Reports

Got out guiding for the first time since 9/4.  I wish I could say that my long break was due to a fishing trip or a nice end-of-summer break, but I acquired a pretty stubborn case of the flu early during the AM of the 5th.  It wasn’t particularly severe, but certainly set me back a bit.  I am just starting to get back to normal.

My first trip that I postponed was with Bob and his wife Pam, which was originally scheduled for Wednesday of last week. The weather was getting super-hot then.  Today we had perfect weather with highs in the 60s and a nice north wind that actually got fairly strong by around 3 pm.  We started today at 12:30 pm.  Bob and I, and more particularly Bob’s son Chris and I, go back to when I taught fly-fishing at Cornell.  Chris is now a big player in the fly-line manufacturing industry.

We fished two main areas today, neither of which were very far from Taughannock Park.  It is typical mid-September fishing with loads and loads (thousands!) of laker within close range of the park.  The trouble is that the bite windows this time of year are TIGHT!  Bob and Pam each landed a couple of nice fish today, but given how many were around us, it was clearly tough fishing.   Fish ranged from 70′ to 120′ FOW.  With lighter winds, I’d have had more options to get Bob and Pam into some different areas away from the spawn, but today we had to grind out what the lake – and more importantly water conditions were allowing us to fish.  Smelt colored Swim-Fish and Chartreuse Silk Shakers gave us the most hits today.  A fair number of hits were missed/fish dropped as well.  It could’ve easily have been a 6 or 8 fish day with a few lucky breaks thrown in.

We had a lot of fun today.  I’m back out at a fairly-good-clip starting on Sunday.