Reports

Guided a 1/2 day on Thursday starting around 11 am and then a full day on Friday starting at just after 8 am.  Fishing for us really turned-on last Saturday around 11 am or noon and has been pretty much top-notch ever since.  Fish are feeding heavily with various sizes of alewives in their stomachs.  This is usually the most consistent bite of the whole year on Cayuga Lake.  There’s no thermocline and fish are concentrated in the northern third of the deep-water portion of the lake.  They’ve been fairly dormant throughout the winter and early spring and this is really the first major feeding, which will get them active again for the year.  Bait fish schools are moving in. This is basically as easy as it gets on Cayuga Lake.  This hot bite usually lasts about 2 to 3 weeks, sometimes longer – although it usually starts a bit earlier in the calendar year, at least if my memory serves me correctly!

4/20:  Guided Joe and his friend John.  These guys fish the heck out of Oneida Lake and Joe has really been getting more into Cayuga Lake’s lake trout fishing for now, until the walleye season opens up.  We had a very good to excellent day out here with a double or two hooked – it was solid double-digit fishing.

4/21:  Today I guided Jamie and his uncle Ken, who both love fishing the Finger Lakes and other waterways in the state.  They’ve had some great laker jigging on Lake George as well as other Fingers.  Today was a spectacular day with over 10 doubles hooked and plenty of fish landed.  The guys decided to call it a day nearly an hour before our scheduled ending time.  At times it was fish after fish after fish on consecutive drops.  A few other boats were out on the day but nothing like some of the past weekends.  We did very well on whites and blacks, which basically mean as long as the fish could see the jigs, they hit them.  There was no key color preferences, although a few of my old colors that never produced much, didn’t seem to work either.  It can be fun to try different colors, brands and styles of lures when the fish are hitting well.  We had a few wild fish but not many.  Average fish ran 25″ to 28″.  We had maybe one or two around 30″.  No real dinks and the fish generally looked very clean.  We are not seeing many lampreys or signs of fresh lampreys which is great.  A few loons are still out on the lakes.  Baitfish schools are moving in heavily.  Surface temps are around 48.  Expect to see more rainbows, browns and a few salmon showing up “uplake” shortly if they haven’t already.  No photos today.  Killer action!