Cayuga Lake out of Taughannock 2/23
Guided Robert for a full day starting around 9 am. He does a lot of fishing for lakers and browns on the NYC reservoir system and was looking to see how we jig lakers here as well as check out the Finger Lakes fishing. The water level on Cayuga Lake is currently at the lowest level I’ve seen all year. Water temps are at 37/38. A 1/2 dozen or more boat went out today from Taughannock.
It was around 27 degrees when we launched today and we had south winds around 8 mph. Our first area didn’t produce any definite hits, but the second one yielded a solid 26″ brown that was likely at least 8lbs and maybe more. After that Robert caught a nice laker and we were in business. The next two hours provided superb lake trout action with 9 or 10 fish landed and many more hits coming. Another brown was landed and he also caught lakers in another area. All in all an excellent day of winter fishing with 12 to 13 lakers and 2 nice browns landed. I kept two of the lakers for my smoker. Robert’s arm was worn out so I got a chance to fish for 10 minutes and managed to land a nice brown around 22″. The big brown came on a stickbait but all the other fish came on tube jigs. We also tried some deep water and found a few lakers out there. Robert dropped one on a shaker.
In the 20+ years I’ve been fishing the Finger Lakes for salmon, March has been the best landlocked salmon month for us on Cayuga (and Seneca when it is fishing well.) Hopefully the weather will cooperate. I have plenty of availability in March and April. I expect good to excellent nearshore laker fishing (with bonus browns) to hold up into early May depending on how hot April is. I do plan on checking Seneca Lake soon, perhaps from shore.