At first, Leo Garza thought he was hung up while jigging for lake trout Sunday morning near Chicago Light.
‘‘When he lifted his rod, he realized he had a fish on,’’ his brother, Capt. Ernesto Amparan of Thin Blue Line Fishing, messaged.
With that, Garza headed into Chicago fishing lore with an unofficial record of 14.3 pounds for a Chicago walleye weighed on a certified scale.
‘‘When I saw this coming up, I said, ‘That is a weird-looking laker,’ ’’ Amparan said. ‘‘When we put it on the deck, I started jumping for joy.’’
Amparan and his buddy David Vasquez had taken Garza out for his birthday. It turned into a memorable celebration.
Let’s set the stage. Vasquez caught a nice laker on his second cast. Five minutes later, Garza thought a slight tug meant he was hung up on a rock. But then the fight was on.
‘‘[Garza] landed it using a spinning rod with 17-pound monofilament and a half-ounce jigging spoon dressed with white tinsel hair,’’ Amparan messaged.
Amparan realized they might be looking at the Illinois record. Jim Zimmerman caught the state-record walleye (15.08 pounds, 31½ inches) on March 11, 2012, from the Pecatonica River.
Amparan contacted Brian Fenlon at Park Bait, where it was weighed on a certified scale. It drew a crowd, as such a fish should. At 14.3 pounds, it was short of Zimmerman’s Illinois record, but it smashed the unofficial Chicago record for a walleye weighed on a certified scale.
Walleye are sporadic catches in the Chicago waters of Lake Michigan, but each big catch sparks the dreams of anglers.
Garza’s walleye replaces Mike Osuch’s (7 pounds, 5.5 ounces, weighed at Henry’s Sports and Bait) as the unofficial Chicago-record walleye weighed on a certified scale. Osuch caught his in September 2008 while fishing for salmon off the point of Northerly Island.
But stories float about other big walleye, notably the 26-incher weighing 8.1 pounds that Brian Markham caught and released Nov. 15, 2024, while fishing for smallmouth bass with Capt. Ryan Whitacre near DuSable Harbor. It was Fish of the Year last year.
Amparan’s personal-best walleye was nearly 7 pounds, caught on the Illinois side of Wolf Lake. Garza’s best were 2-pound walleye caught while river fishing in Wisconsin.
Park Bait kept the walleye in its tanks in case the Illinois Department of Natural Resources wanted to do something with it, but it died later Sunday.
Another round of contemplating the mystery of Chicago walleye begins.
‘‘My guess is that it is a resident fish that came from one of the lake’s southern tributaries and decided to make a living where living is good (lots of prey),’’ emailed Vic Santucci, the Lake Michigan program manager for the IDNR. ‘‘It might be a fish that escaped from one of the stocked inland lakes (Wolf Lake and Skokie Lagoons come to mind) or not.
‘‘We do not manage for walleye in Illinois’ Lake Michigan waters, nor do we sample them very often in our nearshore assessment surveys. There may be a bigger walleye out there, but it is really hard to say if and when another one will be caught.’’