Cayuga Lake 7/4, 7/5 + 7/6
7/4: Guided John from Minnesota and his friend Simon from Kenya. Laker jigging was good with the guys landing 7 or 8 fish if I remember right. The guys really enjoyed the fishing and it was great fun watching Simon catch his first laker. He’s used to summertime air temps pushing 120 degrees! That’s HOT!!! His favorite wild game to eat is giraffe. I’ll have to check Wegmans next time I’m there…. 😉 He talked to us about killing a lion being a rite of passage for Kenyan men – though it isn’t practiced anymore (at least that was my impression.)
7/5: Launched out of Taughannock with Tom and Mark for a full day trip starting at 6 am. We had a decent breeze to start with south winds around 10 mph. The west shore of the lake provided some laker action with Mark catching a couple nice fish. We later moved east and Tom landed and released a 31″ solid fish. The fishing wasn’t spectacular, but wasn’t bad – we had some action throughout the day. If I remember right, best depths were from around 65′ to 80′ or so.
Tom wasn’t a big trout eater by his own admission, but Mark and I were pretty sure he’d likely eaten some fish that perhaps weren’t well taken care of. Back at their camp, Mark prepared some fish and I received an email from Tom – “You were right….it was great.” Lakers are excellent eating – they may not be the best eating fish that swims, but there are very few fish out there better eating than freshly caught lake trout!
7/6: Launched out of Dean’s Cove at just after 6 am with George and his son in-law Perry. Perry wanted to try some fly-fishing for bass and pickerel so we headed north. He hadn’t done any lake fly-fishing but was willing to give it a shot and learn as he went. For whatever the reason, fishing was tough for us. Weeds were up high – especially N. of the State Launch at Cayuga State Park. Fish didn’t seem to willing to come up for our presentations. Good time to do some pitching! Anyways, George landed one small pickerel and likely missed a bass or two. Water temps were around 73 to 76. There was a slight algae bloom. George had a new Canavan Custom rod and wanted to spend 1/2 the day laker jigging. The PM jigging bite wasn’t easy. The guys missed a few. We persevered and a couple decent fish came to the net.
We are seeing slightly more wild fish than usual on Cayuga Lake this year. Time will tell whether we’ve just been lucky or it’s a lake wide trend. Given what I saw today, we’d have been better off jigging lakers in the AM, then bass fishing in the PM. Plenty of bass boats were out pre-fishing for the BFL tourney this weekend. And in the Red Cross Derby, and there will be a bit of boat traffic come this weekend on Cayuga Lake.