State #3: New Jersey Troubles...

New Jersey was an interesting state -we caught a huge variety of different fish here. But it was also the first blunder of our trip as we spent several days hanging out in Cape May (fun) targeting the wrong fish (less fun). Wikipedia had informed us that New Jersey had both a saltwater and freshwater state fish, and so we decided to go after the saltwater fish, a striped bass. We drove from Delaware to Cape May, and fished there for two days, catching some dogfish, a stingray, some kingfish, and of course some croakers as well.

We finally realized that there is, in fact, no saltwater state fish for New Jersey, Thanks Wikipedia! We needed to be fishing for brook trout instead. So we said goodbye to the beach and drove up to Philadelphia where we spent the night with some friends. Next day we fished the Delaware River near the Delaware water gap. We caught plenty of smallmouth and rock bass, and even a couple of pumkinseeds, but no trout.

The next day we tried a few small creeks in the area that we found in the Fishbrain app, with similar results. We did a ton of research that night and found that Dunnfield creek had a good population of brookies as well as some other trout. We hiked up along the creek several miles, fishing the good holes that we saw. Daniel caught a nice brown trout and then after seeing brook trout in a few holes and not being able to get one hooked he finally caught one.

We continued hiking up. But eventually decided to head back down and fish what we had already been over. We stopped at a good spot and I finally caught one. We were both using small rooster tails.

After hiking back to the car we drove up through New York to Connecticut, stopping for a picture with our rods in Times Square before spending the night in Mystic, Ct. This was to be a short stop in Connecticut as we found out that their state fish, the American Shad only runs in March. So we continued North, and will return for those Shad in spring!