Cayuga Lake out of Long Point 5/28
Did a 1/2 day trip with Gordon and his daughter Kaitlyn. Last year Gordon hit some of the best salmon/brown trout action of the year in early May. This time we focused on lakers, given the time of the year. Action was ok today – better than the past two trips. Gordon landed two solid 28″ lakers and had a few other follows (right up to the boat) and hits. Kaitlyn managed to come through at the end of the trip with the best fish of the day – a 28.5″ beauty. Solid but not spectacular fishing. All three were kept today and all were loaded with alewives.
My friend Todd tipped me to some salmon/brown action that had been taking place down the lake so I made a good run after the trip with fly-rods in tow. I found a large area of 47 to 52 degree surface water but the conditions weren’t very good with the calm, swirling winds. I had a few follows from dinks on my flies but avoided them. No solid fish. I did manage one laker on a jig near Kidders in around 23′ FOW. Gorgeous fish. Silver fish are moving up the lake (finally.) Reports from trollers I’ve talked to around Long Point have been slow if not non-existent for salmon/browns/bows. We usually run into a few by now jigging. They don’t appear to be around despite the presence of tons of baitfish. Expect to see non-lakers this week from Dean’s over to Long Point.
I am pretty much done with guiding fly-fishing and spin casting for salmon/browns on Cayuga for the season. My guiding focus will turn to lakers mostly on Cayuga, northern pike during June on Seneca/Owasco and I’ll be getting back into some other species as well with my own fishing.
Seneca Derby: A handful of friends of mine fished the derby this weekend and I kept close tabs on the live leaderboard. In a nutshell, the laker action was slow on Saturday and Sunday and picked up on Monday. Laker action via jigging was slow on Cayuga on Saturday and Sunday too, so it was likely a weather issue. Lake trout fishing is improving on Seneca Lake. Lake trout do a better job withstanding lamprey attacks than the “silver fish” aka browns, rainbows and salmon.
One look at the leaderboard and it’s clear to see that the lampreys had the biggest effect on those silver fish. Until around 3 pm Sunday, there wasn’t a brown, rainbow or salmon over 5lbs on the board! Eventually a few better browns and a decent salmon were caught, but not seeing older silver fish is clearly a lamprey issue. If you have bad lamprey infestation, you are hard pressed to see 3 year old browns or salmon in the lake. It’s happened before on Cayuga (early 1980s) and it’s happening now on Seneca. The good news is that these lampreys will run their course and hopefully be done with soon. Treatments are scheduled to take place in June. With luck, we’ll start seeing the results next year and onwards. We can only hope.