Reports

I spent Friday afternoon and all day Saturday up in Rochester working the boat show for Silver Lake Marine as a Crestliner Pro-Staffer.  Friday was slow up there but foot traffic really picked up on Saturday.   It’s always nice to get back to my hometown but I’m glad I live down here near Ithaca now.

Cayuga Lake out of Taughannock State Park 2/3 AM:  Guided Ron for a half day on Monday.  My fly-fishing classes just started at Cornell and Ron had an appointment at 1 pm so we did a half instead of our usual full day.  The shallow bite started out great.  I had to re-rig a swimbait rod and handed Ron a tube rod.  Before I could get the rod re-rigged he had landed two lake trout!  He caught one or two more before our conditions changed and the shallow bite waned for us, so I took a run and had him working some deep water.  He had a hit on his first or second drop of the jig but things slowed down for about a half hour.  Once the front blew through the bite picked up and Ron landed some nice fish including a 30″er.  Solid half day with around 6 fish landed.  We left them biting as we headed back to Taughannock.

Seneca Lake out of Severne 2/4:  I decided to do some checking in on a few areas I hadn’t fished in quite some time so I headed up to Severne Point.  Amazingly, I was the only person at the launch when I arrived at 11:45 am.  Nobody perch fishing Seneca Lake on a relatively nice day in February is a rarity.  Clearly the perch fishing is slow, otherwise there would be upwards of 4 to 6 rigs in the parking lot.

As an aside, perch populations don’t fare well when alewife populations are high.  Seneca Lake’s alewives hit very low levels in the late 1990s and early 2000s.  Perch fishing was great in the early 2000s over there and onwards.  Alewives eat perch fry.  Conesus Lake was one of the best perch fisheries in the state until alewives wound up in there.  Lake Ontario perch fishing is getting better and better as the alewife numbers drop.  I certainly feel that the heavy fishing pressure on Seneca Lake hurt the perch fishery over the years, but perch are very prolific and the main reason they are down is likely the huge alewife population over there now.

I didn’t have any activity on Seneca.  I tried some pike areas and some places I was hoping would harbor a salmon or two but nada.