Reports

Guided two back-to-back half-days today.  I had an AM trip scheduled, then had a last-minute call from my friend Jeff, who was hoping for a PM half-day, so I spent the whole day out on the water.  Lake trout fishing is generally good to very good.  Baitfish have moved in at times, but I have not been seeing any major schools quite yet.  We are fishing a little shallower than a lot of people, so the bait still might be a bit deeper.  Fish we caught today were still relatively thin.  Over the past months, I’ve had days when the fish were full of bait and others when they weren’t.  There hasn’t been a whole lot of rhyme or reason to it so far, apart from the cold snaps we’ve been getting. We should see a lot more bait showing up later this week or next week.  I’m sure the midges will be abundant too.  Surprisingly, they weren’t much of a presence out on the lake yesterday.  Surface temps are around 41 degrees.  The water still shows some signs of the heavy rain – it is a little bit cloudy on top in areas and there’s some light debris still floating around in areas.

AM Trip:  I had Steve and his son Alex join me starting just after 8:45 am.   The parking lot at Long Point already had a good dozen or more rigs parked in it when we launched.  Steve has a place on Keuka Lake and caught the one rainbow we’d ever landed there jigging, back a good ten years or more ago.   To this day he swears that the rainbow tasted no different than the lake trout they kept out of Keuka Lake that day.  Those Keuka Lake lake trout are fantastic on the table!

Alex fished hard for the first two hours of our trip, then his fatigue got to him a bit.  We had a good double-digit lake trout morning with a slow down around 11 am.  We finished the day strong with the best fish of the day – a 30″ beauty!

PM – Trip:  My PM trip was with Jeff and his friend Brian, along with Brian’s buddy Mark.  We had a solid afternoon and another double-digit trip.  Fishing was by no means hot ‘n heavy today, but by being patient and persistent, we made out well by the trip’s end.  I filled the guy’s catch for them at the day’s end and didn’t see much bait, although some of the fish showed signs of well-digested baitfish.