Reports

Fished Keuka Lake on my own on Thursday afternoon and then guided a full-day trip out of Watkins Glen on Seneca Lake yesterday. 

Keuka Lake remains a terrific option for fly-fishing lake trout and also catching them shallow on gear.  The population is 100% wild and they are abundant.  DEC encourages people to keep their limit here.  They feed on perch fry, freshwater shrimp and occasionally on sculpins.  The larger trout will sometimes gobble pickerel, bluegills and other warm water species, especially in the cold water months when they can roam the entirety of the lake.

The water level at the state park is very good for launching a boat.  The water is very cold – I had 38/39 degrees.  Fishing was good – I fly-fished for two-hours to start and landed one laker and had a few other follows.  The conditions weren’t super conducive for a lot of lake trout to move shallow, so I probed some slightly deeper water than I’d been fly-fishing with a bladebait and had excellent action – I filled my limit in 15 minutes!  Later on I went back to fly-fishing and had better action, landing another nice fish and missing/losing a few more.

I expect this bite to hold up through April.  We shall see!

Seneca Lake out of Watkins Glen:  We did a full-day trip here getting underway just before 10 am.  The forecasts were calling for calm conditions switching to a light south wind in the afternoon.  A lot of the time with this forecast, we see a morning “thermal,” then a calm period followed by the predicted winds.  Unfortunately, today we had dead calm conditions for most of the day until the last two hours of the trip.  Landlocks feeding on gobies can be caught a bit easier during calm conditions than fish that are on alewives, but it’s still very much a sub-optimal condition.  Murky water helps, but today we had clear water everywhere.  I downsized some of my gear presentations in order to be more effective in the trickier conditions.  Usually I like to cherry-pick the days we salmon fish so we can fly-fish or aggressively cast for the salmon, but you have to be ready for whatever Mother Nature gives you.  Usually I use hair-jigs or Keitech type-stuff but guide friend Kurt has some things he likes to do that are a bit more straight forward, so that’s what I went with.

Chris was fishing gear and his nephew Ray was fly-fishing.  Ray mostly does streams/rivers so we spent some time working on lake-style (distance/tight loop) casting.  He was a quick study, but unfortunately the conditions made for very tough fly fishing.  He had some salmon follows on the flies, but no good grabs.  Chris nabbed a couple of fish early on and lost some as well.  We worked some uplake areas and he lost a good fish.  Finally the wind picked up.  Ray eventually went with a spinning outfit and stickbait and nailed a nice 18″er on his 4th cast.  Then we had a good flurry with Chris really dialed in.  We kept a couple of 18″ers and called it a day.   In summary, we had tough fishing for most of the day but did well all things considered.  Once the wind came up, the bite picked up and it’s always great to end a trip on a positive note!

The water level is excellent on Seneca Lake.  Water temperature was at 41 degrees.  It’s still mighty cold on the lakes!