"I've always liked fishing there," Gomez said.
Last Saturday, Gomez experienced the most incredible experience in his fishing life - one that would turn even the most gullible fool into a skeptic.
While he was fishing, he felt his rod and reel jump like he had caught a fish. No problem, Gomez thought. After all, the state Fishing and Game Division had helped to stock the pond with 1,200 trout, bass and catfish earlier in the year, and they come back every other week to add 300 more. So catching a fish isn't a novelty.
But this fish was.
"My reel kept breaking," Gomez said. "It happened four times. I didn't know what it was. I saw this silver thing go by and it kept following my bait, but was biting through the hook. I never saw anything like it."
After four attempts, Gomez finally brought in the fish, by using a net. There was one thing he noticed right away - the fish had a set of teeth.
It's not every day that you pull out a fish from the Braddock Park pond that has teeth. Come to think of it, fish with teeth are very limited. Like barracuda and sharks. Well, they'd be too big for that pond.
But how about piranhas? The vicious fish also have teeth.
"I went to the Internet and saw the face of the fish resembled a pacu, which is related to the piranha," Gomez said.
Yeah, right.
"I know it sounds crazy, but I caught this fish, and I [was] pretty sure it was some sort of a piranha," Gomez said.
So, curious minds had to find out. A quick call to the Hudson County Parks Department brought a few chuckles.
"I know we don't necessarily stock the pond with piranha," said Hudson County Parks Director Thomas McCann. "My mother named me Thomas for a reason. I'm usually the one to doubt things like this. This sounds totally unbelievable, like something out of 'Jaws.' Thank God we don't allow swimming in the pond."
McCann summoned assistant division chief Ken Jennings to check out the fish story. Jennings, an avid fisherman himself, is in charge of ordering the fish to stock the pond, as well as maintaining and policing the proper fishing laws and fishing licenses. When Jennings was told that a piranha was fished out of the pond, he was also very skeptical.
"This, I have to see," Jennings said. "I've been shaking my head in disbelief since I heard it."
So Jennings went to meet with Gomez, who showed him the four-pound fish. Sure enough, it was a pacu, a relative of the piranha.
According to pacufish.com (yes, the fish has a website), it is identified as "a beautiful fish (that) looks like a piranha when young. It is actually a relative of the piranha. The pacu is protected in the wild partly because of its similarity to the piranha. Unlike the piranha, the pacu have very blunt teeth and eat plankton. The pacu is thin but very large, sometimes growing up to 36 inches. This amazing fish lives in the Amazon Basin in South America. Its habitat is slow fresh waters in the rain forests. Their diet consists of ripe fruit and nuts that drop into the river. There are 20 species of the Pacu in Brazil and some of them can weigh about 65 pounds."
Wait a minute. Amazon basin in South America? Funny, doesn't sound like North Bergen.
So how does a fish like this end up in the pond in North Hudson Braddock Park?
Yeah, how?
"It had to have been dumped into the pond," Jennings said. "These fish are bought as tropical fish and they're pretty expensive. But the owner saw that it was getting too big and it was costing too much to keep. So the owner probably dumped the fish illegally into the pond."
Unfortunately, that happens too often. People think they're doing the right thing by dumping fish into the fresh-water pond, but it does more harm than good. A few years ago, someone must have dumped some Japanese carp into the pond. The fish mass reproduced, and eventually, there were approximately 4,000 carp in the pond.
"There were so many carp in the pond that they caused a disease called 'black gill' and they needed to be eliminated," McCann said. "They overtook the lake. It was unnatural to the lake."
Gomez didn't know what to do with his catch, so he turned it over to Jennings, who will in turn give it to the state Fish and Game division for further examination.
"I was told that you can catch anything up there," Gomez said. "Hey, you never know what you're going to end up with."
Sure makes for a better fish story than the big one that got away.
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