Almost got the skunk at Point Mountain today

[The Royal Coachman]

Almost :looser:

Only managed 2 in about 2 1/2 hours of fishing. Plenty of caddis but no takers. Deep Sparkle Pupa went untouched as did the scud, BH Prince, Copper John, Brown Wolly Bugger and HE soft hackle. Wow.

The 2 I caught were on a #16 Lightning Bug.

Made a move upstream but still in Mansfield township and caught 3 more in an hour including a tiny native Brook Trout unk:

BTW, the TCA was fairly crowded. I had the other spot all to myself.:victory:

 

[coolkyle]

Nice report! All day I was thinking it was a nice day to be in NJ. Point Mountain is nice water, but so are the other 40? miles of the Musky. What did the other 3 fish hit? The thing I like about Point Mountain is that there's an Arby's on the way back to Rt-80. In fact, I find the first few blocks of Hackettstown quite amazing. As I remember there's Applebee's, Wendy's, Burger King, McDonald's, White Castle and KFC in a 2-block drive on highway #blahbetyblah. Pretty amazing.

 

[The Royal Coachman]

All the fish came on the same fly. #16 Lightning Bug.

Forgot to mention I caught a NICE hold over Rainbow, probably from the fall. That fish was fat!

You're right about 40 miles of open water. I almost turned around when I saw 7 cars at point mountain. In my drive up from Hackettstown I didn't see one other fisherman until then.

 

[Rusty Spinner]

At lunch time I couldn't ignore the grannom caddis hatch (but I could ignore my sandwich). So I hopped into some open water up above the TCA a ways and stuck 3 big 'bows, landing 2 and LDRing the 3rd. Smallest about 18". Two were last fall holdovers and one fresh broodstock from this spring. Got 6 jumps out of my LDR and he was close to the net so I saw that his fins were in nice condition - had to be from the fall. Not another angler seen there except on opening day.

Drove well below the TCA in the evening to fish for half an hour before my 7 pm River Mgt Council mtg., again on public water, again I had it all to myself. This time I only moved one fish swinging a caddis emerger, but then I didn't have much time and I was exploring this water which was new to me (been there before, but never to fish it).

BTW - that road in Hackettstown with fast food alley is 182 (Mountain Ave). The Arby's is on rt. 57 in Mansfield Twp. Depending on who you ask, the Musky is either 42 or 43 (I use 43) miles long. One of these days I'll try to calculate the total open water in miles, but a good guestimate is 30 of those miles, maybe more (and growing all the time).

I received permission to put up some C&R signs on a newly preserved section of the river. Signs go up this week. Please PM me if you find them (sorry, no more hints - I want to find out how quickly this spot gets discovered). We need this stretch to be C&R only because we will be promoting angling and it could get fished out ASAP if we allow general regs. We cannot enforce this, just request it as it is on general regs water.