Fishing Trivia
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162 free Fishing trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This fishing trivia quiz covers the whole sport, from bank-side worm dunking to blue-water big game: the species anglers chase, the record catches, the history of rods, reels, hooks and lures, the tournaments and personalities of competitive fishing, and the books, films and TV shows built around a rod and line. The easy questions are ones any weekend angler will know: what an angler's float is for, which fish Santiago fights in The Old Man and the Sea, and which state fish the walleye is. From there it gets harder: George Perry's 1932 largemouth, Cal Johnson's muskie, Alf Dean's 2,663-pound white shark, the Song-dynasty origins of the reel, the Kentucky watchmaker who built America's first baitcaster, the 22,000-year-old shell hooks of Okinawa, Dame Juliana Berners and Izaak Walton, Ray Scott and the first Bassmaster Classic, Kevin VanDam and Rick Clunn, Lauri Rapala's cork minnow, the Cod Wars, the Grand Banks moratorium and Lee Wulff's case for catch and release. If you only care about largemouth and smallmouth, our dedicated Bass Fishing quiz goes deeper on that. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for the species, people, tackle and events named before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question.
30 of 162 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01A boat's electronic 'fish finder' locates fish using which technology?
Sonar
Sonar: the unit fires pulses of sound into the water and reads the echoes that bounce back, so fish and the bottom show up on its screen.
Q 02Which fishing line material is prized for being almost invisible underwater?
Fluorocarbon
Fluorocarbon bends light almost as water does, so fish struggle to see it, which is why anglers tie a length of it between the main line and the hook; it is also denser than nylon and sinks.
Q 03The world's oldest known fish hooks, found in Sakitari Cave, Okinawa, are made from what?
Sea snail shells
Sea snail shells: the Sakitari Cave hooks are more than 22,000 years old, older than shell hooks from East Timor and Papua New Guinea, a sign that Ice Age islanders were already skilled fishers.
Q 04Which classic lure is nothing more than a curved blade of polished metal with a hook?
Spoon
Spoon: its dished shape makes the bright metal wobble as it is drawn through the water, throwing off flashes like the scales of a swimming baitfish.
Q 05The earliest fishing reels are documented in paintings from which country and era?
China, Song dynasty
China, Song dynasty: a painting by Ma Yuan from about 1195 shows a fisherman with a reel on his rod, and Chinese texts mention line wheels as early as the 3rd century, long before reels appear in Europe.
Q 06Which reel brand grew out of a Tulsa company that made time bombs for oil wells?
Zebco
Zebco: the Zero Hour Bomb Company made electric time bombs for oil wells until an inventor, R. D. Hull, walked in with his design for a backlash-free reel; the reels sold so well that the firm took their brand name and left the oil field.
Q 07George Snyder, who made the first American bait-casting reel in 1810, worked in what trade?
Watchmaker and silversmith
Watchmaker and silversmith: George Snyder of Paris, Kentucky built the first American multiplying bait-casting reel, and his 'Kentucky reel' was copied by Meek, Milam and others.
Q 08Before nylon, braided fly lines were traditionally made of which material?
Silk
Silk: braided silk fly lines replaced horsehair in the 19th century and let anglers cast much farther, even into the wind.
Q 09The favoured fishing rods of the late 19th century were built by gluing strips of which material into hexagonal blanks?
Bamboo
Bamboo: gluing split strips together kept the cane's strength and spring while cutting the rod's thickness and weight, and split-bamboo fly rods are still made and fished today.
Q 10The Mitchell 300, a classic fixed-spool spinning reel launched in the late 1940s, was made where?
France
France: the Mitchell 300 came from a factory at Cluses in the French Alps, which turned out reels by the million until low-cost competition from Asia pushed production abroad.
Q 11Which tackle item suspends the bait at a set depth and dips when a fish bites?
A float or bobber
A float or bobber does a second job as well: its buoyancy lets the current carry a baited hook into water a cast could not reach.
Q 12Why did lead become the material of choice for fishing sinkers?
Low cost, easy casting and density
Low cost, easy casting and density: lead is cheap, melts at about 327 °C so it is easily cast into shapes, and sinks a bait fast; many places now restrict lead tackle because it poisons wildlife.
Q 13Which commercial fishing method sets hundreds or thousands of baited hooks on short branches called snoods or gangions?
Longlining
Q 21Who added the extra chapters to the expanded 1676 edition of The Compleat Angler?
Charles Cotton
Charles Cotton, the author's friend, wrote the twelve added chapters on fly fishing in clear streams, and had the two men's initials twined into a cipher over the door of his riverside fishing house.
Q 22Fly anglers call the newly winged, not yet mature stage of which insect a 'dun'?
Mayfly
Mayfly: it is the only insect that moults again after growing working wings, and that brief first winged stage, the dun, is one that many classic trout flies are tied to copy.
Q 23A circle hook, favoured for catch and release, is shaped to catch a fish where?
In the corner of the mouth
Longlining runs a main line that can stretch for miles, and its baited hooks also catch sea turtles, which can drown when they are hooked or tangled below the surface.
Q 14What is 'noodling'?
Catching catfish with bare hands or feet
Catching catfish with bare hands or feet: the noodler reaches into an underwater hole where a catfish guards its nest and lets it latch onto a hand; some states ban it as too dangerous.
Q 15Which tool does an ice angler use to cut a round hole in the ice?
An auger
An auger, cranked by hand or driven by a motor, bores the hole; an ice saw or chisel can also do the job, and a slotted skimmer then scoops out slush and new ice.
Q 16What is the reserve line wound onto a fly reel beneath the fly line called?
Backing
Backing is thin braided line wound on beneath the fly line; it fills out the spool and gives a hard-running fish more line to take once the whole fly line has left the reel.
Q 17Offshore sport-fishing boats hold trolling lines clear of the wake with which long poles?
Outriggers
Outriggers are long poles angled out from each side of the boat; lines clipped to them run wide of the wake so several baits troll without tangling, while downriggers hold baits at depth.
Q 18Which Roman writer is often credited with the first record of an artificial fly, around 200 AD?
Claudius Aelianus
Claudius Aelianus, in De Natura Animalium (c. 200 AD), described Macedonian anglers on the Astraeus River catching spotted fish with a hook dressed in red wool and two cock's feathers.
Q 19The 1496 treatise on fishing credited to Dame Juliana Berners was added to which book?
The Boke of Saint Albans
The Boke of Saint Albans: Wynkyn de Worde's 1496 second edition added the fishing treatise to this guide to hawking, hunting and heraldry, and many of the methods it describes are still in use.
Q 20Who wrote The Compleat Angler, first published in 1653?
Izaak Walton
Izaak Walton kept adding to The Compleat Angler for a quarter of a century after its 1653 debut.
In the corner of the mouth: a swallowed circle hook is built to slide back out of the throat and turn into the lip rather than the gut, so far more released fish survive.
Q 24Which fly angler promoted catch and release from 1936, saying game fish are too valuable to catch only once?
Lee Wulff
Lee Wulff, the fly-fishing author and film-maker, argued from the 1930s that 'a game fish is too valuable to be caught only once', a line printed in his 1939 Handbook of Freshwater Fishing.
Q 25Trout Unlimited was founded in 1959 by a handful of anglers on a riverbank in which US state?
Michigan
Michigan: the founders were tired of seeing the state fill its streams with hatchery trout, and their new group soon persuaded it to cut back on stocking and manage its rivers for wild fish.
Q 26In the film Jaws, what is the name of the shark hunter Quint's boat?
Orca
Orca: Quint takes the police chief and a visiting scientist to sea on her to hunt the shark, which at last hurls itself onto the stern and sinks the boat under them.
Q 27Who is credited with founding big-game fishing in 1898?
Charles Frederick Holder
Charles Frederick Holder landed a 183-pound tuna on rod and reel off Santa Catalina Island in 1898, then founded the Tuna Club there, which allowed only rod and reel so that the fish had a sporting chance.
Q 28The International Game Fish Association was launched in 1939 at which institution?
American Museum of Natural History
American Museum of Natural History: the IGFA was launched in a cramped upstairs office there, because its backer Michael Lerner fished on museum expeditions and its fish expert William K. Gregory became first president.
Q 29Which magazine handed 68 years of freshwater records to the IGFA in 1978?
Field & Stream
Field & Stream had kept the records since 1910 and was glad to hand them on; until then the IGFA had been the keeper of saltwater records only.
Q 30Which leaping saltwater game fish do anglers call the 'silver king'?
Tarpon
Tarpon: the nickname comes from the flash of its big silver scales as it leaps clear of the water, and Florida prizes the fish so highly that it is catch-and-release only there.