‘I Wasn’t Seeking Glory.’ Smallmouth Bass Caught in Chicago Was Just an Ounce Shy of the State Record
A bass angler fishing the southern end of Lake Michigan landed a tank of a smallmouth bass Thursday that nearly broke the Illinois record. Kyle Danhausen’s smallie weighed 7 pounds 2 ounces, just one ounce shy of the standing state record. He caught the fish in the heart of Chicago — not far from where the Bears play.
“I like to fish that downtown area whenever I can, and I was right there [in the city]. I put in at Burnham Harbor, which is right next to Soldier Field,” Danhausen tells Outdoor Life. “It’s cool to fish there, because you’re looking at the skyscrapers, and the fishing is actually really good, too … The only thing is the wind — we get a lot of small craft advisories. But the [bass] fishing can be fantastic.”
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It certainly was that day, April 24, with air temps in the 80s and no wind to speak of. Danhausen, who works as a sales rep for Shimano and lives an hour south of the city, says he was hooking bass on nearly every cast that morning. Targeting small rock piles, he caught smallmouth on a 2.5-inch tube bait and then switched over to a small swimbait. He says he had his forward-facing sonar on, but that it didn’t play much of a role because the fish were stacked up near the bottom and hard to see on the screen.
The bite slowed by mid-morning, and Danhausen started working some deeper structure nearby. He was fishing in around 20 feet of water when the big smallie hammered his swimbait. Danhausen felt the head shakes and he knew it was a good fish, bigger than the four- and five-pounders he’d reeled in that morning.
“It was funny. A couple guys were fishing near me, and they said they knew right away it was a big fish because as soon as I hooked it, I jumped into the middle of the boat and got my net ready,” Danhausen says. “I’d been hand-landing the rest of my fish, but that one I really wanted to catch.”
Weighing the bass on his hand scale, Danhausen saw it was just over 7 pounds, and then he confirmed that weight on the neighboring boat’s scale. When he realized he was knocking on the door of a state record, Danhausen called his friend Dale Bowman, who writes for the Chicago Sun Times, and who sent him to a certified scale at Bridgeport Bait and Tackle. Danhausen was also joined around that time by Jim O’Neil with Midwest Outdoors, who met him at a nearby boat ramp after hearing about the potential state record in his livewell.
Danhausen called a state fisheries biologist on his way to the bait shop, just to see if he should fizz the fish after pulling it up from 20 feet deep. (The biologist told him not to worry about it.) He says he was planning to release the fish regardless, and he wasn’t all that interested in certifying a record at the start. But he figured he might as well get confirmation at the bait shop.
The fish, a female full of eggs, measured 21 ¾ inches long. It weighed 7 pounds, 2 ounces — just an ounce short the 7-pound 3-ounce state record that was caught and released from the Chicago shoreline in 2019.
With those measurements recorded, Danhausen and O’Neil ran back out into the lake and released the trophy smallie. He says his main concern was keeping the fish alive through the ordeal, and he was happy to see it swim off strong after reviving it for several minutes. They also stuck around for another 10 minutes to make sure the bass didn’t resurface.
(@midwestoutdoorsusa)“I’ve gotten so many damn calls about this fish, so a lot of people have seen that Midwest Outdoors post. And there’s been an unbelievable amount of hate on there, which was surprising to me,” Danhausen explains. He says he’s been accused — mostly by other anglers — of “molesting” fish for likes or attention, while others claimed the bass must’ve died because the release video ends before the fish fully leaves his hand. “I never really expected this notoriety … and I certainly wasn’t seeking glory or anything like that. I just thought it was a cool fish and I was glad to catch it.”
Besides, Danhausen knows there’s an even bigger smallmouth bass in the Chicago area just waiting to smash the state record. He says that looking at Lake Michigan as a whole, some of the best smallmouth habitat can be found right there in downtown Chicago amid the breakwalls and harbors. And in recent years, he’s been catching more and more big (five-plus-pound) smallies there.
“The Great Lakes fishery in general is just booming — the coho fishing is outstanding, and the same for perch and lake trout [on Lake Michigan],” Danhausen says. “Some old-timers might correct me, they’ll say it was really good back in the 80s. But the smallmouth fishing down here [around Chicago] has never been as good as it is now.”
The post ‘I Wasn’t Seeking Glory.’ Smallmouth Bass Caught in Chicago Was Just an Ounce Shy of the State Record appeared first on Outdoor Life.
Source: https://www.outdoorlife.com/fishing/near-record-bass-downtown-chicago/
