Reports

Bass fishing remains challenging on Cayuga Lake to say the least. At Bass Pro Shops I’ve been talking to many of the top Federation anglers representing their clubs and most are complaining about the difficult bite. They are fishing hard for just a couple fish. One angler I’ve talked to found good numbers of big largemouth bass in 30′ to 35′ of water! I don’t know exactly what’s going on with Cayuga. There are a lot of nice fish in the lake. Water temperatures are warm – upwards of 65 degrees or better down 50′! So there are a lot of areas bass can utilize. Alewives are in the 40′ range and deeper. There are plenty of baitfish available shallow and in mid-depth as well. My tournament partner and I spent a half-day out on the lake on Friday and managed one chunky largemouth on a crankbait in around 14′ to 17′ of water.

It’s a little tough for me to do Bass tourneys since I’m spending 95% of my time on the lake guiding/targeting lake trout – but it’s still a lot of fun! We fished an Avon Anglers open tourney on Cayuga Saturday with around 60 boats total. The NYS Bass Fed. had their 6 man team tourney going on as well, with over 150 participants from what I heard! Lots of pressure on these fish and on this lake.

Durning the tourney I managed to catch 2 decent bass on a Fat Free Shad and lost one other fish. My partner had some hits on jig/pig but never hooked up. The crankbait fish were on sparse weeds, not the normal thick coontail we usually crank(though not far away from the thick stuff). Once the wind came up at around 11 am we never got another hit. The wind was unreal – 25 mph. with higher gusts at its peak, though all morning long it was around 15 mph out of the south! We had 4′ waves at the northern part of the lake. The tournament results reflected the tough conditions with 1st. place being 5 fish for 11lbs. and 2nd. was in the 10lb. range. A typical Cayuga tourney this time of year would require around 18lbs to over 20lbs of bass to win! In this tourneya 7lb. to 8lb. bag of fish was good for a prize! The winners fished the same area we were working but were using soft plastics. They had found that the crankbait bite was slow the day before and made the switch. Our two fish weighed around 4.5lbs. Lunker for the tourney was just over 4lbs. Most fish that I saw weighed in were largemouths. Many teams only caught one or two legal fish and around 10 to 15 teams left the tournament early without weighing in due to the trying conditions out there. I had to keep a very good watch on the boat in the waves – even then we still took a wave over the bow. Nasty!

I’m going to spend a bit more time bass fishing Cayuga over the next couple weeks working on some new areas and techniques. I’ll post the results here (but probably not the areas! 😉

Avon results will be posted on www.avonanglers.com/ NYS Bass Fed. tourneys results will be on www.nybassfed.com/ Bass tournaments are a lot of fun and are ALWAYS a good learning experience. Avon tournaments are open to anyone. The rules and details are available on their website.

bass cayuga lake