Cayuga Lake out of Long Point 3/17
Guided Tom and Mark for the full day today starting around 10:30 am. The fishing was solid from start to finish today, with the guys having a blast landing over 40 lakers! I don’t think we ever had 5 minutes go by without a hit. We did best around 135′ to 145′. Another couple guys I talked to at the launch at the end of the day did great out deeper – upper 150s to 160s. But the bottom line is that the fish were gobbling.
It didn’t matter what colors or lures we used today. White, chartreuse, smelt, white-ice, sparkle – you name it, it worked. Tom did great just relaxing and sitting on his cooler the whole day. Mark stayed in the front of the boat. We used 1+1/2oz jig heads. The 12lb Invis-X flourocarbon leaders were incredible! The only time I re-tied was after we had a couple tangles, otherwise the line never broke or needed to be re-tied. That’s a lot to think about after 42 fish!
We had one 30″er and quite a few 29″s and down. At the end of the day “big fish Tom” caught a couple dinks, but overall the quality of the fish on the northern flats of the lake is better than those around AES. Fish were generally on the thin side. They are just starting to feed. We didn’t mark much bait. We had a couple lampreys come up with fish.
Regarding Lamprey on Cayuga this year:
Most people realize that lamprey control is the number #1 issue on Cayuga Lake in terms of having a quality fishery. You can stock all you want, but if lampreys are abundant, we won’t have much of a fishery (see Lake Champlain in the 1980s and 90s.) We are lucky to have the low-head dam on Cayuga Inlet, which enables DEC to collect spawning eels at the fishway. This generally prohibits the need for time consuming, expensive chemical treatments. Right now there’s a 4′ drop between the dam and the lake. Every single lamprey that moves up the inlet will get collected and destroyed.
But over the past couple years we had a year when the lake levels were very high and the inlet was as well. So a fair number of eels got into Cayuga Inlet and spawned. So this year and next year we will see a spike in eels (treating the inlet now doesn’t help – these fish are already in the fishery.) And these eels are transforming (into parasites) at the south end, where they converge with browns and salmon. The eels will live for one year or so, then spawn and die. And that will be it. Barring any flooding or crazy weather this year, we’ll see eel numbers drop way down again by 2014. So we have one to two years of more lampreys on Cayuga.
There are enough gamefish in the lake to buffer these eels. When eels have enough hosts, they are “parasitic” – they will attach to one fish and then move onto another host, oftentimes not killing their host. When there aren’t many hosts – the eels become “predatory” – meaning they attach to the host and stay with it until it dies, then they move on. So even though the eels are unsightly, they likely won’t be killing many trout and salmon.
BTW – the eels are edible and considered a gourmet food in much of the world, apart from the U.S. See my article on trying one. They really are delicious, though you need to have a sense of adventure and some cojones to eat one. So feel free to step up this year, vow to put the pink lace underwear in the garbage forever and eat an eel like the real men you all know you are! 😉 Anthony Bourdain would certainly do it! Try one and you won’t be disappointed! Just cut off the head, slit the belly and gut it, then sauté with butter. You can bread them too.