This year is the first time I’ve ever fished outside of my home state of Wisconsin. The wife is working a contract in Wyoming for the summer and our camp site is right on the North Platte. Figured it’d be a great opportunity to learn some fly fishing. Stopped in to a local outfitters today and grabbed the 2026 regs and started reading. That’s where I got confused really quick.
In Wisconsin we have size limits on just about everything as well as specific seasons for most game fish. If I’m reading it correctly there really isn’t a closed season here only closed areas at certain times. It also seams like there’s no minimum size on many of the species just a limit on keeping big ones. Is it really that simple out here and Wisconsin is just overly picky? I’m sure the vast majority of my fishing out here will be catch and release unless one of the neighbors in the campground likes fish.
Posted by Northwoods_Phil
2 Comments
A big reason Wisconsin has so many regulations is the sheer number of anglers. The pressure on the stocks is higher overall (if you look at the number of fishing licenses for annual alone, it was over 800,000 for 2024 for Wisconsin, the latest number for Wyoming was 104,000 for comparison.)
This isn’t including lifetime licenses many folks get their kids when they’re born.
So to answer the question, probably because the state has not deemed such regulations to be necessary to maintain healthy populations of popular gamefish given the smaller numbers of anglers. I’d also suspect a western state with lots of wild areas to have healthier populations due to reduced human activity in general (Wyoming is the least populated state in the country at just over 500,000, Wisconsin has over 5 million)
It’s not that Wisconsin is overly picky, it’s that nobody lives in Wyoming, so there is less fishing pressure, so the impact of keeping smaller fish is less. Wyoming has 587,618 to 592,720 people living in the state, Wisconsin has 5,972,787, over 10x the population. To put it into scale the city of Milwaukee has 10k less people than the entire state of Wyoming, so if you took everyone in Milwaukee and spread them over a land mass the size of Wyoming it would be pretty similar to what they experience. There are size limits for certain long lived fish, like tiger musky under 36 inches must be released, but there aren’t a ton.