The World’s Best Tasting Fish?

There are a lot of great-eating fish in fresh and salt water, but most who have tasted a lot of different species agree that the sauger is at or very near the top in flavor.

Sauger are members of the perch family, and they live in clean, flowing water, where they eat mostly minnows. The meat is white, moist and flaky—absolutely delicious any way you want to cook it. And limits are liberal in most states where sauger are found, which basically includes everywhere north of Tennessee in large river systems. They’re also found well into Canada, but are rare east of the Appalachians.

Like their cousin the walleye, sauger have a mouthful of teeth, and their body shape is nearly identical to the walleye. The easy way to tell them apart is that sauger usually have large, dark blotches scattered across their skin. They also average smaller sizes, usually in the one to two pound range with an occasional three-pounder showing up.

Sauger can be caught year-around, but the easiest time to capture them is during the spring spawning run, when they congregate in the thousands below the many giant dams on the rivers of the Midwest. The aggregation starts as early as January in southern Tennessee, as late as May below big Western reservoirs.

I had the privilege a few years back to learn sauger fishing below Pickwick Dam in southwestern Tennessee in the presence of a master, Bill Dance. Besides being a great entertainer and TV host, Bill is a true master of many types of fishing, including sauger-chasing. Dance used his depthfinder to locate the edge of the drops and ledges within a few hundred yards of the dam outfall. We used 3/8-ounce bucktails tipped with minnows, bounced on bottom at depths of 25 feet and more, to capture the fish.

Bill was convinced that a blue and white bucktail was the magic color pattern, and he proved himself right by catching three fish for every one I cranked up on green and white. But I have to think a major part of it was Dance’s touch on the rod—he seemed to instinctively know when a sauger was about to strike. Bill also liked adding a squirt of anise-oil scent to the bucktail, which he said held the odor better than a plastic-tailed jig. Again, how much the scent affected our catch might be arguable, but it seemed that we often caught a fish shortly after adding the scent and making a new drop.

Best tackle for sauger is a light spinning rig loaded with 10-pound-test microfiber; the no-stretch fiber line gives a much better sense of touch than monofilament, and also allows a better hook set.

Once you get the fillets pulled off of these fish, they are world-class edibles. A quick dip in cornmeal followed by a few minutes in hot vegetable oil, and you’ve got an unbeatable freshwater feast.

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