Reports

Guided Dave and Rich for 1/2 day of pike fishing. These guys got me going on the swimbaits back around 2006 or so and they always give a good effort on the water. We were going to launch out of Treman, but there was some skim ice over there. Water temps ranged from 43 on the south end of the lake to 47 further north. The lake level is low.

Fishing was good today. We were all pleasantly surprised. Spoons and jerkbaits yielded a couple decent pickerel and 4 nice pike, a 27″, 36″, 32″ and 34″er if I’m not mistaken. I’d rank the pike action as “good” on Cayuga Lake. It’s typical Cayuga – not a lot of fish, but some nice ones. Fish look healthy for the most part.

The mystery of “The Net” was finally revealed to me today. I’ve had a lot of trouble netting fish lately – from the 46″ Tiger (which was understandable) to even some pike around 32″ and up. I couldn’t figure it out. They would jump out. I consider myself very perceptive in a lot of ways (I have to be as a guide) but virtually blind in other ways. Today it finally dawned on me what happened. With my old Cabelas Super Extra Magnum (or something like that) net, we were able to land a lot of big fish – including my 50″ pure strain musky last year, Jarrod’s 14lb Derby winning laker and more. No real problems. So why was it so hard to net the 46″ Tiger?

This summer my old rubber netting wore out. I thought I’d replaced it with the same deep rubber mesh, but my jaw dropped when I finally noticed that I had a very shallow net now. It wasn’t the right replacement stuff! I don’t know why it took me 2 months to figure that out. But it did. Go figure….