Keuka out of Branchport 5/24
Started out this AM by finding out that my trolling motor wasn’t working! Great – I pretty much buy the best motor I could find and it decides to stop working the morning of a guide trip where I need precision boat control! At least it’s still under warranty. I had two drift bags on board so there was no need to panic – at least not on the surface 😉
Ihor and his son Matt did a great job today compensating for the lack of boat control. The Branchport Arm has plenty of lakers in it along with some bait. But as usual, it was pretty windy over there (the funnel effect.) After fruitlessly trying to jig sans trolling motor with a couple drift socks we rode over to the bluff area. It was much calmer and we settled into some good fishing. The guys landed a half dozen nice lakers up to 30″!!! That 30″ fish was a Keuka boat record for my guiding. Beautiful fish. They came from 75 ‘to around 120’. As usual, many of the Keuka fish are suspended. We didn’t mark fish in many of the areas we caught them in either. Tube jigs did the trick. We didn’t hammer the fish, but given that we had no trolling motor, I thought everyone did a very nice job!
We finished the trip with some casting for pickerel. It was quite productive with fish up to around 24″ being caught – mostly on X-raps. Surface temps are mostly in the low 50s with up to 60 on the N.end of the Branchport Arm.