Cayuga Lake out of Myers 8/14
Picked up Will at Taughannock and up the lake we went. We worked a few different areas and then the lakers finally started hitting good. Will also caught a nice bonus rainbow trout that was around 22″ or 23″. Top fish of the day was a trophy brown that Will wanted to take home with him (usually we release most browns we catch.) After a digging lake trout-like battle I slipped the net under a 31″ behemoth. The fish weighed around 15lbs 12 ounces or so on my accurate Berkley TEC scale. It was a big male. Great lamprey control combined with ample bait – both predominantly gobies in the colder months and alewives in the warmer months have come together to make Cayuga arguably the best inland brown trout fishery in the state and perhaps in the Northeast. That’s strictly my opinion, but I can’t think of any better (apart from the Great Lakes – but that’s not “inland.”) Add in the tremendous lake trout fishery and you have a powerhouse of a lake! I have zero regrets moving down here after living around 10 miles from Lake Ontario for most of my early life.
Word from the Lake Ontario Fisheries Unit is that alewife biomass in Lake Ontario is down 29% this year. DEC has managed the fishery wisely. Not one Charter Captain is complaining this year about the fishing after a few solid stocking cuts. Not one. Do you think any of these guys will utter the phrase “I WAS WRONG.” Don’t hold your breath. It’s like the old Happy Days Episode where Fonzi tried but couldn’t utter the words “I AM SORRY” to Ritchie after clocking him with a door. I would guess DEC will cut stocking again to try to stall the diminishing bait numbers. Keuka Lake hung on quite a while with very low alewife numbers. We’ll see if the same happens on the big Lake. But I think another cut would be a good idea if anglers want to prolong this great fishery. Laker stocking was cut on Cayuga a few years back. We are seeing more wild fish and the cut was unnoticeable. So far standard gang gillnetting appears to show the population is still as abundant as it was 4 years ago. More to come on that once I get the word.