Best friends from Fox Cities compete for statewide master fisherman award in contest for high school students

KAUKAUNA – Sometimes fishing is more about friendship than the pursuit of a catch.

But when you’re competing against your best friend for the title of master angler in the state of Wisconsin, you can’t take any chances. You better blindfold 'em and confiscate their phone before you bring them to any honey holes.

That’s the position Brendan Papesh, a senior at Appleton North High School, found himself in last summer with his buddy Riley Hemme, a senior at Kaukauna. They’re competing neck and neck for the Wisconsin Interscholastic Fishing Association’s Master Angler Award.

The statewide contest invites student fishermen to pursue trophy-sized fish from a list of 34 Wisconsin species listed on the organization’s website. It runs from Feb. 1 to Jan. 31 each year.

Once anglers catch a fish at or above the size, they snap a picture next to a bump board and upload it to the FishDonkey app, a social media platform for fishing tournaments. It allows competitors to keep track of each other’s progress.

Hemme has caught 32 of the 34 required species so far, which is a state record. Papesh, or 'Pappy' as friends and family call him, is right behind him at 31. All that’s left for them both is pumpkin seed and splake, along with a rainbow trout for Papesh.

Hence the blindfold last summer.

“It’s come down to the wire where Riley isn’t sharing information,” said Greg Franzen, a Kaukauna High School science teacher and fishing club advisor. “Supposedly, Brendan even blindfolded Riley, took him to a lake up north and made him leave his phone back at the cabin.”

It’s a pretty serious competition between lifelong friends. Hemme and Papesh met playing little league baseball when they were 11. Since then it’s been all baseball and fishing trips across the state, notably to Minocqua, and Milwaukee each year for burbot and lake trout.

All that time together makes the heightened competition a little strange for both anglers.

“It’s extremely hard to compete against him because I know how bad we both want it,” Hemme said. “I want to help him as much as I can, but I want it for myself and my family wants it for me. It’s a bizarre competition, but it will make us better anglers in the long run.”

With the clock winding down on this year’s master angler competition, Hemme and Riley aren’t sure if they’ll catch any more of the species on their lists. How do you catch a 9-inch pumpkin seed, anyway?

"It’s probably one of the hardest on the list, for sure," Papesh said. "You just have to pray that you’re not going to catch a bluegill because they’re essentially the same fish, just a hybrid of it."

Once the contest is over at the end of the month, they’re looking forward to just setting a few tip ups and chilling out for a while (pun intended). Their advice to any fishermen pursuing trophy fish is to be willing to put in the time, research and gas money.

“Seventy percent of fish I’ve caught has been from me putting my head down and doing it,” Papesh said. “You have to be willing to work, keep your head down and focus on it.”

While the contest has taken both across the state, Hemme said he's still partial to the natural resources around the Fox Valley — in the bay of Green Bay and the Fox River, where about 14 of the master angler species can be caught.

"A lot of people think you have to travel a long ways, but we’ve caught some of these 10 minutes away from our houses," he said. "It’s all right there, you have walleye, musky, and it’s right at our fingertips."

Despite the photo-finish between Hemme and Papesh, Franzen said he suspects the two have learned as much about their friendship as they have about fishing.

“This program ultimately isn’t about how many you catch,” he said. “It’s about the journey. It’s bringing families together, it’s about kids working together.”

Contact Jake Prinsen at jprinsen@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @PrinsenJake.

This article originally appeared on Appleton Post-Crescent: Wisconsin fishing: Fox Cities students compete for master angler award