Cayuga Lake out of Dean’s Cove 5/30 PM
Got out on my own for 4 hours starting at 1 pm. I only brought my fly-fishing gear. The winds were really blowing! As I launched, a guy was behind me at the ramp with his kayak trailer. A lot of serious kayak fishermen will be around Cayuga Lake this weekend and today. Keep an eye out for them! There’s a big national kayak bass tournament going on this weekend. I talked to a guy that lives down by Guntersville who had made his first trip up to NY. The modern kayaks are fishing machines and guys can stand up in them and bass fish low to the water as if they were in a bass boat. A lot of these guys are running all kinds of gadgets including live-scope sonar and side-imaging. It’s impressive but at the same time you have to wonder what ever happened to the simple pleasure of bass fishing and just throwing an old Hula Popper or Jitterbug out?
As I mentioned before, with new fly-lines, spot-lock features on trolling motors and accurate mapping features on sonar units – the odds are starting to look better for fly-fishing lakers, as more than just a niche thing, thus I’ve been committing more time than usual to it. I did some Ophthalmological surgery on a bunch of old Clouser minnows I had (switching out the heavy eyes to much lighter ones) and was eager to try them out with my RIO 350 grain sink-tip (it’s really more of a shooting head with a 24′ section of “tip.”) I had the conditions I was hoping for (at least for some of the day) with cold water upwelling in some areas. I knew lake trout would be in shallow water. I tried a few areas and after about 45 minutes I hooked up with a solid laker. Unfortunately after maybe 10 seconds, it got off. It was around 5 or 6lbs. That was kind of the story of my day today. I had another violent grab maybe 30′ out and wasn’t able to hook that fish either for more than a few seconds. Another 4 or 5 fish encounters, including salmon and possibly a nice brown around 5lbs (it could have been a laker, but I think brown…) rounded out the day. No fish landed, but I was happy with a half-dozen hook-ups/encounters on the fly in 4-hours. I was just working flats – I wasn’t on points, creek-mouths or other high-percentage areas, so I was happy about that. As great as those areas can be, they are also subject to a lot more fishing pressure.