DETROIT — Anyone who doesn��t like doing this can��t claim to be a real fisherman.

We��re using a three-weight fly rod and an ultralight spinning rod to cast a glass minnow fly and a small white bucktail jig at boils on the surface of the Detroit River, and every cast results in a strike and a hard fight.

The target is white bass, and we��ve located a big school of them off Lake Erie Metropark by watching for baitfish exploding through the surface as they were attacked by the white bass from below.

They aren��t the biggest fish in the Great Lakes, but matched with the right tackle they are among the scrappiest.

Carl Schreiber is using the spinning rod, a six-footer, paired with a small spinning reel and six-pound test line, and his lure is a ��-ounce jig with a red head and white deer hair tail.

About half the hair has been chewed off, but that doesn��t bother the fish, which rush at it in schools as soon as it hits the water.

��Ooooh, I��ve got a real monster,�� the Gibraltar angler said, holding the rod high as line spooled off the reel. ��It might be a small mouth. If it��s a silver (white bass), it��s the best one yet.��

He played the fish carefully to the side of the boat, where it proved to be a white bass nearly 16 inches long and well over two pounds, a veritable Shaquille O��Neal of its ilk. As the bass came alongside, a dozen more swirled around under it, still trying to steal away the jig lodged in the corner of its mouth.

��We��ve caught, what, 50 in an hour? I don��t understand why more people don��t rig up with the right tackle and fish for silvers,�� Schreiber said. ��I like catching walleyes like anyone else, but once the run slows down like it has, I get bored jigging for them. I��d rather catch white bass and small mouths.��

The most effective fly for white bass is a white or silver minnow imitation three to four inches long, such as a glass minnow or Lefty��s deceiver. But the most fun is when they are feeding on schools of minnows that they have driven to the surface and readily attack surface lures like a bass popper or muddler minnow.

White bass come into the Detroit River by the millions in late May and early June to spawn, and they are such aggressive predators that they will attack anything that looks like a minnow.

White perch usually grow to nine to 11 inches in the Great Lakes and can live 15 years or more. White bass in the Great Lakes are mostly 10-13 inches long, and a 15-incher is a trophy. They normally live about five years, and the record of 6.13 pounds came from a lake in Virginia. (A typical Great Lakes white bass weighs about a pound.)

In recent years, anglers have caught numbers of fish that look like white perch but are 12 to 14 inches long and weigh more than a pound, and they most likely are a white bass-white perch cross.

White bass are also crossed in hatcheries with the oceanic striped bass to produce a highly regarded hybrid game fish called a wiper. While it doesn��t reach the 50-pound-plus size that striped bass can achieve, the wiper easily triples the average two- to three-pound size of a white bass and grows faster than either parent.

Wipers were unknown in Michigan��s Great Lakes waters until an angler caught one in a Lake Michigan tributary in 1986. Jim Dexter, a biologist in the Department of Natural Resources�� Plainwell office, said that a couple of wipers are caught every year, mostly in the Kalamazoo, St. Joseph and lower Grand rivers on the Lake Michigan shoreline.

The Michigan record fish list includes a 10.75-pound wiper (listed as a hybrid white bass) taken from the Kalamazoo in 1996. But two years ago a Canadian angler caught a 19-pound wiper on the Ontario side of the Detroit River, a fish whose origin has never been explained.

��I came to the (Michigan) DNR from Indiana, and we had a wiper (planting) program there,�� Dexter said. ��Some of them were stocked in watersheds close to the Lake Michigan watershed. I suspect that the fish we see from our rivers along Lake Michigan are Indiana fish that were planted by someone.��