Irondequoit Bay and Lake Ontario 5/27
After much debate (as always) my fishing buddy Jarrod and I decided on Irondequoit Bay for today. Honeoye, Conesus, Otisco, Owasco and Sodus were considered. What a tough decision, but off we went. Drum were the target today. We started at the mouth of the bay – there were black areas full of baitfish around, but no fish for us. The mouth of Russel Station had very little flow, but there was enough for me to nail a 20″+ brown trout (probably 3lbs) on a Krocodile spoon in about 3′ of water. That fish could have easily been taken from shore. We tried the mouth of the Genny without luck.
We headed back into the bay and I landed a nice Northern Pike around 31″. It was very clean! Some big rock bass were also hitting, and we saw plenty of gar. I had another follow from a smaller pike. We saw gar everywhere and had plenty of slashes and follows from them. I didn’t bring any rope lures and the gar weren’t super active at the time. Fishing was pretty slow in general. A trip across the bay to another area (around some points) produced a solid smallmouth for Jarrod. Then he set the hook into a chunky 21″ walleye (both fish on deep diving crankbaits.) We ran across a congregation of nice largemouths running around 1 to 2lbs. We caught around 5 of those, then we finally hit paydirt (or at least Jarrod did) with a couple beautiful drum! This fish were very clean and looked just like their saltwater cousins – redfish.
Water temps ranged from around 62 to 67 in the bay on the day. 70 is usually the key wake-up for gar fishing. The lake ranged from 51 to over 60 around the Genny mouth. Fishing today was a nice change of pace from the usual Finger Lakes stuff. We may hit Sodus or Oswego soon, but there are so many other opportunities around – those areas may be low on the priority list!