Cayuga Lake out of Myers 5/2 PM
Got out with Mike at around 1:15 pm today. He was a little under the weather so we decided to stay local. We fly-fished and did a little bit of gear fishing for salmon and browns. There’s a lot of warm water on the south end of the lake and some warm water around the larger creek mouths. The amount of alewives that moved in to the Inlet this past week was reportedly fairly staggering. We have no shortage of bait on Cayuga Lake!
Fishing was slow for us today. We worked a lot of areas as thoroughly as we could by casting and drifting. Some of our slow day was due to conditions changing (wind to no wind.) But overall I’d say the fishing is fair and occasionally good when you find the fish, but they don’t seem to be particularly abundant. We never had a hit until the end of the day when Mike nailed a solid 4lb 10oz 21″ salmon on one of his tube flies (the “Hooligan.”) It fought great, but we got lucky! We saw a shorefisher get a silver fish as well.
I kept Mike’s fish for dinner and surprise, it had a goby in its stomach along with the remains of a couple alewives. It’s great to see the salmon eating gobies. Gobies do not have the concentration of thiaminase that alewives and smelt have, so it’s conceivable that a salmon that ate a lot of gobies would produce viable eggs and fry. We can only hope.
There was a large group – at least 140 cormorants stationed along Cayuga Inlet near Treman Marina. That’s not good. They are likely eating alewives. Let’s hope they don’t find the newly stocked browns and salmon.