Cayuga out of Taughannock 8/8 + Owasco Lake 8/9
Cayuga Lake out of Taughannock 8/8 AM: Guided Craig and Jim for the full day. Craig booked a trip back in April for some deep jigging. Due to the weather, we rescheduled probably 4 times! I don’t do trips unless I think the weather will make for decent fishing conditions. So we finally got a good day, though we started with fairly good south winds. The bite wasn’t easy, but we found an area with good numbers of fish and worked them hard. The guys nailed some very nice lakers -up to around 26″ to 27″. Jim’s enthusiasm was great. The technique isn’t easy in the wind with a moving boat, but the guys did a good job and it paid off. I think we wound up with around 6 or 7 fish total. Both shores produced fish.
Taughannock PM: Picked up Jim and his brother Joe at Myers Park. Jim booked his first trip with me on my first-year guiding. We headed north and set up around 3:30. Fish were moving for the jigs, but not very well. The going was tough for the first three hours. But during our last hour fish started cooperating and Joe nailed a couple and Jim got one. The guys missed quite a few as well.
Owasco Lake 8/9: Started at 6 am picking up Fred from his rental house. Fred’s been booking trips for a few years with me and had a chance to fish some of the hot Owasco Laker action. After getting some on and off again reports regarding Owasco Lakers, we decided not to spend too much time on them. Given how much better Seneca and Cayuga are now for lakers, I don’t see much of a point in grinding it out on Owasco.
Baitfish numbers looked pretty good on the N. end of Owasco. Especially on the west side near Buck’s Point. We marked fish shallow too – no doubt some browns/rainbows, bass and walleyes. Lakers are around too, but they weren’t particularly active when we started.
I’ve been wanting to give the smallies a good shot here starting early in the AM so that’s what we did. I’ve been doing most of my bass guiding on Skaneateles Lake over the past couple years. Huge baitfish numbers on the N. end of Owasco – plus lots of bass mixed in with them has me fairly convinced that a lot of the Owasco fish are suspended and on bait. They are – but they’re fishable. Fellow guide and friend Jon Evans (www.fishingthefingerlakes.com) was raving so much about Owasco’s bass to me that I was chomping at the bit to really give them a good try!
I had Fred working some Superflukes and we found a semi-motherlode of bass. Fred started with a nice 18 1/2″ fish. Then a few 17″ers came to the boat with some smaller ones (15″.) At one point a school of around 20 fish followed in his fluke! As we wound things down, we tried lakers again, and they’d activated a bit. Fred lost 2. After I dropped Fred off I did something I haven’t done in a while – I fished after a trip. I spent the next 5 hours working various areas, testing out rods and marking areas in my GPS. Landed a couple more bass. Found some good midlake lakers areas.
I plan on doing more smallmouth guiding and fishing here. There are some real quality bass here. I’ll be combining it with some laker jigging, so we may have the best of both worlds soon!