Cayuga Lake 12/2, 12/3
12/2: Launched out of Long Point today with Suresh and Lars, both Cornell Fisheries experts. Today wasn’t a guide trip per se, I met the guys a few weeks ago at an American Fisheries Society Meeting and we were looking to procure some lake trout for studies Suresh is doing. Suresh wanted a variety of different sized fish – I though that Long Point might produce some bigger specimens than say Myers Point.
Conditions were pretty nasty when we launched at around 10:45 am. We had strong winds out of the south and some storms coming through. The guys were prepared with commercial fishing rain-gear (Grundens.) We worked a few different depths and found some lakers deep. We also hooked fish shallow. A lot of dropped fish were the order of the day for all of us, especially yours truly. We managed to get three nice lakers up to around 30″ (and a pickerel – yes we fished shallow) onboard. I dropped a small salmon that was maybe 16″ to 17″ long too. We lost some good lakers both deep and shallow.
Suresh really knows his gobies and was able to give me some great oral and written information on them which will help my guiding out a lot. Lars is a wealth of information too and it was a real pleasure being able to ask questions of bona fide experts.
12/3: Launched out of Myers today at 9 am with my buddy Mike. I hadn’t fished with Mike since early May targeting salmon and browns so I was glad to see him today. We had laker stuff as well as fly-gear in tow. I wanted to get Suresh another 7 lakers so he would have enough fish for his project. We also checked on pike/pickerel fishing today. Laker action was excellent once we found them and figured out a good way to catch them. We landed 8 solid fish with Mike taking one and the rest going towards research. Fish ran to 29″. Pike and pickerel fly-fishing was excellent as well. We had maybe 90 minutes to fly-fish them before it got dark (and windy!) out there. We landed some solid pickerel up to around 5lbs and a couple nice northerns up to over 30″ on flies. 8 weight type 6 sinking lines (full sink) and deceivers did the trick for us. We had some great fighting fish! Fun day.