Raritan river 6/5:

[Doug Vitale]

Originally Posted by AndyS

Heard some good reports from this morning and headed down to Roberts St. (soon to be removed falls) Talked and mingled and did a few throws. Lots of people fishing, that's a good sign. Listened to stories of trout, walleye, pike and musky.

It's easy to confuse pike and musky because of their similar shape.

According to the State's stocking records, musky are not stocked in the Raritan River. They are stocked, however, in the Delaware Raritan Canal. A total of about 800 small muskies were released into the canal in 2005, 2007, 2008, and 2010. According to the Hackettstown Hatchery's records this was done near the 10-Mile Lock in Zarephath.

The man who used to own the bait & tackle shop in Bound Brook in the 90's did tell me that he and some other guys stocked the canal with a couple hundred muskies near the Queen's Bridge in South Bound Brook.

Now every once in a while, some canal water will flow into the Raritan after periods of very heavy rain. As a result, it's conceivable that some of the muskies swam from the one body of the water into the other. However, I still think that the true muskellunge in the Raritan are very few and far between.

[BIGRED2]

Has anyone heard of anybody pulling a musky from the canal?

[Almaink]

I caught a few small Musky in the D&R Feeder canal this year while trout fishing. Two in West Trenton and one up in Titusville by Washington Crossing SP. Last year also while trout fishing in the Feeder canal, I watched a guy fight a huge musky for over an hour before it snapped his line. They are in there and some are huge.

[Doug Vitale]

Originally Posted by BIGRED2

Has anyone heard of anybody pulling a musky from the canal?

Yes, back in 2004 I was in the Millstone Sport Shop in Hillsborough and I saw a photograph of a guy holding a musky (about 10-12 pounds) and on the photo it was written that he caught it near the lock in Somerset.

Originally Posted by Almaink

I caught a few small Musky in the D&R Feeder canal this year while trout fishing. Two in West Trenton and one up in Titusville by Washington Crossing SP. Last year also while trout fishing in the Feeder canal, I watched a guy fight a huge musky for over an hour before it snapped his line. They are in there and some are huge.

That make sense because the feeder canal connects with the Delaware River, a known musky habitat.

To revise my earlier post, I should say that since the D&R Canal empties into the Raritan River in New Brunswick, it is conceivable that some muskies may have swum all the way from South Bound Brook and washed into the Raritan by the Landing Lane Bridge. But I wouldn't bet on it.

It's certain that many of the small muskies stocked in the canal (eight inchers) fall victim to the bass and pickerel who also inhabit that environment. So a baby musky has to be lucky its first few years in the canal in order to grow to a respectable weight.

I'd also like to point out that during the late 90's my buddy and I fished the canal in Zarephath and South Bound Brook about a dozen times and we never caught sight of a musky. We were fishing all the structure with plastic lizards, Banjo minnows, Rapalas, and spinnerbaits and while we caught no small number of bass and pickerel, we didn't catch any other fish outside those species.