Cayuga/Dean’s 4/29 + Seneca out of Sampson 4/30
Fished Cayuga with my old friend Mike on Tuesday. We were going to postpone but said “what the heck”. Conditions were fairly brutal with 34 degree air temps in the AM and steady Northwest winds with speeds in the upper teens. Wind chills were probably in the upper 20s or around 30. We marked lakers from around 55′ or 60′ out into deeper water, but boat control troubles combined with scattered, suspended negative fish made fishing conditions and presentation very difficult. I had classes to teach, so we cut the day short around 1 pm.
Guided Andrew today on Seneca Lake. We launched out of Sampson with light north winds. Things started out very difficult. We tried a bunch of areas for lakers and bass without seeing much of anything. We worked from shallow to depths of over 160′ without much more than a hit or two. We marked a couple nice schools of fish in 140′ and had some chasers and a momentary hookup. Anyways, I’d marked some warm water (47 degrees) early in the day on the west shore but wrongly assumed (yes, I know what happens when you ‘assume’ 😉 that it was due to the warm water discharge at Dresden. We went back to the west shore close to the end of our day and hit paydirt on lakers. Plenty of quite aggressive fish had moved up into the 45′ to 65′ range. Fishing got hot towards the evening and Andy landed 4 nice fish and missed others. We likely could have loaded the boat had we stayed out – we were constantly marking fish and chasers! I had classes to teach, so we stayed out as long as I could. There are plenty of fish from north of Dresden all the way up the west shore to the north end of the lake. Great fishing at the day’s end – it just goes to show….
We kept 3 fish and they were nice sized – up to 28″. The big fish was stuffed with HUGE alewives! Fish were generally in pretty good condition.