Cayuga Lake out of Long Point 9/17
Guided John, James and Gabe for a 1/2 day AM trip. I much prefer mid-AM to mid PM laker action in the fall, but today I had an afternoon fishing class to teach at Cornell, so it had to be an AM trip. We started just after 7am north of Stoney Point, more or less by Wells College. I marked a few fish in the area. The bite was slow with James managing to land a couple lakers and Gabe landed a smallmouth bass (in around 60′ FOW.) John mentioned seeing an eel by the motor in the back of the boat. I snagged it. Sure enough, a 21″ lamprey had attached to my transom!!! I’d never seen this before, though I’d heard of eels attaching to downrigger weights. Very weird! And it might have been the largest Cayuga/Seneca lamprey I’d ever seen! (Lake Ontario has the longest I’ve seen, though I haven’t seen the Delaware River eels.)
The wind was steady out of the south and didn’t let up until around noon. We ran towards AES and John landed a decent laker. A few other hits were missed. Overall, I felt we could’ve done much better had we started later and fished later, but we had no choice.