Articles tagged with ""

• 17 Apr 2025 0

  Region 7 and 8 Diary Results are in….

  Articles

  FLAZ

  The results and summaries will be posted in a month or two on the DEC website.  In a nutshell, Keuka’s fishing has remained the same along with Canandaigua’s.  Seneca Lake has shown a lot of improvement in the rainbow, salmon and brown trout catches.  In Region 7, things remain somewhat the same, with Owasco Lake getting better and better for rainbows.  Cayuga Lake had a poor showing for salmon/browns.  Also very few smallmouth bass or pike. Otisco doesn’t have the cooperators it used to, but fishing has remained decent.

  Some regions, like Region 8,  have added some newer fisheries studies to the website, so if that interests you, you can click onto the DEC website and check out the latest findings. There’s some data pertaining to Canandaigua Lake, Honeoye Lake, Keuka Lake, Conesus Lake, Irondequoit Bay and more up there.  There are also plenty of stream surveys for the interested trout angler.

  The new Lake Erie Annual Report has also been posted.  Smallmouth bass numbers continue to trend down over there.  Things looks great for walleyes and perch.  Even burbot showed a rare population spike in 2024.  We’ll see if that’s a trend.  Alewife numbers were way up in 2024, which is interesting.

  Regarding our (Finger Lakes) fisheries, the cooperator numbers are too low for all of the Region 8 lakes – Seneca, Keuka and Canandaigua (I’m not sure about Hemlock or Canadice – but theirs are usually steady over the years.)  Region 7 definitely needs more enlistees for Cayuga, Owasco and Skaneateles Lake.  DEC is in the last year of a 3-year LL Salmon clipping program on Cayuga Lake and needs data to see how direct lake stocking fares versus stream stocking.  If you care about salmon, this is important!

  You can contact Region 7 (Cayuga/Owasco/Skaneateles) at: (607)753-3095.  Ask for the fisheries department and mention that you’d like to be a diary cooperator.

  Region 8 (Seneca/Canandaigua/Keuka)  at (585)226-2830 – ask the operator for the fisheries department and tell her that you want to sign up to be a diary cooperator.

• 29 Mar 2025 0

  Mandated New York State Boater Safety Course Now in Effect!

  Articles

  FLAZ

  Normally, I wouldn’t write about this – but I’ve had a couple questions from clients about it.  “Brianna’s Law”  is NY State legislation that mandates that ALL boaters operating in NY – need to complete an approved boater safety course beginning in 2025.  So whether you live in NY or drive up here from PA, Connecticut, NJ, Ohio, Virginia or wherever, you need to take the class.  There are a lot of online classes.  I took mine last year and it took me around 4 to 5 hours or more.  Boat U.S. offers a “free” online course but they ask for a donation “to keep it free.”  I realize that that doesn’t make any sense, but whatever.  If you’re renting a boat, you are exempted, since the state assumes that you’ll be given safety instructions by the rental company.  Ok….

  I was told by a source or two that Public Vessel operators (like myself) would be exempt, but at the Rochester Boat Show, law enforcement told me that they hadn’t heard that.  So I just decided to take the class online to avoid confusion.  You can find more about this online.  I just wanted to get the message out, so anglers don’t get tickets this year while out fishing.

• 25 Feb 2025 0

  Updates heading into March

  Articles

  FLAZ

  We’re finally starting to see some signs that the heavy aka “traditional” or old school winter of 2024/2025 is relinquishing its grip.  I never made it out ice-fishing this year.  Keuka Lake completely froze up a few days ago and when we need another week of low temperatures, we wind up with highs in the 40s and rain.  People are doing ok out of Indian Pines on lake trout, yellow perch, bluegills and occasional other species like pickerel, northern pike and even a few walleyes.

  I drove over to the lake yesterday but my favorite access was now off-limits.  Here’s what Branchport looked like with 2″ of ice.  I was happy to NOT see anyone out there on the ice.  I’m glad people are showing some common sense, although it’s certainly tempting to want to walk out a little ways and be into plenty of lake trout.

  Branchport Arm of the lake out of Keuka Lake State Park yesterday

  

  Another pic

  

  Angling Zone friend/client Joe B. checked out Long Point today.  Here’s what the harbor area looked like.

  Long Point Cayuga Lake 2/24/25

  

  Another shot...

  

  And one more

  

  It shouldn’t take long for this ice to melt with this week’s forecast temperatures, rain and wind.   Perry, the town where Silver Lake Marine is located, has gotten hammered with snow this winter.  I’m hoping that by the end of this week or early next week at the latest, I’ll have my 2020 Crestliner ready to roll.  Fingers crossed!   We’ll be looking at landlocked salmon fishing and deep laker jigging as soon as I get the boat back and conditions permit.  Keep in mind, that our rapidly changing weather is usually accompanied by a LOT of wind.  I’d also like to see Cayuga Lake levels come up a bit more.  We can hope!

• 12 Feb 2025 0

  Odds and Ends moving towards March

  Articles

  FLAZ

  Updates to this website have pretty much been completed.  I’m hoping that the site will run smoothly moving forward.  In general, I’ve been very happy with this WordPress site.  I did update the lakes and species pages taking into account the 2024 season.  Most updates on the species pages were for fish we actively target – lake trout, northern pike, salmon and so forth.  I didn’t have much to add to some of the other species like bluegills, gar and so on.  At some point in the past, my bowfin page disappeared, so I’ll probably have to try to catch a ‘fin in 2025 so I have a new photo.  I haven’t been able to locate my old bowfin photos.  I will also add “Lake Sturgeon” eventually, and although they are illegal to target, they are a certainly a fish that deserve a write-up!

  I dropped off my fishing diaries to Region 7 Fisheries back in early January.  I’m not going to go on about being a diary cooperator, but keep in mind that every bit of data helps paint a more accurate vision of the fishery for our fishery managers.  You can’t expect great decisions without accurate data!  I’ll leave it at that.

  Lake trout stocking on Cayuga Lake is scheduled to be cut by around 33% this year.  I think this is a good move, given that our lake trout population is immense and is clearly keeping down our salmon and brown trout populations.  There’s enough food out there to feed these lakers, but they are the most canaballistic of the trout/salmon species in our lakes and they consume a lot of freshly stocked/hatched salmonids – including young lake trout.  Owasco Lake laker stocking has been cut substantially over the past decade or more, and the lake trout catch rates remain very good, PLUS we have a terrific rainbow trout fishery and the browns seem to be doing better every year.  We’ll see how things play out, but it will be a good 5 or 6 years before the changes will even be noticeable.  I think cormorants also play a role in the salmon/trout issues on Cayuga Lake, but there isn’t much that can be done about them given that they are federally protected.  Anyways, Keuka Lake is a great example of what can happen when a lake trout population remains unchecked, but I digress.

  I am keeping an eye on the weather and should be ready to roll with my 2020 Crestliner in early March.  I want to see a warm up for a few days in the forecast before I pull that boat out of storage.  My 2013 boat runs great and is my favorite winter boat, but I believe that one of the hoses (perhaps a livewell hose) cracked, so I wound up taking on a lot of water during my last two trips.  The hull seems to be in fine shape – the bilge had been as dry as could be until my last two trips on Seneca Lake.  The most logical answer is that some water wound up freezing in one of the hoses or connections.  It happens and I’m surprised it didn’t happen earlier given how much winter fishing I’ve done in the past.

  If you’re looking for a salmon trip or a lake trout jigging trip, now’s a great time to reserve your date.  If the weather doesn’t cooperate, we move the date or you get your deposit back.  That’s my no-risk approach to booking trips!

   

• 15 Jan 2025 0

  Updates Moving into 2025

  Articles

  FLAZ

  I am currently working on getting this website functioning better. I’m hoping to have everything finished up shortly. Once the WordPress updates are completed (hopefully soon!,) I’ll start updating all the species and lakes pages to hopefully reflect and incorporate observations from 2024.

  Silver Lake Marine will be at the Rochester Boat Show from January 30th through February 2nd. I’ll be with them on Saturday, February 1st for most of the day. If you’re there, feel free to say hi. I’m always happy to talk fishing and boats.

  Not much to report on fishing-wise in the area. Ice fishing will be in full-swing soon (it already is on a lot of area waterways) and I’m hoping we get enough prolonged cold to freeze up large portions of Keuka Lake. The lake trout population could use some serious harvesting!

  I will not be out on the water or doing any guiding until we get a good warm-up. My 2013 boat (my usual winter boat and back-up) needs to get some work done on it. Once I see a good break in the weather, I’ll drop that one off to Silver Lake Marine and I’ll pick up my 2020 boat. I’m guessing we’re looking at mid-February at the earliest. We’ll see what the weather does.

  I’ve had a few calls for spring/summer bookings. Now’s a great time to pick a date for fishing – you’ll have the best selection available.

• 3 Jan 2025 0

  Happy New Year!

  Articles

  FLAZ

  Let’s hope it’s a good one. Over the cold spell of the next couple weeks I will be updating a lot of the pages to reflect this year’s findings.  As I write, this I’m having some bugs with the site not displaying correctly!  Ouch – not the way I want to start the New Year!

  Stay tuned!

• 23 Nov 2024 0

  Gift Certificates/Odds and Ends

  Articles

  FLAZ

  Gift Certificates are available for the holidays or any other occasion!  Give the gift of a day on the water!

  Docks have been pulled from the Otisco Lake State Launch.  Docks will be pulled from Skaneateles Lake on Monday.  The gate may have been locked up on Friday for the season – usually the first plowable snow is when they are locked for obvious reasons – the grade there is steep and treacherous when icy.  Lots of tourists also tend to drive down to the lake, likely unaware of the difficulties they will face when trying to exit!

  Not much else to report for now.  Some lakers are roaming nearshore on Cayuga Lake and salmon action is underway on Seneca Lake.  We have snow on the ground as of this writing on November 23rd!  We received quite a bit of heavy snow on Thursday night and on Friday.  Once it melts off, it should help trigger some early rainbow trout runs as well as remaining browns/salmon.

• 16 Nov 2024 0

  Are fish finally utilizing the large populations of Rudd in our lakes?

  Articles

  FLAZ

  After my guided trip today with Jeff and Jake, Jeff sent me a photo of a fish that he found in his 25″ pike’s stomach after filleting it.  He thought perhaps it was a young carp, but I think after closer scrutiny, it’s more likely a Rudd.  This is the first actually confirmation I’ve had of pike eating Rudd here in the Finger Lakes.  We’ve had Rudd around for awhile – I’d say at least 15 years, but it didn’t appear as though fish were utilizing them for food.  Seneca Lake is full of Rudd.  I cleaned a couple pike a year out of that lake over the past decade and never saw a single rudd in a fish’s stomach.

  Kevin Kapuscinski, a researcher specializing in muskies (he also likes to catch them – I had him out on my boat when he was a graduate student at Syracuse on Otisco Lake on October 19th, 2008, when he showed my friend Jarred and myself how to “figure-8” muskies.  He also showed us his homemade bucktail spinners) did a study on the Niagara River musky population and the invasive Rudd.  He did this research a long time ago, when Rudd were really just getting established in the river.  At that time, unbelievably, Rudd were the most common species in the Niagara River in terms of biomass, but the muskies were not eating them at all!  Rudd apparently got introduced into a lot of area waterways due to the bait trade.  Rudd look almost identical to golden shiners!   Seneca Lake is full of them as I mentioned before.  Perhaps it takes time for invasive species to be looked at by predators as food.  That was certainly the case with round goby in Cayuga Lake.  It took a couple years before they really showed up heavily in lake trout diets.

  If pike really get into feeding on Rudd, Seneca Lake could really turn into an amazing pike fishery again.  There are metric TONS of rudd out there!  I reached out to Kevin and will try to follow up on this finding.

  Pike eating Rudd

  

  Close-up of the Rudd's tail spread out

  

• 29 Sep 2024 0

  Tags, tags and more tags!

  Articles

  FLAZ

  No, this isn’t about tagging fish – it’s about this website.  Over the past year, you may have noticed green “tags” at the bottom of my reports.  Most of you probably know, that with a WordPress website like this, I can tag articles/reports as reference points.  So if we have a bowfin encounter, I can tag the bottom of the report with “Bowfin” and perhaps “Sodus Bay.”  If you then click on the tag, you’ll get a list of all the reports (and articles) with mentions of bowfin.  So if you are new to fishing or the area, and would like to see my experiences with chain pickerel, you’d just click that tag in a report.  Sometimes this winter, I’ll tag all my species pages so it’s easier to do.

  You won’t see any tags for “lake trout” since I do so much of it.  But if you’re interested in “Deep Jigging” for them or “Fly-fishing lake trout,” you’ll have a tag for that.  I also didn’t differentiate largemouth and smallmouth bass, there’s just a “bass” tag.  I also didn’t tag “rock bass” since they are so common.

  I have a thumb drive from my old computer (that I owned from around 2008 until 2015) with hundreds, if not a thousand-plus photos on it.  I added around 50+ photos to my old reports, mostly from the time-frame of 2013 up to 2017.  Maybe during the winter, I’ll feature some of the better fish and photos on my “home-page slider.”  It was fun looking back on the 2010s and uploading shots like the kayaker that we saved on Keuka Lake as well as some nice salmon, brown and pike photos.  Once the weather gets crappy, I’ll get another 50 to 100 photos up.  Ideally, I’d love to have all the old reports accompanied by whatever photos I have, but that might be a bit of a stretch.  It’s very hard to categorize shots that I don’t have dates and names for.  Once I went digital – again, in the mid-2000s, it became much easier.

  We pulled the kayaker out of Keuka Lake on 4/13/14.  That was a miracle!

  My first King on a jig was on 5/3/2012.  My second came on 5/29/2015 and my third sometimes around 2018 I believe.   You can click any of the reports mentioned above and then click on the green tag that states “Jigging Kings” or something like that.  You’ll see the numerous times I struck out on the big lake trying to jig salmon!  I paid my dues on those fish! We had a good brown on Mexico Bay on 7/28/2016.  My 50″ Waneta Musky from 11/7/13 is up.   I have my best pike, taken on a fly on Cayuga on 2/24/2011.  Greg’s legendary (between me and him!) fat-eyed brown trout came on 8/20/2011.  The Will Burford 15/16lb brown was on 8/14/2019.  Stoney Point/Lake Ontario lake-trout jigging is up as well.  These are some of the highlights that I wanted to get posted.  More to come….

• 16 Aug 2024 0

  Hydrilla vs. Elodea

  Articles

  FLAZ

  If you launch a boat in the Finger Lakes region or along Lake Ontario and elsewhere, you’ve probably been interviewed by some of the attendants hired to inform people and check boats for invasive species.  Cayuga has had some hydrilla in it for quite some time.  It’s mostly contained as far as I know, but there’s some in the marina at Myers as well as in the private marina over there and around the cove by Wells College/Long Point area.

  When I got back in to Myers marina today after my truncated morning trip, I saw some Cornell and DEC personnel docked at the marina.  I had talked to them before and knew that they were motoring around the lake looking for hydrilla.  One of the guys was nice enough to spend a little time with me and showed me some hydrilla in the marina.  It looks a lot like elodea, which is a common (I believe native) plant found throughout the region.   He pulled up some of each weed and showed me how to differentiate the two of them.  They both look a lot alike, but the main difference is that the hydrilla leaves have a serrated edge to them.

  Elodea is on the left; hydrilla is on the right

  

  If you look closely, you can see that hydrilla has a serrated edge to its leaves.  Elodea’s leaves are smooth.
• No Blog Entries