Reports

Guided an afternoon 1/2-day trip on Cayuga Lake yesterday and then a full-day trip today.  Fishing has generally been good on Cayuga Lake but it hasn’t quite been up to August standards of years’ past from what I’m seeing.  The two main reasons August fishing has been tougher thus far, apart from the obvious algae bloom that started the month off, have been the large amount of warm water in the lake combined with a lot of unsteady weather.  Wind associated with cold fronts has been moving through – we’re seeing wind that we typically don’t see until September.   This week we’re forecast to see some lows in the upper-40s!  So we are getting a lot of unstable weather.  This can result in short bite-windows and tougher fishing.  Day after day of warm, steady weather and relatively light winds tends to be what we typically see in August.  This year, we’re getting a little of it, but not much.

8/16 PM:  It’s always a lot of fun guiding Mike, aka “Mac,” who has a place on Cayuga Lake not far from the Boy Scout Camp.  Today he was fishing with his friend, also named Mike.  We had solid fishing not straying too far away from Mac’s place.  Mac had the hot hand, no matter what his boat position or what color lure he used.  We had a decent day with a handful of lakers landed along with one rainbow.  I started our trip just after 1:15 pm, and it was good to see some solid afternoon fishing, although the bite didn’t improve much as the trip went on.

8/17:  Today I guided Chris and his longtime friend Glenn for a full-day tutorial-type trip starting just after 7:30 am.  I spent a good amount of time showing the guys the technique and how to locate lake trout.  The guys starting fishing Cayuga Lake after arriving on Lake Ontario one day to rough seas.  It’s great to have a backup plan and Cayuga Lake is a terrific one.  I showed them my temperature probe and how I use it along with the electronics and how I “tweak” them.  As I dropped the probe down, we watched it sink down on my Lowrance.  Three lake trout came up to “investigate” it!  Lakers are territorial fish, that’s for sure!  As I reeled the probe back in, a lake trout hit it!  I’ve had rainbows follow in my probe, but I’ve never had a fish take a whack at it.  Now when people ask me what my black plastic shad bodies represent, I’ll just tell them that they are imitating a temperature probe!

Needless to say, it didn’t take long before the guys got some hits and we put a few fish in the boat, but as so often happens, the skies clouded up and the winds came up pretty good out of the south.  Our short, hot bite-window slowed way down.  We worked some other areas with a few fish, but nothing hot and heavy.  My buddy Todd was fishing down lake and had a great AM on lakers and a brown.  I kept working uplake until the winds got pretty nasty, so I talked to Todd and his bite was still going good.  We made a long run and ran into more wind and rain and a slow steady bite.  We missed the hot bite window where Todd was.  As the day went on, we made a run and I just dealt with the wind and the guys wound up putting 9 nice lakers on the boat for the day.  Our best fish was Chris’s 29″er, but most ran somewhat smaller – around 22″ to 24″.  Nearly every fish was clean in terms of lamprey scars except one 27″er.  Overall it was a productive day, but again, not as good as what I typically expect on Cayuga Lake in August.  Stay tuned – I’m out a lot this week!

I’ve got to hand it to my Minn-Kota Terrova for keeping the boat positioned and to Wal-Mart for good, yet reasonably priced batteries!  I have relatively new batteries in there and it kept us in place all day long – often running on 3/4 to full power!  I used to buy my batteries from Bass Pro Shops, but their prices keep going up and up.  I have gone to Wal-Mart for batteries recently for both my boat and truck and the savings there are spectacular.  I’m sure the batteries are all made in China and probably by the same factories, but you’d be hard pressed to beat Wal-Mart for prices on them.  They still kept us in place late in our trip and were basically nearly completely run down!