Species
Pick your fish: seasons, techniques and the best waters we cover for each one.
Crappie
Brush piles, bridge pilings and standing timber. The fish fry favorite.
Catfish (blue, channel)
The most reliable bite on most southern waters. Blues run big; channels fill the cooler.
Largemouth bass
The headline act on most American reservoirs. Relates to cover: docks, brush, grass edges and points.
Smallmouth bass
Current and rock. Finds gravel flats, boulders and drop-offs, and fights far above its weight.
White bass
River-run spawners and open-water schoolers. Fast limits when you find them.
Brown trout
Wary, predatory and nocturnal by preference. The big ones eat streamers.
Rainbow trout
The workhorse of western rivers: riffles, seams and dry-fly eats.
Walleye
The glass-eyed prize of northern lakes. Low light, wind-blown structure and live bait.
Northern pike
The ambush predator of weedbeds and cabbage edges. Aggressive, big and always worth a wire leader.
Yellow perch
The great lakes and northern panfish staple. Schools tight to bottom; where you catch one there are fifty.
Striped bass
The reservoir heavyweight. Follows shad and herring schools in open water year-round.
Steelhead
Lake-run rainbows that turn tributaries into winter fisheries.
Redfish (red drum)
The copper-flanked king of the flats and surf: tailing in inches of water, schooling by the hundred in fall.
Muskellunge
The fish of ten thousand casts. Weed edges, rock bars and big-water structure.
Speckled trout
The Gulf coast's everyday obsession: soft mouths, violent topwater strikes and a fishery that lives by tide and bait.
Bluefish
The ocean's most honest fish: when blues blitz bait on the beach, everything with hooks gets bit.
Lake trout
The char of the deep: 40-year-old predators patrolling the cold basins of glacial lakes, from the Finger Lakes to the Rockies.
Hybrid striped bass
Stocked white bass x striper cross. Open-water shad chasers; birds and busting bait give them away.
Brook trout
North America’s native char: a small-stream specialist that demands cold, clean water and repays it with the prettiest fish in the woods.
Landlocked salmon
Atlantic salmon that never see the sea: smelt-chasing acrobats of Maine and New England lakes, and the reason ice-out is a holiday up north.
Chinook salmon
The king: the Pacific's heavyweight, intercepted trolling the ocean feeding lanes or swinging rivers on the spawning run.
Surfperch
The Pacific surf's honest wage: barred and redtail surfperch schooling in the wash, paying anglers who read the beach.
Rockfish (Pacific)
The Pacific reef's crowd: black, blue, vermilion and twenty cousins stacked on structure, biting like they mean it.
Mahi-mahi (dorado)
The ocean's fastest-growing gamefish: neon gold-and-green acrobats stacked under anything that floats.
Giant trevally (ulua)
The reef's apex bully: Hawaii's ulua, a hundred pounds of shoulder that eats poppers like personal insults.
California halibut
The flatfish that thinks it is a bass: ambushing anchovies over sand from San Diego bays to San Francisco flats.