Cayuga Lake 2/18 + 19
Launched out of Taughannock on both days. The goal was to fly-fish salmon. Fished with my friend Jeff on Saturday starting around 10:45 am. I met him back in 2004 or ’05 when I worked at Bass Pro Shops. He’s an avid fly-fisherman. We had terrific fishing but slow catching over the first few hours. We found plenty of fish and had follows but strikes were few and far in between. The salmon were tentative. I managed one brown just a hair shy of 15″. We set up for lakers and had some great jigging action with 4 fish landed between us in around 2 hours. We also missed other hits and dropped a fish or two. The smoker will be running this week!
Yesterday was a full day guide trip with Mark I. I gave him the option of Sunday with warm temps but poor winds and today (Monday) with cold temps but good winds. He went with the nicer day. Winds were dead calm after an hour of light southerlies. We were able to see deep into the lake and spotted plenty of suckers along with a few salmon in a few different areas. We even saw a lake trout.
Just as I was debating setting up for laker jigging, the winds came up strong out of the north. Fish activated a bit but were still tough/tentative for us. Gear fishing likely would’ve been productive but we stuck with fly-fishing. It was hard to cover water effectively due to the strong winds pushing the boat along a bit too fast (even with drift bags.) We found some more sheltered areas and Mark got railed by a nice thick brown trout. It found superbly – with some deep runs and great jumps. The fish went 20″ and Mark caught all of the action – including the hookup on his Go-Pro. After that Mark had another hit (likely a salmon) but that was it.
Water temps ran around 39/40. Launching wasn’t a problem for us.