Reports

Keuka Lake:  Met Gordon out here at around 10 am for what was a slightly truncated full-day trip.  He’s been coming out with me for a long time and is currently the President of the Trout Unlimited Canandaigua chapter.  The goal today was to get a lake trout on the fly.  Conditions varied throughout the day, but overall I felt they were pretty good.  That being said, the numbers of fish shallow that we could find didn’t seem very high.  He had a handful of hits on streamers, lost one laker and landed a 23″ beauty.  We tried some gear and he picked up another fish or two and lost a good one.  Vertical jigging also was productive with some decent fish hitting jigs fairly shallow, from around 50′ to 90′ FOW.  We didn’t check on any deep jigging.  We only saw one other boater out on the water fishing during the day.  A couple guys launched as we got in.  I filleted up a limit of lakers and most had empty stomachs.

This lake really could use some lake trout harvesting.  I could even see a 10-fish limit being a good idea here, although given how few people are fishing the lake now, it probably wouldn’t have much of an effect.  On the flip-side, if we did have a couple of harsh winters where the lake froze over, it could result in an over harvest.  It’s hard to say, but right now around 10 to 20% of these fish seem fairly emaciated.  The fish under 20″ long look pretty good for the most part, but the ones around 24″ to 25″ are shaped more like pike/pickerel than lake trout.

I am very happy with some of the newer integrated fly-lines with shooting heads built in.  I know they’ve been around for a while, but they are really “da bomb” for deeper lake fly-fishing applications.  We will be doing more fly-fishing on Cayuga Lake targeting lake trout this spring.

4/16 Cayuga Lake midday:  Guided Ed and his friend Joel for a 1/2 day starting just after 9 am.  The weather was absolutely gorgeous today!  Perfect!  Fishing started out with a bang, with the guys landing 4 nice lake trout in short order.  Today was somewhat of a “catch ’em and eat ’em” mission for the guys, so I had a chance to check some stomach contents at the end of the trip.  We had a bit of a lull for maybe 2 hours.  Once the wind came up a bit and some cloud cover rolled in, the fish began to hit well again.  The guys had a very good day hitting the double-digits and also losing a few good hook-ups.  I filleted 7 fish and they were all stuffed with freshly eaten alewives.  One might have had a well-digested goby in it.

Water temps crept up on the surface to 48 today, but that was just the sun and thin surface layer.  Overall mid-lake temps are still around 43 degrees.  Most of our fish came from 120′ to about 140′ today.  We had a few hits deeper and some shallower too.  It’s hard to go wrong anywhere on Cayuga Lake right now.

Bathrooms are still closed at Long Point.  Fishing pressure was lower than I would’ve expected today, given the great weather.

Bookings are starting to pick up.  It’s been a long, slow start to the spring in terms of nice weather.  Book now for best options!