Cayuga Lake out of Long Point 6/1 AM

Reports

Guided Todd, Ken and Tim for a 1/2 day starting at 6:30 am. It was time to bring out the new(er) boat for the season. Usually I try to run it on my own first and make sure there aren’t any “bugs” to be taken care of but I felt pretty confident. Silver Lake Marine had charged my batteries and tested my outboard.

First thing I noticed when we went to fish was that my beloved Minn-Kota Terrova motor wouldn’t deploy! I then remembered it getting tougher to deploy towards the end of last season. Somehow I’d conveniently forgotten about it when I brought out the old boat. So no trolling motor for the day.

Fishing was excellent – so we dodged the proverbial bullet. Todd has been out with me a bunch of times and had his best day laker jigging on the lake. The guys landed 18 solid lakers – a lot of 27″ to 28″ers with fish to 29″. Typical June pre-thermocline pattern with periodic shallow bites and then deeper bites and vice-versa.

The wind came up around 10 am and I had to deploy the drift bag. I love my big drift bag; it has a short line and opens up quickly and easily. Unfortunately I was tired and/or lazy and thought I could control the drift a little bit easier by periodically firing up the big motor without pulling out the bag in order to make minor adjustments. It worked great until I lost track of the bag and it wrapped around my prop (while running) and killed the motor. So now I have a driftbag securely wrapped around my prop. The bag is super tight to my boat cleat and I have no trolling motor! Yowsa. Not the situation I wanted to be in. Fortunately I was able to get the clip free of the cleat (no need to cut the bag off,) unravel the bag and my motor was no worse for the wear. We called it a day after that. Then it was a long drive out to Boats Unlimited in Utica to drop off the Terrova and order a spare. I’ll be running my older boat for the next week or two.