Bill Saunders is a waterfowl call maker from Kennewick, Washington. But he says his true passion these days is chasing trophy walleyes on the Columbia and Snake Rivers near his home. On April 16, he and his fishing partner, Brent Davis, were out casting swimbaits when they landed a good fish near the confluence of the two rivers.
“It hit like a walleye,” Saunders tells Outdoor Life. “I didn’t think it was all that big – eight or nine pounds.”
However, after Davis got the fish in the net, they were surprised when they gave it a closer look. The fish had the same gold coloration as a walleye, but it didn’t have the same sharp teeth. Pretty quickly they realized it was a pikeminnow — the largest they’d seen, and possibly one of the biggest ever caught by an angler.
“At first I was a little embarrassed,” says Saunders, who’d caught a 12-pound walleye in the same area just a couple days prior. “I really didn’t care [about having a record verified.] But my wife and Brent convinced me. ‘You might never have an opportunity like this again,’ they said. Me? I looked at it kind of like riding a moped. Oh, they’re fun all right, until your friends see you on one.”
Eventually, Saunders gave in. After getting off the water, he and Davis found not one but two certified scales to officially weigh the fish.
“No one wanted to put it on their scale [at first],” he says. “Cross contamination or whatever.”
They got an official weight of 8.6 pounds, along with the required witness signatures. The following day, Saunders met with biologists from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, who verified the species and inspected the fish. They measured it at 25.25 inches in length and estimated the pikeminnow to be around 19 years old.
“These guys were northern pikeminnow checkers (for the department),” says Saunders, who donated his fish to WDFW so they can mount it for educational purposes. “They were great. Just awesome. And I walked out of there incredibly educated about these pikeminnow.”
Saunders’ fish has already been declared a new state record by WDFW. He also submitted a world-record application to the International Game Fish Association. Although that application is pending, his fish should replace the current world record, a 7 pound 14 ounce fish caught from the Snake River in 2008.
Northern pikeminnow (formerly known as squawfish) have the rare distinction of being a native species with a bounty on their heads. Since 1991, the Bonneville Power Administration has been paying recreational anglers to catch and kill pikeminnows through the Northern Pikeminnow Sport-Reward Program. The program was established because pikeminnow feed heavily on baby salmon and steelhead, two other native species that have long been struggling in the Columbia and Snake River Basins. (These runs are all a shadow of their former selves, and seven stocks are now listed as either threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act.)
Read Next: Pacific Northwest Angler Earned $164K for Catching Pikeminnow, Shattering the Payout Record
The BPA’s hydroelectric dams are one of the main reasons why these fish runs are still struggling. The huge concrete barriers make it harder for adult fish to run upriver to spawn, while smolts struggle to navigate the slackwater reservoirs the dams have created. In light of these problems, the BPA is now legally required to mitigate the impacts of its dams and help fund initiatives like the pikeminnow program.
Over the years, the sport-reward program has paid millions of dollars to participating fishermen on the Columbia and Snake Rivers. In 2024 alone, it doled out $1.7 million. That same year, the top-earning angler earned a record payout of $164,200 for catching and killing 16,150 pikeminnow.
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