Reports

Boat traffic and angler effort has been way down on Cayuga Lake over the past week with cooler air and water temperatures and some windy conditions at times.  A lot of sportsmen also start focusing on hunting as well as Lake Ontario tributary fishing this time of year.  The lake trout bite remains good, with episodes of very good action and lulls that can go a while.

Lake trout propagation nets will go in at Taughannock Park on Monday October 4th.   Fish are getting close to spawning (a few probably already are) and the bite windows narrow.

9/24 AM:  Guided Glady, Dan and Keith for a 1/2 day trip starting just after 8 am.  Our first area didn’t produce anything so we made a fairly long run.  The run paid off with some good action on nice sized trout.  Many of the lakers we are catching now are in the 7 to 8lb range.   Everyone caught at least a couple fish with Keith nabbing three.  It was a fun trip with beautiful weather, apart from some good wind when we started.

9/25 AM:  Today I had Jamie out along with his friend John – an easy name for me to remember!  John hasn’t fished a whole lot but that never poses any issues here.  He did a good job landing a couple solid fish.  Jamie had the hot hand and landed some nice fish including a beauty that was a hair under 34″!   It was a very solid fish.   Our fish have been coming fairly deep – from around 70′ in places out to 140′.

A lot of people have trouble identifying wild fish.  Wild numbers of lake trout on Cayuga Lake are approximately 8% of the population (give or take a percentage point or two.)  People that think wild fish numbers are higher  are most likely not inspecting their fish carefully.   The numbers I’m seeing out there correspond with what DEC sees at the lake trout spawning “run” and during the 3 year cold water gill netting assessments.  Clipped fins often regenerate.  So you have to take a good close look at the parallel fins (ventrals and pectorals) and make sure one isn’t smaller than the other.  The clip most people miss is the adipose – and it is used a lot!   That little fleshy nub between the dorsal fin and the tail fin.

Brown trout are rarely clipped in Cayuga Lake – I haven’t seen or heard of any browns being fin-clipped in years.  Stocked rainbows are always clipped as far as I know.  Salmon are not fin clipped but they can 1.) rub fins off in hatchery tanks and 2.) a lot of the surplus salmon that were stocked a few years ago (after the water pump malfunction at the Adirondack hatchery) were clipped fish from other states.   So we will see some salmon with missing fins (usually ventrals) over the next year or two.

9/26:  Today was a full day trip with Ed and his son Nolan.  We had great weather today – a picture perfect fall day.  Nolan is a very talented young lure-maker.  He brought some of his baits along and they were very impressive action wise and appearance-wise.

All in all the fishing was pretty solid today.  Nolan did a bit of experimenting with different lures.  His dad Ed stuck with the tried and true.  The standard stuff worked best today, especially since we were fishing some fairly deep water.  High point of the day was a thick bodied 34″ monster lake trout that Ed landed on a 3.75″ Lunker City Shaker in Arkansas Shiner color.   It was a beauty and we released it along with all but three smaller fish (still nice ones around 23″ to 25″) taken today.  Ed nabbed around 5 wild lakers today if I remember correctly!   Most of the wild fish are running 27″ to 30″.  We certainly had a pretty good class of them back around 10 or 12 years ago.  Now with all the round goby around, we may see wild production wind up being a lot more variable.  Gobies are not a good thing despite what many publications espouse.  It will be decades before we see the full ramifications of the goby-invasion.   

Availability going forward:  

October:  3rd, 10th, 11th, 23rd, 30th, 31st.

November and onwards (I guide all year long weather permitting) – The only dates not available in November are the 3rd and 5th.