Spokane-area lake yields monster tiger musky

An angler hooked a huge surprise while bass fishing at Newman Lake.

Levi Anderson, 20, who works at the Spokane Valley White Elephant store, was casting into lily pads around 6:20 p.m. when a fish boiled up and inhaled his topwater frog lure.

“The water was shallow, just 2 1/2 feet,” he said. “I thought it was a bass – a nice one.

“I set the hook as hard as I could and felt it go down, fighting like crazy at first. It was like pulling a barn door off the bottom with 10-pound test.”

He noticed three things immediately when he finally got the fish close to the boat:

• It was a tiger musky.

• It had two lures in its mouth indicating it had broken off another angler.

• The net he had in the boat wasn’t even close to big enough.

His fishing buddy, Phoenix Pitts, grabbed the tail of the fish and Anderson, in the heat of the moment, grabbed the predator in its mouth as if lipping a bass.

“I didn’t realize their teeth were that big,” he said.

They brought the fish aboard, measured it at a whopping 55 inches long, snapped a photo and released the beast to wow another angler.

“I was so excited I didn’t realize my hand was bleeding,” he said.

The tiger musky is a hybrid. Eggs from female muskellunge are fertilized in hatcheries with milt of male northern pike.

The sterile hybrids are lightly stocked into Newman and six other waters in Washington to help control forage fish while providing trophy fishing.

A tiger musky must be at least 50 inches long before it can be kept by an angler in Washington. Most trophy anglers release all tigers.

“They feed mostly on perch and sunfish in Newman and don’t put on nearly the weight they do in Curlew Lake where they eat northern pikeminnow,” said Marc Divens, Washington Fish and Wildlife warmwater fisheries biologist.

“A 55-inch tiger musky would be the longest I’ve heard of in Washington,” said Divens, who does electro-shocking surveys in the region’s warmwater lakes.

Fishing records are listed by weight; measurements aren’t always recorded, he said.

“It would probably be 10-plus years old, but wouldn’t have nearly the girth and weight as a Curlew tiger musky.”

Asked if he’ll fish Newman Lake any differently, Anderson said probably not.

“But I’ll never put my hand in tiger musky’s mouth again.”