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A new record was set for pink salmon in IL at Northpoint.  A whopping 3.9 lb.  Can’t lie this one would have went straight to the box without a second look.  Even a biologist misidentified the fish at the cleaning station and it ended up being weighed after being cut open.  Makes you wonder how many get caught in the spring down here and get misidentified as coho.

They can be hard to ID but the large spots on both sides of the tail are the give away. They are a every other spawning salmon, they are a cool fish. 4 years ago we caught 7 of them in 1 morning in st joe middle of July way offshore. They were all the size of shakers or march coho. 

Pretty big for a pink! If you're sorting through a lot of coho it's easy enough to overlook them when they are silver

But like Tim said, the oval spots on the tail are dead giveaways. 

That was probably the first pink salmon the USFWS seasonal biotech had ever seen, they just aren't very common in Lake Michigan.  Probably only a handful caught during the spring coho season. They seem to mostly get caught later in summer - most likely are not big enough to get caught earlier in the spring.    Seems like an uptick in reports of them this year though. 

A few years back someone (southshore I think) caught a spawning phase one in Indiana from shore. Was pretty cool

I assume one of the states are stocking these?

Not aware of anyone stocking these but, I could be wrong. I did find this: Known in its native Pacific Northwest as the humpback salmon due to a large hump on the backs of males during spawning runs, this Pacific salmon was unintentionally introduced into the Great Lakes in the mid-1950s. The population has maintained itself since then, slowly growing in numbers and spreading to much of Lake Superior and the northern areas of lakes Huron and Michigan.

I also am not aware of any stocking programs for pink salmon in the Great Lakes

The story on their introduction goes that eggs were imported from British Columbia to a hatchery near Thunder Bay, Canada for stocking somewhere outside the Great Lakes basin, and some were leftover at the dock after loading all the planes - and then were either accidentally or intentionally released into a Lake Superior tributary in Thunder Bay. My guess is that they were intentionally stocked by hatchery personnel who were loathe to kill fish they'd raised, and back then it was the anything-goes wild west of fisheries management

And then they've expanded from there over the past 6 or 7 decades