When COVID shut the world down, Matthew Crawford went looking for a reason to get out of the house, and he landed on fishing. It had never really stuck before, but that changed the day a largemouth bass grabbed his line off a dock, rose to the surface, and snapped free before he could land it.
By his own account, he was inconsolable for a long time. But the heartbreak left a question behind: how the heck had he hooked a fish like that? For two weeks he went back every day, working through YouTube videos until he understood his mistake, and when he finally landed a big bass of his own, that was that. “I was hooked,” he said.
That was five or six years ago, and Matthew has spent almost every day on the water since. Born in South Carolina and now living in Oshkosh, he calls Wisconsin home, and the Winnebago system is a big part of why. There are so many species to chase that, as he puts it, “it really is hard to get bored out here.”
The appeal was never just casting a line and waiting. Matthew treats every trip as a puzzle, and he loves that the fish never let him get too comfortable. “Even when I think I know exactly what’s going on, the fish will tell me otherwise,” he said. “Because they’re fish, they like to remind you that you don’t know everything.”
“Because they’re fish, they like to remind you that you don’t know everything.”
The gratitude comes easy these days. “Every day I’m out here, I’m happy to be out and lucky to be out here.” What sets Matthew apart is what he does with all of it. He gives it away. He built a social media following by posting exactly how and where he catches fish, because he sees sharing as the surest way to connect more people to the water. When information gets locked away, in his view, people get shut out before they ever have a chance to fall for it.
He has already seen what that connection can do. One day a dad reached out on Facebook. His two daughters were hoping for fresh fish for dinner, but between two jobs he had no time to figure out how to catch any, so Matthew sent him the whole rundown. A couple of days later, a photo came back: the two girls, smiling, with plates of fish in front of them. A little shared information had connected a family to the water and helped put dinner on their table. “That told me right there that I should keep doing what I’m doing,” Matthew said.
“This water,” he said, “is where I find enjoyment and purpose.” For him, that is the whole point. It was never about showing off a big catch. It is about the handoff, turning what he knows into something someone else can use, and every so often, into a memory a family gets to keep.
A story from Watershed Moments Issue 3 of 2026
Watershed Moments is a quarterly publication from the Fox-Wolf Watershed Alliance, sharing true stories of people whose lives have been shaped by water—and the moments that sparked their care for it.
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