Keuka Lake out of Penn Yan 6/4 AM + Seneca Lake out of Watkins Glen 6/5 AM
Guided Tom for consecutive 1/2 days. He wanted to bass fish for a morning and pike fish for one as well.
6/4: Keuka Lake – As most of you know, I’m not on Keuka Lake much for smallmouth bass these days. I love the lake and enjoy guiding it for bass, but I typically refer bass clients to Jon Evans, who lives and breathes smallmouths. He does weekday guide trips in the summer, but as far as I know is still in weekend mode. Anyways, Tom wanted me to fish alongside him to help see what worked, so that’s what I did – even though I don’t care to fish when I’m guiding. The trips are for those of you who book them.
Some kind of mild cold front was hanging around the area in the AM. It was apparent with the bluebird skies and lethargic fish. I picked up a barely legal smallmouth on a tube that I never felt hit. Also got pickerel as well on a fluke. Tom wanted to dropshot and he stuck with that. Around 8 or 8:30 am the atmosphere changed and fish started activating. A few pods of large smallmouth bass showed themselves for flukes and were crashing some nearby baitfish on the surface. Tom was quick and managed a nice blow up then landed a chunky bass around 14″ to 15″ on topwater. I missed a couple beauties. Unfortunately we weren’t able to capitalize on these opportunities. I’m not big on bed fishing but we checked one area out and found a few bass remaining. Most fish seem to be post-spawn and back on the feed, at least in the warmer Penn Yan arm of the lake.
I’m going to try to do more smallmouth bass fishing on Cayuga and Owasco Lakes this year. Some of it due to my wanting to fish some alewife fueled fisheries closer to home. Otisco Lake also is a good smallmouth fishery. So stay tuned….
6/5: Seneca Lake out of Watkins Glen: I wasn’t thrilled with the sunny bluebird conditions and zero wind when we got on the lake around 6 am, but there was nothing I could do about it. We tried a few areas for pike and found some very cooperative fish! The 25″ – 27″ fish that we hadn’t located when I did the fly-fishing trip with Mark a couple weeks ago were around in good numbers. We landed at least 8 to 10 solid northerns on spoons. In one area we saw a bass or two and some perch and bullheads. Quite a few small pike are around on Seneca Lake and it’s pretty safe to say we are going to have some very good to excellent pike action on Seneca over the next couple years. Tom insisted I fish again and I didn’t want to disappoint him. I also had a nice trout/salmon follow in a tube jig.