Cayuga Lake out of Dean’s Cove 6/3
Long day on the water, but it was interesting!
AM Trip: Started at 7 am doing a full day with Doug and Cliff. Doug wanted to learn the jigging technique so that’s what we did. I spent the first 1/2 hour or so giving the guys the tutorial. We found a lot of bait and some fish shallow – from around 35′ on out. Fishing was good for around the first hour or two, then it slowed. But it never quite stopped and then it picked up again around noon or 1 pm. The guys landed around 7 nice fish (if I remember right.) Many were in the 17″ to 20″ range – which is what Doug wanted for the pan. We let go a 27.5″er and another good one. Another 6 or so were lost/dropped. So all in all, the action was pretty good. By the end of the day the guys really had things dialed in.
Doug does a lot of perch fishing on Seneca and he actually brought me a big bag of perch fillets! Can’t beat that! I learned a lot re: Seneca perching. That’s the great thing about guiding – I meet a lot of great fishermen from all over the country, world (in some instances) and region (in most cases.)
PM Trip: Guided Todd (who’s a regular) and Dave – who does a lot of Lake Ontario trout/salmon fishing and panfishing. Things started out windy, but Todd got into a solid 27″ laker in short order. Then we had a very tough go of it for the next few hours. Cold surface temps (52) on the lake’s east shore. Very little bait around. Weird. But it reminded me of a very similar day last year – when I first guided Todd. We wound up on the west shore for the last hour of the trip. Water there was 56 degrees and there was plenty of bait and fish in! Another 3 SOLID fish came to the net. As I was filleting fish Dave hooked another one. Todd took the net. I didn’t get a chance to watch but my eyes just about popped out of my head when I saw the brute of a laker in the net! The fish was just huge!!! At least 33″ with a huge head, but the body was proportional – well-proportioned! This fish was full of bait. At the very least it was over 13lbs, but very possibly 14 or bigger. It was a bonafide monster – bigger than I’d ever caught and probably around the top 6 or at worse, 10 that have been landed on my boat. We snapped a quick shot and plunged it back into the water – it took off like a rocket! Great finish to a trip that was looking like it might be very tough!