Record Muskie

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A Mandan man reels in a record muskie.

Cory Bosch of Mandan was fishing all by himself on New Johns Lake north of Bismarck on July Third and caught a 46-pound-8-ounce muskie that measured 54 inches in length. Bosch says it was quite a fight to get the fish into his boat.

(Cory Bosch, Mandan fisherman) "...Back and forth and up and down. it would dive to the bottom and I'd slowly bring it up and it'd take five minutes every time I'd bring it back up. I'd try to land it and it would go back down. I didn't have a net. I had a small Walleye net but I didn't want to risk getting the hooks caught in the net. So I had to hand land it and every time I'd try to grab it under the gills, it would flop its head and go right back down to the bottom...over and over you know."


State Game and Fish officials had to take a sample of the fish to find out if it is a pure muskie or a cross between a muskie and a northern pike.

But either way, officials say the fish is a state record holder.

(Scott Gangl, Fisheries Management Section Leader) "We've stocked both pure muskies and tiger muskies, which is a hybrid between a muskie and a northern pike, into New Johns Lake. So we need to determine whether its one or the other. So the only way to do that definitively is by doing DNA testing and so we're taking a sample of DNA and we're sending it to a geneticist in Maine who did the last onethe last time we had a record."


If Bosch's fish is a pure muskiehe beat the old record by 8 ounces. Bill Wald of Washburn caught the last record holder also at New Johns Lake in 2003