Reports

4/21 Watkins Glen: Monday through Wednesday were my days off from guiding this week, but after the hot action for large salmon on Sunday, I had to get out and try it for myself, despite being quite tired. Conditions were forecast to be similar for Monday, so how could I go wrong? Well the thing about salmon is (as Peter Thilveros says about smallmouth bass) is that they have fins and they use them. A few fish were around the usual areas like the canal, but it was clear to me after a short while that a lot of fish had moved out.

I only had 3 hours to fish before I had to get back to Ithaca to teach my Cornell classes. Unfortunately it wasn’t enough time for me to connect on my flies. I worked 3 or 4 areas and finally found some fish, but after missing a hit I had to go. That’s how it goes!

4/22 Cayuga Lake out of Long Point: I had an email from Joel, who was looking to get out for a 1/2 day for lakers or salmon so I decided to forget about a day off. I wasn’t going to do salmon after the cold evenings. I figured gear fishing would produce fish, but I didn’t want to chance it, so we went after lakers. Laker fishing wasn’t easy. We moved a lot in order to locate fish. After some searching we found lakers very deep. Joel wound up catching his limit of 3 fish which we kept. All were 24″ to 25″. Lamprey wounding wasn’t bad – one fresh scar, one clean fish and one with a healed wound. We found fish in upwards of 190′ FOW, though some were in as shallow as 110′. Water level was high. Not too much debris was around.

cayuga lake Deep Jigging fly-fishing landlocked salmon Seneca Lake