Data collection and the analytics of it are usually as palatable as a communion wafer. Trust me, I’m a baseball fan.
I also have been a fan of Ray Thompson’s annual breakdown of muskie catches in Illinois. For more than 30 years, he made the numbers something you could feel, taste and dig into.
It helped that the Illini Muskies Alliance awarded an annual trophy to a member of an IMA club who released the largest muskie captured the year before in Illinois and registered it in the creel survey.
For some of us, nothing connects as well as a big-fish story and a photo.
Mr. Thompson, 70, died last Wednesday after a short illness. He came home from the hospital, then suffered a setback, according to his children.
I hope that someone assumes the role that Mr. Thompson played in crunching the catch numbers of muskie fishing in Illinois and what they mean.
‘‘He was one of the guys we needed to grow the fishery,’’ Musky Hunter TV host Jim Saric said. ‘‘He was a conduit between the DNR and anglers and could rally the groups.’’
Mr. Thompson joined what is now the Chicagoland Muskie Hunters, the first Muskies Inc. chapter in Illinois, in 1976 and became a life member in 1978. He became a lifetime member of Muskies Inc. in 1977. He helped form the South Side Muskie Hawks chapter of Muskies Inc. shortly afterward. In 1982, he co-founded the IMA. He entered the Muskies Inc. Hall of Fame in 2002 and the IMA Hall of Fame in 2017.
‘‘Ray was one of the instrumental guys in starting a muskie program in the Land of Lincoln when the Illinois Department of Conservation was against it back in the 1970s,’’ emailed Pat Glavin, the vice chairman of the IMA. ‘‘Ray was also one of co-founding members of the Illini Muskies Alliance that brought all the clubs in Illinois together to help the IDNR with their fish-stocking needs and equipment purchases. The Land of Lincoln muskie fishery owes a big thank you to Ray’s countless efforts in making Illinois one of the best muskie-stocking programs in the Midwest.’’
Knowing how muskie anglers are, I think Mr. Thompson’s greatest feat might have been keeping the muskie clubs in Illinois together.
I also love how Mr. Thompson’s annual recap of the voluntary creel survey and overall look at muskie fishing in Illinois provided a vivid glimpse of our fishery each year and chronicled its growth.
Mr. Thompson’s data is available at illinimuskiesalliance.org. For my column on his gathering of the annual summaries, click here.
In lieu of flowers, send donations to the IMA, 3944 S. Clarence Ave., Stickney, IL 60402.
Deer hunting
Overall harvest during the 2019-20 deer-hunting seasons in Illinois was up to 153,048 from 151,709 in 2018-19. I plan to take a fuller look at what the harvest numbers mean in my column Saturday. The number that sticks out is the jump in archery harvest, up by more than 6,000 to 67,696.
Wild things
I’m not sure if the mild winter allowed people to see more robins overwintering or whether the mild winter allowed more robins to overwinter. Or both.
Stray cast
Billie Eilish is to Adele what I am to Spence Petros.
