Cayuga Lake 4/14 – 4/16
Thus far this season I’ve spent more time than ever before fishing Cayuga Lake as opposed to Seneca, Skaneateles and Keuka, which are my usual early season favorites. Why? Mainly because the fishing has been so good and it’s nearby! Can’t beat that and I love not having to do too much driving or running around with the boat.
4/14: Guided Don and his 10 year old (soon to be eleven year old) nephew Greg. We originally were shooting for Skaneateles Lake where Don has a cottage, but due to circumstances on Don’s end we decided Myers would be a better bet.
He’s been getting into some lake fly-fishing and working on his casting and it showed. We had some follows from trout/salmon right away. Greg hooked up and nabbed a fat 16.5″ brown that we kept. It had a goby in its stomach around 4 to 5 inches long! Don wound up catching a couple nice 16.5″/17″ salmon both on my flyrod setup (with an intermediate line) and his (with a floating setup.) Good day on the water with some other follows too.
4/15: Guided Mark I. for a full day. I met him at Dean’s Cove which for me was a blast from the past, but it was better for Mark and easier than launching by myself and running back and forth across the lake. Our target was carp on the fly, though we started by trying some salmon fly-fishing (with no action – which wasn’t too surprising up north) and then we had some very solid laker jigging with Mark landing four solid fish in short order up to over 30″.
The carping is something I hadn’t done in at least 7 years and was just like I remembered it. A LOT of fish mudding on vast flats. It basically involved blind casting the flats and some guesswork casting to fresh mudders. Mark fouled a couple fish to start. One was landed and was probably in the 25lb to nearly 30lb range! Later he had a fish around 12lbs gobble the fly, so that was cool. A lot of fun today! Great fights too!
4/16: Guided Ron and his daughter Rachel for a full day. Usually Ron shows up with his son Matt or alone but it was a nice change of pace. She doesn’t do a whole lot of fishing but has done her share. The laker bite was hot early with around 9 or 10 fish landed fairly quickly up to over 28″. The bite then slowed down next to nothing but picked up to a slower steady pick later and we wound up with 16 solid fish. 2 or 3 were likely wild. All were let go today. We worked from around 130′ to 160′. Beautiful day!