Home Forums Fishing Freshwater If you could only fish for one kind......

Catching grayling is ironed into the memory--just the way they look maybe, but a steelie arcing out out the water in early fall...

Teal is pulling the wool over everyone's eyes. There are no more walleyes in the Bays. Fished out, a few carp left. Sad, really sad.

Do you ever troll the big Bay for pike, Teal?

Naw - trolled little bay a bit never cought one. I haven't fished the bays for years - are the walleys really out? Man we used to come home everytime with 3 or 4 in the 26-28 inch range - perfect for the pan.

Coho for me too!

No Teal, my BS <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> they are there, some with your name on them...maybe a bit shorter now...

Catfish. They are the only fish stupid enough for me to catch on a regular basis.

Has to be the Walleye, can't beat em to eat, not slimy like a pike and don't have the fishy smell but by God they can be aggravating to find and catch.
Fickle buggers.

Heyyyyy.... don't say my favorite fish is stupid... The little ones maybe, but not the big ones. Like whitetails, they don't get big being dumb! The 30 & 40 pounders are a whole different thing.
Know what I call a two pound bass? Bait!

Muskie, it's about all I fish now, only problem if I move some place else there might not be any there

My thing is and has always been BIG bluegill on UL fly gear and micro light spinning gear. I fish exclusively with tube boats on farm ponds/lakes using artificials that I make and swap with a few local tiers. My younger brother started making rods about 25 years ago as part of his taxidermy business. Taxidermy is gone but he still builds rods. Over the years for birthdays and Christmas he has given me some of the sweetest rods built on Loomis and Sage blanks. These have been 3 piece 2wt and 3wt pack rods. Last time I spoke to him he said that he was working on my 60th birthday gift for next January and that it would knock my socks off. A split bamboo maybe??? So my rest of my life pick is BIG bluegill with super light gear.

A big copperheaded 'gill on a 2 weight or an UL noodle comes pretty close to perfect. A native Speck on a tiny stream works too.

SMALLMOUTH Bass

big pike or smallies up in the UP of michigan.

as a kid i got invited up to some remote lakes that hadn't seen a human in many years. the pike were just huge. i swear you could have trolled a beer bottle across the water and got a strike.

after a while we were just dragging the dead shiners acroos the top of the water and the pike were exploding on them.. very cool

smallies just rule....

woofer

Woofer - I envy you the pike experience! (Around here we have always misnamed them northerns.) Best, John

Any fish that you actually have to trick to catch.....so i guess that includes almost everything, except probably pike b/c they bite anything you throw at them........and bluegill when u fish with worms.....my all time favorite fish to catch is largemouth bass. Nothing like tricking a fish into biting a plastic worm as you bring it across the bottom....ive never been smallmouth fishing so idk about them?!

JMHO

Grayling on a fly rod are great. They will take almost anything that looks remotly like a bug. I don't see a point in nimph fishing for them though, It's all about the dry fly. I catch and realese them though because I don't find them good eating.
I also like rockfish and lingcod fishing off Kodiak. They are great eating.

Well, it depends - when I'm on the GA coast, I love the speckled trout and the redfish. But I spend a week in AK every year and the Coho and Dolly Varden in the Situk are to die for. But wait, the big catfish in Santee-Cooper are some kind of fun. Don't forget the largemouth - Oh my word! - when they bust a buzz bait or top water plug I almost have a seizure! Fresh water stripers free lined with live herring give a thrill to be remembered. And just to breathe the air in the mountains where the small stream trout live, not to mention a couple panfried in bacon grease. Sigh.
To sum all this up, I don't have and would not want just "one" favorite. Wherever, whenever I can go fishing, that is where-what-when I want to go and catch. I recall some episodes that sum it up: Ships Creek in Anchorage, AK, ruined a pair of dress shoes catching a nice coho on a borrowed rod and then giving the fish away. Had an absolute ball doing so!
Another time, out of town trip to the Caribbean, ended up catching bonefish at night in the lights from the hotel. Some of the locals wanted them to make soup, which I had never heard of. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" />
Good friends, good tales, tight lines - can it ever be better than this?