Angler Pulls Pending State-Record Muskie Through the Ice, Fulfilling a Yearslong Dream

It was a bitter chilly and windy morning on Feb. 24 when Victor Gelman got down to catch a record-class muskie on 1,900-acre Greenwood Lake. After strolling by the snow to his spot on the New Jersey facet of the lake in Passaic County, Gelman used an influence auger to drill 5 10-inch holes by the ice.   

“I used to be on their lonesome, sitting in a chair that morning watching my tip-ups with stay 8-to-10-inch sucker baits beneath the ice,” Gelman tells Out of doors Life. “The wind was blowing 25 miles per hour, and the temperature was about 20 levels. It was proper after the blizzard of the century after I acquired on the ice at 8 a.m., and the fish didn’t chew till 4 p.m.”

It was the one strike he had all day, and the tip-up was 80 yards away when Gelman observed he had a fish on. After attending to it as rapidly as he might, he needed to break ice away from the opening to seize the 50-pound braided line that was coming off the reel spool.

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“I pulled on the road, and it was like having a tug-of-war with a Rottweiler,” says the 47-year-old angler, who owns the Warwick Chocolate Factory in New York. “I lastly pulled the fish to my gap and when its head popped up, I knew it was a large. Then it pulled again down by the opening and took off on one other run.”

Even with 50-pound check and a wire chief, Gelman knew there was an opportunity of shedding the fish. Lastly, he hauled it again up towards the opening and acquired its head up. Then he lifted the large fish by the ice and onto the snow.

“I knew it was a particular muskie,” he says.

Gelman needed to launch the large muskie alive. However the fish was hooked deep and bleeding, and he knew there was an opportunity it will die quickly after he let it go.

“I didn’t wish to preserve it,” he explains. “However I knew it was near a report, and the New Jersey fisheries division seemingly would wish to see the fish and examine it, which was higher than placing it again within the lake to die.”

Gelman contacted the fisheries people at a close-by New Jersey hatchery that’s been stocking muskies for years. They stayed open till Gelman acquired there along with his fish. Craig Lemon, the superintendent of the Hackettstown State Fish Hatchery, measured and weighed the fish on their licensed scale.

The huge muskie tipped the scales at 45.02 kilos, and it measured 51.125 inches lengthy with a 27-inch girth. Gelman says the report paperwork has been filed with the state, and his fish ought to prime the present report, which weighed 42 kilos 13 ounces and was caught again in 1997.   

Gelman donated his muskie to the hatchery so biologists can dissect it and be taught extra about its age, bodily situation, and what it was consuming.

“I like muskie fishing and would by no means have caught my fish with out the excellent stocking and analysis work completed by state biologists who created the fishery in Greenwood Lake by their tireless efforts,” Gelman says. “It’s my honor to assist the fisheries workers.”

Gelman says he’ll even have a taxidermy mount fabricated from his fish if it turns into the brand new state report. This may be a dream come true for Gelman, and the end result of a decided effort that started two years in the past, when he caught a 52-inch muskie from the St. Lawrence River in New York. That fish was launched, and he nonetheless doesn’t understand how a lot it weighed.   

“I’ve a photograph of me and that fish in my chocolate store, and everybody who walks in needs to know the place I caught the muskie and the way a lot it weighed,” he says. “I’ve instructed everybody who noticed that picture in my store that I’m going to catch a muskie that dimension in New Jersey, and I lastly succeeded.”