We traveled to Minnesota this last year and explored part of the North Star State, but we didn't come close to fishing all the great species or covering the state in detail.

From musky to brook trout to lake trout, steelhead, and beyond, Minnesota is for sure a destination that should be on your list this year.

And we are in luck because today we have the person who wrote the book, Fly Fishing, Minnesota, and today you're going to get a roadmap to fish some of these storied waters. This is the Wefly Swing podcast where I show you the best places to travel to for fly fishing, how to find the best resources and tools to prepare for that big trip and what you can do to give back to the fish species

we all love. How's it going? I'm Dave, host of the Webfly Swing podcast. I've been fly fishing since I was a

kid, grew up around a little fly shop and have created one of the largest fly fishing podcast in this country.

I've also interviewed more of the greatest fly anglers and guides than just about anyone out there.

Carl Hensel, the person in charge of the largest fly fishing expo in Minnesota and the author of Fly Fishing Minnesota is here to walk us around the state. We're going to find out why you should find some time this year to fish lake trout when they get started with their program. Right now, as we spoke, it was negative two degrees.

So we're going to talk about when they start fishing there.

We're going to find out about the drift list.

Again, taking it back to the drift list.

And they're also going to obviously get into steelhead salmon,

talk about the fishery and hear about a little bit of the history of sea lamp prey.

That was very interesting.

I think we've heard about that. They collapsed back in the 50s, and now they've responded and rebounded, and we got that story today. Here we go. You can check them out. Check out the book, Fly fishing, Minnesota. Let's get into it. Here he is, Carl Hensel. How you doing, Carl? Doing great. Glad to be here today.

Yeah, you have a bunch of things going on. We're going to dig into today with the focus on Minnesota. You're a guide out there. You wrote a great book that covers kind of fly fishing

Minnesota. You have an expo, and I'm sure there's some other things we're going to pull out

here and some great rivers. And we were actually up in Minnesota this last year and kind of traveled around. It was really awesome to be there. We have a lot of family there. So yeah, I'm really excited about this one. But maybe take us into what you have going this time of year. It's kind of like as this goes live, we'll probably be in February, mid-February. How's things looking for you? Do any fish it now? Yeah, it's, uh, Minnesota does deserve its reputation of being cold. So we're based

up along Minnesota's North Shore. And right now, you know, Lake Superior is open, but none of the

streams in the areas are. So our fly fishing opportunities are limited in northern Minnesota.

But in southeast Minnesota, in the driftless region, which will certainly talk plenty about,

all of those streams down there are limestone spring creeks, and that's where we head for fishing in the winter.

Because all those streams, even on the coldest days, are generally open

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