Reports

Guided Jim, his son Dan and Dan’s GF Sausin for a 1/2 day trip starting at 8:30 am.  With the extreme heat in the forecast coupled with the dissipation of the steady deep bite, I suggested a 6:30 am start for our trip to Jim.  He has a good drive to get over here, so we went with 7:30.  Unfortunately they ran late, so we didn’t get on the water until around 8:30 or so.

We had a great start to the morning with a couple fish landed in very short order in shallow water.  A handful were dropped as well.  That bite quickly slowed down for us and I went into “search mode.”  We covered a lot of water with only a few more hits to show.  We had areas with bait but not many predators and a lot of areas devoid of both.  We did get into some action later in the morning and wound up the day with a half-dozen nice lakers in the boat and probably a dozen or more dropped/missed.

I’d consider this the first somewhat slow day we’ve had in the past few months since early March.  A half dozen fish is still a darn good day (I know most people would love to do that on Seneca Lake!) but it was a lot slower fishing that what I’d been encountering lately.  My clients Koen and Johan were out yesterday with friends and had a very solid day.  They also reported a slowdown today when I talked to them around noon.  Although as I’m writing this at 6pm, I just got a text from Johan who just caught 5 lakers in 5 drops!   With shallow waters warming up, groups of fish are moving around now quite a bit.

Earl Holdren had a great line regarding this time of year in his book about trout rarely grouping up when they have favored temperatures from top to bottom.  “Many fishermen go nuts at this time trying to get their limit!”