The fish

The fish of BC lakes

8 fish worth driving for, and what the atlas knows about each one: how many lakes hold it, which regions they are in, and the heaviest on record. Every count on these pages is counted from the data when the page loads, so none of them is a number somebody typed, including this one.

• Rainbow trout

  1,578 lakes in 9 regions, heaviest on record 52 lb

  The fish this province's stillwater fishing is built on. If you are driving to a BC lake without a plan, you are driving to a rainbow lake.

• Cutthroat trout

  421 lakes in 9 regions, heaviest on record 10 lb

  Two quite different fish under one name. The coastal cutthroat of the islands and the wet coast, and the westslope cutthroat of the Kootenays and the Elk, which is a mountain fish living a different life.

• Kokanee

  367 lakes in 9 regions, heaviest on record 12.1 lb

  A sockeye salmon that never goes to sea. It lives its whole life in the lake, which makes it the one Pacific salmon this stillwater site is really about.

• Whitefish

  290 lakes in 9 regions

  The fish most BC anglers catch by accident and almost nobody drives out for. Several species under one name, native, widespread, and the best ice fishing target in the province on the lakes that are open to it.

• Lake trout

  232 lakes in 9 regions, heaviest on record 40 lb

  The biggest char in the province and the oldest fish in most of the lakes that hold it. A big lake trout is not a fast grown fish, it is a decades old one.

• Bull trout

  231 lakes in 9 regions, heaviest on record 20 lb

  Not a trout. A char, native to the province, and the fish most often confused with Dolly Varden because for most of the last century science filed them as the same animal.

• Brook trout

  230 lakes in 9 regions, heaviest on record 11.75 lb

  An introduced char from eastern North America, stocked into BC lakes that would not grow much else, and the fish most likely to be biting when everything in the lake next door has shut down.

• Dolly Varden

  217 lakes in 9 regions, heaviest on record 11 lb

  The coastal char, and the other half of the province's longest running identification argument. Dolly Varden and bull trout were treated as one species until the late 1970s, and most of what is written about either still reads that way.

The same eight fish are told apart in one read in the trout and char guide. What you may keep, and where to read the rules for a given water, is on the licence page.

Open the map: 1,843 BC lakes, each with a seven day forecast