Reports

Guided Paul and his nephew Jeff for a full-day tutorial trip on Keuka Lake, mainly targeting bass. 

I’ve had occasional questions regarding “tutorial trips.”   A tutorial trip is a trip where the focus is on learning.  We spend a good amount of time working different lures and different areas.  When I did a trip here earlier in the year with Chris, we talked about smallmouth bass location on Keuka Lake, behavior and tactics.  I covered winter patterns, spring (including pre-spawn, spawn, and post-spawn,) summer, as well as fall – both early and late fall.  I had him work soft jerkbaits, tube jigs, blade baits and swim baits.  On a regular guided trip, if fish had been actively hitting the soft-jerk baits (like a Super Fluke,) that’s all we’d do – we’d work those in a bunch of different areas and try to maximize our catch.  With the tutorial trip, we’d hopefully get a few fish on the soft jerkbait, then switch gears and spend a couple hours throwing swim jigs, then go to the blade bait.  That’s the idea!  It’s about getting acquainted and comfortable with different presentations and scenarios.

On a lake trout tutorial trip on Cayuga Lake, we might motor around and fish areas that I normally wouldn’t fish this time of year.  The goal would be to show some of the areas that are productive in the spring or summer and get acquainted with them.  It’s kind of like making an investment in your fishing.  A parallel example would be that if you were interested in learning the guitar, you might hire a teacher to teach you a couple of songs.  The tutorial lesson, would be focusing on ear-training and some musical theory so you could eventually teach yourself the songs.

I don’t delineate between regular and tutorial trips per se, but if someone wants to make their trip more of a tutorial trip, they let me know and we automatically spend more time doing different things and talking different approaches.

So how did things go today?  It was interesting to say the least.  I suggested to Jeff that we try lake-trout for an hour or so.  His family has a place on Keuka Lake and he wants to get his young kids into fishing, so I feel that learning laker fishing is a must, since they are the dominant species on Keuka Lake.  Puul has fished lake trout with me on Cayuga Lake a bunch of times.  Fishing was slow but in the last area we fished Paul landed a 21″ trout.  Unfortunately it was quite emaciated!  It looked an awful lot like the thin Skaneateles Lake fish we catch over there.  It isn’t too surprising, given the forage issues here.  I wish we’d caught more lakers so we could have seen if that fish was just an anomaly.  Time will tell!

Bass fishing was weird.  Usually this time of year is top-notch for soft jerkbaits over here.  The lack of wind definitely hurt us a bit.  We had no luck working around drop-offs, which are usually productive.  We had a few good fish show for us over weeds in 10′ to 20′ FOW.   We also had a lot of small bass today.  Drop-shotting deeper water produced some more fish, but they were all on the small side, including some downright dinks.  I wish we’d had more time today, but the time just flew and we were really only able to get time in to work on drop-shotting and the soft jerkbaits.  I would have liked to work some deep swimbaits, as well as fished some different areas.

Another anomaly (I am hoping) was the last fish that Jeff landed, a 16″ smallmouth on a drop-shot that was also emaciated!  Not a good sign, but hopefully another anomaly.  We’ll see! It was a beautiful day on the water with light boat traffic.  Water temp was 73 on top.  We had cold water down 55′ which was a lot different that what I’ve been seeing on Cayuga Lake.  There’s still quite a few particulates in the water too – the algae continues.

This Wednesday and Thursday remain open for trips.  Call or email to book – the weather looks fantastic and leaves are starting to turn!