How many of you would sit all day in the open on a frozen lake on a bitterly cold day, getting pummeled by wind gusts up to 30 miles per hour, and still not give up?
Not many, we would dare to guess. But It didn’t even faze Victor Gelman, a die-hard fisherman who doesn’t let the weather stop him. He endured those conditions for almost eight hours on Feb. 24 on Greenwood Lake on the New Jersey-New York border and ended up with a giant reward: a potential state-record fish
Against all odds, Gelman landed a muskie that weighed 45.03 pounds, measured 52.125 inches long and had a 27-inch girth. That fish is a potential state record in New Jersey, where the current standard sits at 42 pounds, 13 ounces. Gelman formally applied for the record on Feb. 26 and is awaiting a decision from fisheries officials.
“The chances of me catching that fish on that day in that spot were less than 1 percent,” Gelman told Wired2Fish. “This was truly a lucky catch.
“I would have never fished this spot if it wasn’t for me not being able to go further because of the conditions. I had never fished there before. There was nothing special about this place.”
To set the scene, it was the day after the area was hit by a giant blizzard. There was 20 inches of snow on the ground, and a layer of about 8 inches of slush on the ice. It was hard enough driving to the lake, which Gelman considers his home water, let alone fishing it.
“I was considering driving to a lake that got less snow, but I drove by Greenwood, which is close to my home, just to check it out,” said Gelman, 47, who lives in Warwick, New York. “When I saw a shack out on the water, I said, ‘That’s it. I’m going fishing.’ “
Gelman has the mindset of a muskie fisherman. He thrives on nasty weather. And he had caught sizeable muskies — up to 30 pounds — on Greenwood before. But this was especially challenging.
He struggled to pull his sled very far before he had to plop down and fish a spot far short of his intended destination. Then, he waited all day for one big bite.
“I got on the ice at 8 in the morning and didn’t see the flag on my tipup go off until 4 in the afternoon,” he said.
Gelman had drilled five 10-inch holes in the ice, then began the long wait. He jigged for perch as he waited and only caught three of them.
“Nothing was biting,” he said. But that changed in a big way when a muskie hit one of the large suckers Gelman was using for bait.
“It was my furthest-away tip-up and had the least lively sucker on it,” he said. “When I first felt the line, it was so heavy I thought the fish had wrapped around a log or a rock.
“But then it took off, and it was like wrestling with a Rottweiler. The head shakes were enormous. It was almost hard to believe that it was a fish. “
Gelman finally tired the muskie on his 50-pound braided line and immediately knew he had a potential state-record fish. He wanted to release it, but it was hooked too deeply and he knew it wouldn’t survive. So, he took the fish to a New Jersey hatchery office and had the muskie weighed on certified scales in front of fisheries employees.
He donated the muskie to the Hackettstown State Fish Hatchery, where he had the fish weighed. That move was especially symbolic to Gelman, because he credits that hatchery with creating a muskie fishery at Greenwood through its aggressive stocking and management program. Fisheries officials plan to study the monstrous fish to determine what it was eating, then Gelman will get it back.
“I wouldn’t have caught that fish if it weren’t for them,” Gelman said.
Gelman is a lifetime fisherman who grew up fishing in his native country near the Belarus-Ukraine border.
“I learned how to fish within view of the Chernobyl Power Plant before its disaster,” he said.
Since moving to the United States, he has developed two passions — making chocolate for his Warwick Chocolate Factory shop and fishing. He fishes year-round and has an impressive gallery of huge fish he has caught. He has a photo of him holding the 52-inch muskie he caught and released on the St. Lawrence River hanging on the wall in his chocolate shop. Now, he plans to add either a taxidermy mount or photo of the fish he caught on Greenwood Lake.
“Most of the people who come into my chocolate shop are either area residents or tourists who have been to the lake,” he said. “This will be a great conservation piece.”
