Lake Ontario out of Oswego 5/29 + Cayuga Lake out of Dean’s Cove 5/30 AM
5/29 Lake Ontario out of Oswego:
Met my buddy Terry out here at 11 am. As most of your are probably well aware, the water level at Lake Ontario is very high. Knee high boots are helpful here for launching and retrieving boats. The City has actually placed another dock on top of the normal one. The normal one (on the western part of the boat launch) that is underneath the newer one is completely covered in very slippery weeds and that original dock juts out a bit from beneath the newer one. So it can be easy to launch without getting wet, but coming back in is another story. If you pull your boat up to the dock, it is still maybe 2′ away from the newer one if that makes sense, since the boat abuts to the older, wider one. So I gingerly stepped on the older one with my boots on and was able to not slip. Either way – be prepared for high water.
We tried some casting for browns and jigging for lakers/salmon without any luck. Terry had one hit on the lakers. Warm murky water was high in the water column going down from maybe 56 at the surface gradually getting cooler as you got away from the harbor down to the low 40s at around 30′. That being said, we did mark some scattered piles of bait on bottom in deeper water later in the day (I didn’t take a down temp later, but am pretty sure things stayed the same.) No sign of spring browns despite pretty favorable conditions, though covering water was a slow-go with the light winds. We did manage to salvage the day with some good to very good bass fishing in the harbor area. We landed some solid fish with Terry landing the lion’s share, but we both lost our best smallies.
Quite a few charters were out deep when we started. Overall Lake Ontario water is still very cold. A boat or two were trolling slow for walleyes in the harbor and river when we left around 8:15 pm.
5/30 Cayuga Lake out of Dean’s Cove: Met Michael and Dan here for an AM half day. They drove over from Penn Yan so we started a little later than usual – it was probably 8:30 am by the time we got underway. The late start didn’t hinder us due to the fog that had just lifted. Fishing was solid with around 7 solid lakers landed to around 28″. Most ran 24″. Kept fish had alewives in them but one fish notably had two gobies in its stomach. I believe that those were the first gobies I’d seen in a lake trout in at least a month. Surface temps were around 53 and I had temps in the low 50s down to over 15′ or 20′.
I had a text from a client/friend of mine who let me know that Stone’s Candies in Oswego is still going but just relocated in another part of Oswego. I deleted my paragraph in my Oswego report just above but I was lamenting that it appeared that the longtime fixture and great candy/ice-cream store in Oswego had closed.