online, we started to think what we could do instead and start college next year," Konson said. "We thought about trying to catch a fish in all 50 states, but that's been done before. But we couldn't find anyone who had caught the state fish in all 50 states, so that's what we decided to do."
Living in northern Virginia, not far from Washington, D.C., the pair began their yearlong angling odyssey by traveling up the Eastern Seaboard. Eleven states between their home and Maine were conquered fairly easily, with the exception of Connecticut, whose state fish, the American shad, was out of season.
"After that first bunch of states, we came home for a couple of weeks and planned our next route, with the intention of fishing 22 more states before Christmas, when we would return home again for a break," Konson said. "Minnesota is the farthest west we're going on this leg, then we'll head south to Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, before following the Gulf Coast states home."
Some states have been tougher than others. It took a week to land a couple of Ohio walleyes. But Michigan's brook trout cooperated, before Konson and Balserak drove to Wisconsin, where they caught a break when two local guides got them onto the Wisconsin River and Pewaukee Lake and into muskies, the Badger State's official whopper.
