Cayuga Lake out of Ithaca 2/10
Got out with my buddy Mike on his boat for most of the day starting around 10 am. He wanted to launch at Treman, so that’s what we did. I wouldn’t recommend launching there this time of year – we both learned that today. The lake level is very low and we had to traverse 1 to 2′ of water in places. There are also very shallow areas at the mouth of the Inlet.
Wind forecasts didn’t go as planned. We were hoping for some good salmon conditions, but decided to forego the salmon fishing and head up the lake for some lake trout action. It was a good call! We found nice groups of fish N. of AES from 125′ to around 150′ and more. The usual plastics worked well and we landed 7 nice fish, most between 24″ and 28″ including one nice wild fish. We dropped one other good fish near the boat.
For some reason a lot of the winter AES area fish get beat upon by lampreys. We had two small lampreys attached to fish, and one fish with a fresh wound. I see this every year around AES and it is not indicative of the general lamprey wounding – which is very, very low on Cayuga Lake.
We kept our limit of lakers for the fryer and smoker today. One laker had an alewife in its stomach, but overall they didn’tappear to have been feeding much.
We did some pike fishing on the way down the lake and Mike landed a 35″beauty on one of my deceivers near the S. end of the lake. We got afew great photos of the fat female before releasing her.
Water temps are 38 to 39 (warm for this time of year) on the lake. Water levels are VERY low! Boaters needto be careful around the launches.