Keuka Lake out of Penn Yan 6/28
Guided the Hermans for a 1/2 day here starting just after 7 am. I am available to do occasional guide trips on this lake depending on the circumstances. The Hermans live about 45 minutes away from here to the west, so it was a good compromise on the driving. I do impose a surcharge for trips here. It takes me a good hour and 20 minutes to drive here, plus there’s a $10 launch fee at the Village Park.
The plan was to target some lakers and smallmouth bass. I made a good run towards the bluff area and we worked back. This run and some searching on the electronics pushed our actual fishing start time to around 7:45 am. Eleonore hooked up a laker on her first drop of the jig. After that, it was a slow go despite marking decent numbers of fish. Both John and Eleonore hooked fish and/or had hits. She nabbed our only laker of the AM, a 19″er. Fish were not moving much for the jigs. A month ago, the majority of these fish were moving and striking our presentations. At times the fish would turn on a little. Had we kept laker fishing we probably could have caught a few more, but it didn’t appear that we were going to have any notable action. Being on the water at 6 am would likely have resulted in much better laker action. Fish are known to feed at night on this lake, just like they do on Canandaigua.
We did some bass fishing with both flukes and Ned rigs. Some good sized smallmouths were missed on flukes. The Ned rig resulted in a few halfway decent smallmouths and one was landed on the fluke along with some rockbass on the Neds. No sign of pickerel, though the lake did get flat and sunny, which usually turns them off. Fluke fishing wasn’t as good as it was back 5 to 10 years ago or longer when plenty of alewives were around, but it wasn’t bad. I would call the bass action good to very good. We also saw some nice sized largemouths in close to shore. We didn’t cover a whole lot of water. Surface temps were around 72 degrees. The cottonwood wasn’t too bad either.