Can anyone tell what kind of fish this is? Freshwater, stocked pond, Massachusetts. And how do we catch it?
Summary: from this terrible photo what kind of fish could we have seen? How do we catch it?
Details below.
My son and I were fishing yesterday (we’re beginners). It was 5pm sunny and warm out (mid 70s), we were fishing the shoreline of a local stocked pond. There were lots of smaller fish like sunnies near the shore.
While fishing we came across this enormous fish we kept trying to catch. It looked at least two feet long to me. My son thought it was an enormous large mouth bass. We named it “Big Beautiful.”
We’d get Big Beautiful’s attention with bait, but it would just kind of hang back and watch other fish, like sunfish, go for the bait (we used a lot of worms: big red and night crawlers and also tried Keitech Fat Swing Impact). It did take a small bite of the baitfish.
After losing interest it would retreat to a rock not far from shore (I suspect it lives in or around this spot). If something was interesting enough to come out for again, it would get close enough to seem curious but then decide no thanks.
We went back to the same spot this morning between 7-9 am with live shiners. Caught lots of large mouth bass, no sight of this monster.
How do we catch it? It would be like winning the world fishing Olympics for us.