Katie Musial made her first time fishing for Chinook salmon a big deal.
“I brought my fiancé out fishing to target kings for the first time and she landed this huge female from shore,” Pierson Tan emailed. “We moved to Chicago about a year ago for her grad school at Northwestern where she’s doing a JD/MBA. Katie had so much fun fighting this fish and it’s a Chicago memory we’ll cherish forever!”
Tan emailed that the Chinook, which weighed 17 pounds when they got home, “was caught at Waukegan harbor on a small gold 9gram minnow jerkbait that I got for $1 online for some type of promotion.”
The small jerkbait worked for a big catch.
FOTW, the celebration of big fish and their stories (the stories matter) around Chicago fishing, runs Wednesdays in the paper Sun-Times.
To make submissions, email (BowmanOutside@gmail.com) or contact me on Facebook (Dale Bowman), X (@BowmanOutside), Instagram (@BowmanOutside) or Bluesky (@BowmanOutside.bsky.social).