Reports

Guided Ron and his daughter Rachel for a full day getting underway at 8:30 am.  Cayuga Lake is still very low, but hopefully should start rising this coming week.  I used trolling motor power to get out.  It’s a good idea to raise your big motor as much as possible when motoring around the harbor area at this water level.  The bottom is loaded with weeds and muck/marl that can easily get around your prop or play havoc with your intake.  A couple of weeks ago, we found an old rag had wrapped around my prop.  Hopefully we won’t be dealing with this low water for much longer.

We had a slow start to the day with plenty of fish onscreen, but relatively few hits.  I believe Rachel picked up the first fish.  I had absentmindedly forgotten to bring my boat bag onboard, so before we strayed too far from the launch, I made a quick run back to the park and grabbed my bag.  On the way back out, I had Ron and Rachel work an area that I hadn’t worked this year thus far.  We hit paydirt (or likely the fish had just started hitting) and started nabbing fish consistently.  We worked some other areas and wound up having a great double-digit day – I think it was our best day thus far of the season.   “Big-fish Rachel” landed a nice 31″+ fish which was great.  It’s always fun having her onboard and she really executes well with the jigging – she loses relatively few fish.

The fish are still looking great on Cayuga Lake.  We had a lot of fish in the 26-, 27- and 28-inch classes today.  We also had a few smaller lake trout come onboard.   Lamprey scarring is pretty minimal.

Thus far, my schedule is wide-open next week.  If I don’t book, I’ll try to get out a couple days on my own and do some fishing/scouting.  Either way – guiding or fishing, I’m happy!   Water temp on Cayuga Lake was around 40/41 degrees.  Jack did tell me that many of the fish he cleaned from Monday had baitfish in them – plenty of alewives, so fish are feeding fairly heavily – especially for this time of year.