Keuka Lake out of Penn Yan 6/4
Fished Keuka Lake out of Penn Yan with my buddy Terry starting at around 10:30 am. I hadn’t open water fished this lake since last spring when I jigged a few lakers out of Branchport. With Lake Ontario being at floodstage we’ve been setting our sights on some lakes we haven’t fished in a while. I plan on fishing Canandaigua, Otisco and Conesus sometimes this season if I get time. Eventually we’ll hit Lake Champlain again too.
I brought a lot of tackle mainly geared towards bass fishing. We hadn’t warmwater fished this lake in a few years so I was looking forward to seeing how and if things had changed. We started with laker jigging. Over the past 15 years, laker fishing has usually been a challenge on this lake in early June. Things are a few weeks behind – water temps at the surface were 60 degrees and fortunately there wasn’t much cottonwood seed on the surface here. Laker action was fantastic. We didn’t make it quite down to the bluff but we did a drift in deep water and I marked a lot of fish. Most of them moved for the jigs. In 15 minutes we had three nice lakers. Within an hour and 15 minutes we had landed eight! It was tempting to just laker fish but we were anxious to give our bass fishing gear a try. The lakers are hungry here. There was a few perch fry in one or two of the six we kept but most had empty stomachs. People need to harvest more lake trout on this lake.
My bass gear is always in disarray early in the season and today was no exception. I have a lot of reels to respool and combos to re-evaluate over the next week. But we had a lot of fun today trying different things out. I’m not a big bed fisherman so we tried to focus on pre-spawn bass. We didn’t have a lot of luck today – we caught a few smallmouths and a few largemouths. No great numbers though my best smallie was just under 18″. We crushed the pickerel – I don’t think I’ve ever seen more pickerel on this lake. The cool water temps are probably helping. Terry landed the first pike/pickerel hybrid I’ve seen on this lake – a solid 25″er. I also had a solid 11″ crappie nail a Super Fluke, which was a first for me. We dropped a lot of good fish too – mostly pickerel but some bass as well.
DEC Region 8 is doing a lot of work on the lake and it will be interesting to see what their findings are. I had no sign of ciscoes in any laker stomachs today.