Cayuga Lake out of Long Point 6/14
Guided Ron here for a full-day getting underway just after 7 am. We had decent fishing to start which turned into very good to excellent fishing in short order. Ron’s hot bite tapered off after maybe 4 hours and then we had a slower, albeit steady pick of lake trout. Fish ran 20″ to 28″. Ron had a very solid double-digit day today. Fish fought great too!
The bigger news is that there are particulates showing up in at least the first foot of water or two in many areas of Cayuga Lake. Yep, it looks like the annual algae bloom could be starting. Surface temperatures of the lake are 66 degrees and we haven’t had much rain. My belief over the past 5 years or so, is that the algae bloom correlates with the formation of the thermocline, and we definitely are seeing some signs of a thermocline forming now, although it isn’t very strong yet.
I checked the NYS HABs map (i.e., “Harmful Algae Blooms” map) and Cayuga Lake has seen minor localized algae blooms in the bay south of Taughannock and on the far northern end of the lake. I’m out on Cayuga Lake all day tomorrow and am scheduled to be back out on Monday, so we’ll get a better idea of what’s going on. With a big heat wave in the forecast for next week, I’m pretty sure we’ll see the all-out bloom by Friday or Saturday the 21st./22nd. respectively. Time will tell.
I do still have Saturday June 29th open for trips. It is a FREE FISHING DAY (actually weekend) designated by NYS, so no fishing licenses are required. The algae bloom is a great excuse to get acquainted with other area lakes like Seneca, Owasco and Canandaigua (for those of you who live further to the west.)
The other news comes from my friend/client Pete, who has a place near Watkins Glen on Seneca Lake. Goby numbers, as expected, are exploding on Seneca Lake. He had a hard time keeping them away from his kids’ smallmouth bass worm set ups.
We will see all the usual stuff on Seneca Lake over the next 5 or 6 years. Monster sized smallmouth bass, salmon acting like white suckers and feeding on the bottom, shallow lake trout in the winter, pickerel and pike all around the perimeter of the lake, more gigantic perch and so on.
After that, we’ll see everything come back down to earth with fewer smallmouth bass, but still a lot of big perch. We shall see how this differs from what we saw on Cayuga Lake. Gobies were inevidable on Seneca Lake with the connection to Cayuga Lake (and Lake Ontario) via the NY Barge Canal System. This should be it for new waters and goby infestations for the Fingerlakes region of NY. If you love smallmouth bass, gobies are not your friend. You’ll trade having thousands of bass for maybe 10% of what you had before, but yes, they’ll be big – big and few and far between. Expect Seneca Lake to host a lot of bass tournaments (including possible national events over the next 5 to 10 years) but don’t believe the hype. Gobies are NOT a good thing.