F&G Council meeting highlights April 2019:

[AndyS]

Freshwater Fisheries: Chief Barno handed out the opening day angler report. They assessed anglers at 35 waterbodies opening day, 32 of them are on lakes and ponds and had contact with over 1,100 anglers. Overall it is the highest success rate we’ve had. Some of the highlights: we have Manny’s Pond in Hunterdon County that had 65 anglers and 74 trout caught from 8 a.m. to noon. Nomahegan was the highlight of Saturday and was one the Council had approved to extend trout stocking through the in‐season period, they had 115 anglers with 102 trout caught. Harrisonville Lake had 59 anglers with 29 trout caught. Sylvan Lake had 115 anglers with 125 trout caught. On the lower end of things, we had Clinton Reservoir in Passaic County with 19 anglers and 0 trout reported caught. Little Swartswood Lake had 8 anglers with 7 trout caught. Indian Lake had 23 anglers with 2 trout caught and Colonial Lake which we have talked about before has been consistently low as far as trout caught, had 41 anglers with 13 trout caught. There were 33 cormorants counted on opening day at Colonial Lake. Heritage Pond is another we are keeping an eye on, it had 16 anglers and 0 trout caught. Councilman DeStephano asked since some of the places didn’t have any trout caught at all, are you considering dropping any of them? Chief Barno replied yes. First, a lot of the locations where we do the surveys are areas where there is a lack of angler presence and activity and also angler success rates are poor, so it does paint a grayer picture of opening day as a whole. There are a couple of them that we are considering recommending to either reduce the number of trout or times its stocked, or remove from the program entirely, that would be for the 2021 Fish Code

Hackettstown has geared up operations. They did Northern Pike trap netting. It was a banner year for northerns and in 2 days they had 166 Northern Pike out of Budd Lake. They met their entire million egg obligation in just the 2 days. At Swartswood, over five days they captured 187 Walleyes yielding around six million eggs.

[RWole]

Here we go again. The fish and game will discontinue stocking some of the better lakes and reservoirs. Clinton is an awesome reservoir and i have had great success there. Maybe they will put all the trout in some park pond in a middle of a city where half of the people dont even have a license.

[AndyS]

So based on the results of the guy dead sticking Power Cheese, we will determine where and when how many trout will be stocked.

Nice to see the Cormorants being factored into the equation now.