DeRuyter Reservoir 9/29, Owasco Lake 9/30
9/29 DeRuyter Reservoir: Had the day off so I joined my buddy Mike at DeRuyter. This is another one of many area lakes I either haven’t fished, or don’t get a chance to fish much. There’s a list of ’em including Waneta, Lamoka, Cazenovia, Jamesville, Cayuta, Tully, Whitney Point, Lake Como etc…My buddy Mike lived near the area for a while and used to fish it 4 or 5 times a year. He lives further away now and hadn’t fished there this year and asked me if I wanted to join him. I’d been curious about this lake for awhile.
The lake is about the size of Waneta Lake and very clear. It’s maybe 3 miles long and tops out around 50′ (I believe)with plenty of milfoil, some coontail and plenty of pondweeds. The launch is very good and there are no horsepower restrictions that I know of on the lake. There’s a $5 fee to launch at a General Store/Camp and it’s a very well kept, nice place. We started off around 8:30 am casting blade baits for walleyes. Most walleyes are small here – around 15″ to 17″, with big ones rare. Mike picked up one around 15″. I caught a pickerel. There are loads of pickerel in this lake – most around 17″ to 18″ long. In around 18′ FOW I made 5 casts with tube jigs and hooked 2 pickerel. There are a LOT of them here!
Bass fishing was what we came here to do. The fishing for 12″ to 14″ largemouth bass was excellent, though we did have to finesse them with dropshot rigs. I tried a bunch of other stuff, but Mike probably caught 2 to 3 on the dropshot for every one I caught on something else, so the dropshot it was. We probably wound up landing 30 to 35 bass with Mike getting the lion’s share, though we didn’t keep track. Nothing was over 15″ and most were around 12″ to 13″ We went back to walleye fishing before the end of the day and Mike picked up one keeper and I landed a bass.
The fishing here is very good in terms of the general fish population. It’s a great place to catch bass and pickerel all day long, but the size is lacking. We kept a handful of bass, a few pickerel and a walleye. The bass I cleaned had 3/4″ long sunfish in them and the deep bass had 1″ to 1 1/2″ perch fry in it. That is small forage! My gut feeling with this lake presently is that it is a bit too gamefish heavy. It could use some harvesting of bass and pickerel. Fun day and gorgeous scenery here. Water temp was around 60 degrees. I would tend to choose the north end of Cayuga over DeRuyter for action from bigger fish, but DeRuyter is a great place to relax and work on some different techniques or just catch a bunch of fish.
9/30 Owasco Lake out of Emerson Park: Guided Oleg and Yuri here for 1/2 day AM trip. Not much new to report. The lake trout fishing remains very good to downright excellent here. The fish are healthy, running 22″ to 25″ long. The amount of bait on the north end of the lake is ridiculous – TONS of 1″ young of the year alewives. They are getting hammered by the lakers – many lakers were spitting up 2 or 3 of these peanuts. Around 85′ to 105′ was best and we had action on white, white and chartreuse, smelt and chartreuse plastics. The guys had never done the technique before and managed to land 9 solid lakers.
The lake level is LOW – about a foot lower than it was 2 weeks ago, but launching out of Emerson Park is still doable and not hard.