After catching the walleye of his life last week, Pete Riedesel texted, “Look at the tail of that beast . . . was as big as my hand. Now I need the 50-inch musky.”

He was fishing Lake Tomahawk in northern Wisconsin when he caught the 31-inch, 10-pound walleye.

“Probably never again, what a fish to hold, a little No. 8 jerkbait in his mouth,” he texted.

Riedesel, a retired educator, is one of the best anglers I’ve had the chance to fish with often. It’s good to know that even the great anglers who fish nearly every day still chase dreams. I suspect the dream of a 50-inch muskie will be harder to reach.

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.

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