Reports

Strong north winds over the weekend moved a lot of water plateaus around making for some challenging fishing.

6/1 Cayuga Lake out of Long Point:  Guided Mike, Steve and Mike’s 9 year old son Michael for a 1/2 day starting around 8:30 am.  Cold water moved in and we had water temperatures in the upper 40s on the surface and water around 42 down 30′.  Needless to say, fish scattered greatly.  Lakers were likely in water from 10′ on out to over 200′.  We nabbed a couple lake trout in fairly short order in our first area and then tried a few other places.  We made a good run and found decent numbers of fish and a large amount of bait out around 50′ to 70′ or so. We ended up with a nice catch of lake trout including one wild fish around 27″.  I’m not seeing any young wild fish as of late.  We’ve had a few good classes of wild-produced lake trout over the past 20+ years but for whatever the reason we haven’t seen many since.

6/2 Seneca Lake out of Sampson:  Got out here on my own for just over 4 hours starting at 3 pm.  The privatization of Sampson State Park continues.  There is now a “ship store” adjacent to the marina that sells snacks, ice and other items.  We now have a $7 launch fee and a 2 day $10 launch fee.  That is reasonable, especially given all the improvements to the park and especially the launch, which is much better now.

I wanted to do some pike fishing partially in order to scout on a pike trip I have scheduled shortly.  I did not have much action.  I had one pickerel follow my jerkbait in in relatively short order but I had trouble locating productive areas despite good water temperatures, fairly good conditions and some good areas.  Just like with Cayuga Lake, we had cold water move in throughout the northern portions of this lake.  That may cause the pike to get a bit dormant or drop a bit deeper.  I don’t know.  There are plenty of pike in this lake (at least there still should be.)

I checked out a couple lake trout areas when my wind died and the sun peaked out.  I had a couple faint marks but nothing special.  I did mark a lot of bait nearly everywhere I checked out.

Water temps on the surface ran from mid-40s to mid-50s.  Some areas have some weedgrowth.  There were areas with a lot of filamentous algae (cladophora) floating around which made for tough presentations.  It probably got churned up off of the bottom with the high winds and water temperature change.  I think we’ll see some good pike fishing here but it may take a few days for things to settle.  We’ll see.