Cayuga Lake out of Long Point 7/13 AM and Owasco Lake 7/14 AM
Did trips over the past two days with Joe and his son William. I met Joe 4 or 5 years ago at a concert and his son expressed an interest in fishing and we’ve fished together nearly every year since. Their first introduction to fishing was jigging lakers and dropshotting Skaneateles Lake. His son William is 11 years old now. We always have a lot of fun on the boat and it was time to get the guys casting and working some different lures.
7/13 AM: We met at Cayuga Lake around 7:15 am after some delays due to a road closure/accident. Fishing was very good to excellent with the guys landing 16 solid lake trout! It was the best fishing we’d had together and William is at a point now where he can do everything well himself, including fighting some heavy fish.
7/14 AM: The guys had fished Skaneateles Lake with me a few times and had some decent smallmouth bass and rock bass/perch action. I thought it’d be cool to try something different today, involving working different lures. So we met at Owasco Lake’s south shore Marina at 7:30 am. I really like launching here and as I’ve said before I think Owasco is a special lake. There are no Finger Lakes where you can fish smallmouths, largemouths, pike, perch and then catch a big lake trout, rainbow or brown, all within a few miles. Once Cayuga’s smallmouths bounce back a bit, you might be able to say Cayuga, but I still find most of the better salmonid fishing quite a long ways from the north end – like 15 to 20 miles! Anyways, Owasco Lake still has a few big walleyes cruising around and it has an excellent perch population. I’ve caught 15″ perch here, though the average perch runs 7″ to 8″ or so.
Our boat was the only one we saw fishing on the day. I had the guys give the pike a try for around an hour without any luck, apart from a couple solid perch. Conditions were great for smallmouth bass with the impending front moving through. William had some great opportunities for a few solid fish. He landed a hard fighting chunky bass around 15″, but the one he lost had to be pushing 20″ – it was a beauty. He also missed another solid hit that was around 17″ or 18″. I checked things quickly for lakers on the north end but we didn’t do much. Some bad weather started moving in. I hope to be back here soon.