Lake Ontario out of Oswego/Cayuga Lake 5/8 + 9
5/8: Made it up to Lake Ontario for the first time this season. It’s great to see the road construction on Rt. 104 heading east into Oswego finally winding down. I launched around 11:30 am in hopes of catching a salmon on a jig. Fishing has been top-notch out of Oswego by most accounts. Brown trout and walleyes are being caught in inshore areas. Salmon are shallow as well as out in the deeps. Smallmouths are stacked in the harbor and likely up the river too. There are lots of opportunities around the Oswego area!
Fishing salmonids up here is mostly a troller’s game. There’s lots of warm colored up water – miles of it! So it can be a needle in a haystack casting at times, though over the years I have caught browns and a coho while fly-fishing. I tried both shallow and deep with jigs and managed a couple close calls. I had what appeared to be a nice coho or immature king follow my jig to the boat in around 60′ to 70′ FOW. I also had a hit near the boat from a King around 6 to 8lbs out deep, but no connection. Lakers were not active for me. I usually find lakers out here more responsive during low light conditions. Of course I don’t get to put in much time up here to experiment so take it for what it is.
I wound up my day casting tube jigs (both alewife and green pumpkin – aka goby colors) in the harbor and had a blast landing a dozen solid smallmouths up to 18″ and probably over 4lbs in about 40 minutes. I talked to some guys trolling for browns off of the harbor and they limited out on “good eating sized fish.” Other trollers caught some salmon.
5/9: Cayuga Lake out of Myers – Guided Gordon for his birthday trip. We’ve done these periodically over the years. He was out with me on April 27th and managed a 27″ brown trout on the fly – his personal best, but we didn’t have a whole lot of action apart from that. Steady warming weather has really amped up the salmon/brown trout action on Cayuga Lake. On the day he caught a couple nice salmon on flies and a couple casting stickbaits. All nice fish. The catching was decent but the “fishing” was much better. He had a lot of hits and follows – probably two dozen follows from small salmon to some very solid fish. Converting the hits to hooked fish didn’t go all that well for what we saw, but it was a lot of fun. Water temps are on the rise now and there are active fish in a lot of different areas. It was much improved from what we’d experienced over the past few weeks.