September 02, 2025
By In-Fisherman Staff
Mr. Don Pursch will be inducted into the Minnesota Hall of Fame this coming fall, and it’s an overdue honor for such a wonderful guy. Don talks about his early days with the renowned Camp Fish here in Minnesota, and how the original crew at In-Fisherman helped encourage him to purchase a remote fly-in fishing resort in Ontario. He shares a few epic stories about what it takes to run a lodge like that and spends a lot of time reminiscing about the discovery years of In-Fisherman. A truly enjoyable conversation that sheds a lot of light on the guide lifestyle in an amazing part of the world.
Truncated transcript:
00:00:03.480 --> 00:00:39.260: You're listening to Storyline, North America's top voice in multi-species freshwater angling. Here is your host, Thomas Allen. I have a special guest today. We're digging into another episode of In-Fisherman's Storyline. In fact, We're currently perched atop the beautiful, the glorious Twin Towers of the In-Fisherman headquarters at the LL Bean Studios. We're overlooking beautiful downtown Brainerd here. It's just a fantastic view.
00:00:39.260 --> 00:00:54.180: My guest today is Don Pursch. And Don, I want to hear about your history. I want to hear about your contributions to the industry. In fact, you're a member of the 2025 Class Induction at the Minnesota Fishing Hall of Fame.
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00:00:54.180 --> 00:01:26.740: It is pretty unbelievable. It's cool. You've had a great career. There's so much I want to talk to you about, but I got to tell you a story first. Okay. So, and I've told parts of this story on this podcast, and I don't apologize. This is a great story, but when I was in fourth grade. We moved from southern Wisconsin to Iowa. Things weren't going great for me. It was a tough time, uncomfortable, you can just imagine. Loved to fish, and we moved to Muscatine, Iowa, which is on the Mississippi River. And my dad bought me an In-Fisherman video.
00:01:26.980 --> 00:01:48.000: So I'm fourth grade, right? And it was the greatest hits. It had Al's big pike. It had the segment of the catfish deal at the at the dam there in Selkirk. Doug was catching walleyes wearing waders at night with a keep sack, and there was just a lot of really interesting stuff. And it just it molded me, it changed me.
00:01:48.000 --> 00:02:19.880: Well, the very next video that I bought was The Great Muskie Hunt. And in this video, there was this tall, skinny guy with, by the way, how old is your mustache? Have you kept a date on it? It's been forever. It's been forever. But you wore a classic mustache. It had to have been late 70s, early 80s. Right. And you contributed to the great Muskie hunt. Whatever. There were two parts to that, if you'll recall. I don't remember which one it was, but that's where I saw you on TV. And I'm like, man, look at that dapper dude.
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00:02:19.880 --> 00:03:05.300: Muskie had, but there was a… I met you at a show in Chicago. You remember that? I don't remember meeting you in Chicago, no. But that was that was back in the Campfish days when this stuff was kind of happening. And I was the muskie guy at Camp Fish, instructional director and stuff. Yeah, we just put this show together and it was stumbled on a lake in northwest Ontario, Jimmy and I. I mean, Muskies aren't easy. Was that one of the biggest challenges in fishing ever at that point was to film a Muskie show? I mean, it had to have been early, early days of Muskie film….
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