Cayuga Lake 8/9 +10
Lake trout jigging is fantastic on Cayuga Lake at this time. I am not doing many “doubles” anymore these days but I did one yesterday. Both trips went very well. I finally got out for some bass fishing with my buddy Terry and we had a lot of fun too.
8/9 AM Trip: Went out with Matt and his brother in law Mike for a morning 1/2 day. I hadn’t seen the guys in over 5 years so it was a lot of fun catching up. The guys had some solid fishing for lake trout with 12 fish landed in around 4 1/2 hours.
8/9 PM: Met the Hermans at the Taughannock launch and headed out for my PM trip. We started at noon. Fishing was absolutely fantastic with John and Eleonore landing 19 lake trout and 2 nice salmon, including a 25″er. We kept the smaller (21″) salmon. Fish are feeding heavily and the water looks great. Nice and clear with no sign of algae. The water is cooler for this time of year but fish are still working deeper. The Hermans landed some big hard fighting fish to 30″. We also had a few 28″s and 29″s.
8/10: Met my buddy Terry over at Long Point for some bass fishing. Although I felt a little crazy targeting bass instead of lakers given how fantastic the laker fishing has been, I was itching to do something different. I also want a batch of lakers for my smoker and won’t have time to smoke them until next week, so I’ll likely go then. I expect top-notch laker fishing for the next three weeks. Hopefully it will hold up!
I have way too much bass gear (as does Terry) and the first bass trip of the season is always a bit of a shakedown i.e. “what did I forget to bring today?” and “where are the fish?” Bass fishing has been great on Cayuga Lake over the past few years but you still have to find them. Weed growth/types and fish distribution are affected by factors like the cold spring we had along with the muddy high water. Neither Terry nor I had been largemouth bass fishing in at least a year! That’s a long time away.
We tried a bunch of different areas – basically “prefishing” as if we were preparing for a tournament. We found a couple productive areas and techniques and had fun landing over 1/2 dozen largies up to around 3.5 or 4lbs. We also caught some nice pickerel including one around 25″ that hit my swimjig. So no great numbers of bass but some steady action. I’ll be getting out more frequently for bass throughout the rest of August and into September before I start targeting pike. Fun day and we will be better prepared next time – we both had tackle issues to work through. Terry dropped a nice fish or two. He did well though, catching the majority of the bass.