This study archives locality names of artisanal and commercial fishing gears, fishing gears comments, and fishing vessels currently used at shoreline, inshoreline and off-shore areas in the Lake Victoria basin drainage systems of Kenya. The paper also achieves names of fish species representatives harvested from the lake using the gears. Fifty-three (28 artisanal, 14 commercial) types of fishing gears are recorded to have locality names at shoreline, 8 near shoreline and 3 off-shoreline. Sixty-nine (15 artisanal and 18 commercial) types of fishing gears components are recorded to have locality names at shoreline, 18 near shoreline and 18 off-shore. Thirty-sixty (21=8 artisanal and 13 commercial) types of fishing vessels are recorded to have locality names at shoreline, 11 near shoreline and 4 off-shore. Five top most effective gears in collecting fish species representatives are the mosquito seine net and the gill net (24 species each), the fish basket and the fishing pole (12 each) and the fishing fences (9), respectively. The information is treated as archive for the ever-eroding information, for purposes of preliminary use in the assessment of the effects using locally available fishing gears may have on the diversity of fishes in the basin.

Keywords: artisanal, traditional, hand-woven, indigenous, commercial, fishing vessels, common names