Lakefront salmon and trout: Waukegan Chinook and Chicago steelhead share Fish of the Week

Big salmon and trout keeping rolling on the Illinois lakefront.

Brandon Hacker caught a 38-inch, 25-pound Chinook last week from shore at Waukegan on an orange-spotted Little Cleo spoon.

On Thursday, Matt Mantia caught a 35-inch, 14-pound steelhead on the Chicago lakefront on a night crawler.

Mantia sent a follow-up note worth reading: “I lost a big one that pulled my entire line earlier and this one did the same thing, ran out about a hundred yards, jumped eight times and I landed [it by] myself.”

Provided

FOTW, the celebration of big fish and their stories (the stories matter, as this one shows) around Chicago fishing, runs Wednesdays in the paper Sun-Times. The online posting here at https://chicago.suntimes.com/outdoors goes up at varied days of the week, depending on what is going on the wide world of the outdoors.

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