Don’t forget walleye. A great freshwater eating fish. I always throw back bass. Not a good eating fish and so I let them live to get bigger. But I love catching them.
We have a few really good water lakes in this region, and I find smaller largemouth bass, say, up to 14”, from those lakes, (esp. cooked fresh over a campfire) can be pretty good table fare.
The interesting thing is that almost all these lakes are overpopulated with small bass, so the fisheries people encourage harvest and write the regs for those lakes accordingly, usually with slot limits.
Saugeye are being increasingly stocked in some lakes, but, I’ve yet to catch one. My last outing I was trying to catch saugeye and instead caught a 7 lb. channel cat. Out of good water — that’s pretty good eating too.