Lake Ontario out of Oswego Harbor 8/3 + Cayuga Lake 8/4
Fishing continues to be good to excellent in the region. August 29th remains open for trips. Apart from that, it’s onto September and onwards.
Oswego 8/3: Got out with my buddy Terry. We were hoping for a shot at browns and maybe a King or laker. Strong NE winds caused a major upwelling along the south shore of the lake and water temperatures were super cold down 30′ as well as in shallow. It wasn’t as severe an upwelling as I remember from my youth (when bass would die and we’d have 42 degrees or something like that on the surface,) but it was strong enough. The currents were as strong as I’ve ever noticed! Jigs never seemed to hit bottom and were notably being either pulled away from us or pulled towards us. We had to reel as fast as we could at times just to get the paddle tails working! Unreal.
There were more boats out here than I’d seen in a while. A good amount of bait was up high too. (Again – “good amount” means for Lake Ontario circa 2016.) Articles I’ve read in the “In-Fisherman” magazine refer to the “zone of stability” out in the middle of the lake as being the place to fish when crazy stuff like upwellings happen. I wasn’t about to do that with my boat, so we stayed within 150′. We marked fish on bottom in shallower and Terry had a hit, but nothing.
Upwellings can make for scattered, tough trout and salmon fishing but they make for superb smallmouth bass fishing. So after maybe 2 hours of futile trout jigging, we looked around for bass. The harbor and river provided us with the best smallmouth bass fishing we’d experienced in probably over 10 years. We didn’t keep track of how many we caught but at times we were getting hit on every cast, sometimes more than once. Best fish was around 18″ and fat. These fish are much heftier than the numerous smallmouths we used to catch back in the 1990s and early 2000s around the lake. We used green pumpkin tubes. Just superb action! I caught a bonus drum (and rockbass) and Terry caught a small walleye in the river too.
A check at the cleaning station revealed a tough day with only 3 salmon being brought in to be cleaned by 4 pm. There are some 30lbers being caught this year, which is great.
Cayuga 8/4: Did back to back 1/2 days today with James and Eric starting things off around 6:30. Action was a little slow to start with a decent chop on the lake. But eventually the bite got going good and the guys did great, landing 15 solid lakers and 3 small salmon. Some huge salmon are around – my client/friend Tom nabbed a 32″er last week! Yowsa! We’re in for some superb salmon fishing on Cayuga Lake over the foreseeable future. Can’t wait.
Eric’s a die hard bass fisherman who’s done his share of tournaments on various levels and he loved the laker jigging. James has a place on Seneca and usually pulls copper. It’ll be interesting to see how the guys do back on Seneca later this week and this season.
My PM trip was with Todd and his wife Amy. It was a last minute deal. The fishing started out a little slow and never really got going great but it was still good. Cayuga Lake circa 2016 has been fantastic and even slow days have been productive and downright good to great when compared to other lakes. Amy really did great today and is amazing at holding lake trout for photos which is something 95% of my clients (and sometimes myself) have a tough time with. 6 nice fish plus a dink salmon or two were caught on the day. Todd might have dropped a good silver fish. A few fish showed good lamprey marks on the day (with one big lamprey coming up this AM.) That was unusual for this season.