Cayuga/Taughannock 3/7 + Seneca/Severne 3/8

Reports

Cayuga 3/7:

After picking up my boat on Friday I was psyched to make sure everything was in order. I also was hoping to check on conditions for a possible guide trip. I arrived at Taughannock at 1:15 pm on Saturday to find 17 trailers in the parking lot. People obviously had some cabin fever and were jonesing to get out. Three boats came in as I prepared to launch. They reported slow salmon fishing. The wind was light and offshore, so I decided to check on lake trout. I did a bit of searching between Taughannock and Sheldrake and didn’t see much. It might be time for a new depthfinder – I don’t know, my inexpensive Eagle doesn’t have the power/sensitivity to mark much in deep (over 120′) water in the winter. I worked out to 170′ or so. Wind and rain came up and it got nasty. I motored south to try some fly-fishing for salmon. I had one follow and that was it. Water temps are around 35/36. I expect good to excellent salmon fishing once we get the right weather conditions – mark my words!

Seneca 3/8:

A lot of perch are reportedly being taken in some of the community holes in the northern parts of Seneca Lake. I’m told nearly 40 boats were congregated on a huge school of perch up there Saturday! I don’t enjoy that kind of “combat fishing.” My buddy Mike and I launched out of Severne at around 9 am today. We tried an area for perch pretty thoroughly w/o anything except a very beat-up looking scrawny pike. Our shiners were basically worthless – they would die after a couple minutes in the water, but we persevered. Many perch fishermen bring an assortment of baits (oak leaf bugs, fat heads, worms etc..) and plastics with them. We will start doing that in the future. After 2 hours without perch we checked on lakers at Severne. I missed one. We saw one caught on copper line. Perch anglers were congregated in singles and groups of 3 and 4 boats. I’m not sure how they were doing – my guess (judging from how much moving around they were doing) is that a few of the boats probably did well, but most struggled. Conditions were pretty awful for fishing, lots of fog (esp. N. of Long Point) and no wind. I was happy that my cellphone had an electronic compass on it, the fog was unreal at times.

We worked for perch and pike in an area I like N. of Long Point and we hit a few nice pike. We tried Sampson for lakers and didn’t mark anything. A lot of the poor laker bite of the last 2 days for me was probably due to the low-light conditions. Sun makes for the best winter jigging.

Last I heard, perch were in less than 20′ of water in many parts of Seneca Lake. We didn’t see much today – and we could see the bottom in quite a few areas. Water temps were around 35 to 37 today on Seneca. Water levels were decent and the launch at Sampson is open. I’m not sure about other launches, but I’d guess most are open by now. (They certainly will be after the rain tonight!)