UTERGreat Lakes fish species: all 17
17 species — inshore, surf, reef, offshore, sharks, fresh water, and the bait. What each one is, what it eats, how to fish it, the live bait for it, what it's worth in the book, and the rule — with the date the rule was checked.
The points scale
rarity and size; bait scores nothingA catch scores the fish's base points times how many, up to double again for a trophy-size fish photographed on a ruler, plus ten for a photo and fifty for the first of a species in your book.
Inshore
2 fish
White perch
The Chesapeake's pan fish: a little cousin of the striper in every tidal river and creek, running up to spawn in March and schooling on the points and oyster bars all summer.
Steelhead
The sea-run rainbow trout: chrome-bright from the ocean, running the coastal rivers from California to Alaska in winter (and some in summer).
Offshore
2 fish
Chinook (king) salmon
The king: the biggest Pacific salmon, black-gummed, spotted on both tail lobes, feeding on herring and anchovy in the ocean from Monterey to Kodiak before it runs home to its river.
Coho (silver) salmon
The silver: an acrobat that hits fast-trolled lures near the surface all summer and floods the bays and river mouths in the fall from Oregon to Kodiak.
Fresh water
13 fish
Channel catfish
The everyday catfish of the rivers and lakes, spotted and forked-tailed, on the bottom at night on anything that smells.
Smallmouth bass
The bronzeback: a bronze, red-eyed, tail-walking bass of clear rocky water — the rivers of the Ozarks and Appalachia, the TVA lakes, the Great Lakes shoals.
Yellow perch
The ringed perch: gold with dark saddles, schooled by the thousand over the weed flats and the mud of the northern lakes and the Great Lakes, and the fish behind half the ice shanties and fish fries of the Midwest.
Walleye
The marble-eyed perch of the North: a night feeder with glassy eyes that see in the dark, schooled on the rock reefs and the river runs from Lake Erie to the Missouri reservoirs and south in the TVA mountain lakes.
Northern pike
The water wolf: a long, green, duck-billed ambusher of the northern weed beds, with a mouth full of teeth and a habit of hitting anything that moves.
Muskellunge (muskie)
The fish of ten thousand casts: the biggest of the pike family, fifty inches of barred or spotted fury in the clear lakes of Wisconsin and Minnesota, Lake St.
White bass
The sand bass: a silver, striped, shad-chasing schooler that runs up the rivers by the thousand every spring to spawn — the Texas rivers in February, the Wolf in May — and boils on the surface of the big lakes all summer.
Brown trout
The wary one: a butter-yellow, red-spotted European trout gone native in the limestone creeks, the Rocky Mountain rivers and the Ozark tailwaters, where it grows to thirty pounds on sculpins and small trout.
Lake trout (mackinaw, togue)
The char of the deep, cold lakes — Superior, the Finger Lakes, Flathead, Flaming Gorge, Tahoe, the Alaska interior — grey and cream-spotted, slow-growing and long-lived.
Landlocked Atlantic salmon
The landlocked Atlantic of Maine's big lakes — Sebago, West Grand, Moosehead — and New Hampshire, Vermont and New York: a leaping, smelt-eating salmon that follows the ice-out smelt run into the river mouths.
Lake whitefish
The silver, small-mouthed whitefish of the Great Lakes — the commercial fish of the upper lakes for two centuries and an ice-fishing favorite on Green Bay, Bays de Noc and Chequamegon Bay.
Freshwater drum (sheepshead)
The grunting silver drum of the big rivers and Lake Erie — a hard-pulling, mussel-crunching fish the Midwest calls sheepshead, and the bonus fish on every walleye trip..
Common carp
The golden ghost of the flats: introduced everywhere, scorned by most, and one of the hardest-pulling fish in fresh water.