Local angler reels in 50-inch muskellunge on Nolichucky River

GREENE COUNTY, Tenn. (WJHL) — A local angler named Cody Pond caught a roughly 50-inch muskellunge on the Nolichucky River over the weekend, and he told News Channel 11 that the catch was a 15-minute battle that wouldn’t have been possible without the help of a passerby.

Pond said he was fishing for bass on the Nolichucky Friday, and when he set the hook, he could immediately tell it wasn’t a bass on the end of his line but a musky, notoriously called the fish of 10,000 casts.

“When it jumped out of the water the first time, that’s when I had realized I had a big muskie on my hands,” Pond said. “I was in my kayak using a 10 lbs test fishing line, so I knew that I couldn’t do much with the fish other than sit back and let it pull my kayak around the river!”

Pond said he went on to battle with the fish for 10 or 15 minutes, hoping its teeth wouldn’t tear through his line when a man passing by on a Jon boat offered to help him get it in a net. The pair netted the musky and got it to the riverbank.

Pond said a quick measurement revealed the musky was approximately 50 inches long. He said he was not able to weigh the fish because he wanted to get it back in the water as quickly as possible.

“We returned it back into the water and swam away just fine,” he said. “This fish would have been a lot bigger if she [hadn’t] spawned!”

Pond said this was the third and largest musky he has caught in his 30 years of fishing.

Musky belong to the predatory family of fish known as pike and are notorious for being wary of anglers, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reports .

According to the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, the state record for a musk y was caught in 2017 at the Melton Hill Reservoir. It weighed 43 pounds and 14 ounces.

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