Cayuga/Taughannock 5/29 + Seneca Lake out of Sampson 5/30
Memorial Day was a guide trip with Willy and his dad Jack. These guys both went to Cornell and really wanted to fish Cayuga Lake. After the day I had with Willy a week or two ago – I couldn’t blame them. The day started out with around a good hour or two of thunderstorms. We were lucky enough to run into some of my Master Swim friends who live on the lake and were kind enough to invite us in for coffee while the storm passed.
As soon as things cleared we ran to Millican. No one was there and things looked promising. Both guys had some hits and Jack missed a nice 20″+ salmon that took a lightning fast swirl at his streamer. One big unidentified fish also followed in one of Jack’s white clousers. A few perch were hitting the flies and that was pretty much it. We worked a lot of deep water around the discharge without much action. We went to lake trout jigging and it was pretty slow. A few follows and hits. Willy and his dad both eventually caught fish jigging, but we had to work for them. We tried the flow again in the evening and nothing was doing.
Bottom line: Millican is probably an early morning bite at best now. Water temps are quickly shooting up out of trout/salmon preferences.
I checked out Seneca with Mike, a bass pro employee friend of mine. We started jigging at around 8 am. Plenty of bait and fish around, but few chasers or hits. We took a break and looked around to see what was going on shallow – not much! The heat was brutal – 90 degrees and no breeze. A sweatfest!
Around 11 am we went laker jigging again and someone had flipped a switch. The fish became a bit more aggressive and we landed 4 in short order. We each missed hits and lost fish in 35′ to 50′ H2O. After keeping what I wanted we checked on some pike areas without any luck. Again – it was midday, glassy and hot! I didn’t expect much and wasn’t surprised. Mike had enough heat by 3pm and we called it a day. There’s bait everywhere and fishing will be excellent over the next few weeks.