Memorial Weekend Lake Trout Derby Report 5/23 – 5/25
Just got back from three fairly long days of fishing the derby with my buddy Jarrod. Fishing wound up being pretty good on Saturday and Sunday and a bit slow on Monday, though it picked up as the day went on. The bite and results were pretty much what we thought it’d be from early in the week – a “slugfest” with a lot of quality fish weighed in. The results are online and they are a testament to the superb fishery that is Seneca Lake circa 2015. Two 14lb lakers, numerous 10 to 12lb fish, a few 13lb browns(!), 4 landlocked salmon in the 8 to 9lb class and some solid rainbows from 7lbs on down. That’s very impressive stuff! I would venture to bet that in terms of numbers of large fish of different species across the board, this might be the best derby ever. So for what it’s worth “These are the ‘good old days’ for Seneca Lake trout and salmon fishing.”
No need for a day by day breakdown, but in a nutshell the deep bite was best the first two days with good numbers of fish pushing shallow on the third day. (We never ventured south of Roy’s Marina.) Expect good to excellent shallow (less than 100′) fishing from here through the end of July barring any extreme weather. Jarrod and myself both landed decent, though not exceptional numbers of fish. On day one Jarrod landed 3 fish in the 10lb range up to 10.5. It wasn’t good enough for a prize. He lost a good one as well on day one that we never saw but was likely a class up from the 10s. I landed a decent number of fish up to around 28″ or 29″ but again, nothing board-worthy. I also dropped a good fish (on day 2.) We both felt that we fished a good event and the lost fish weren’t due to preventable tackle issues – the hooks just pulled out, which happens with jigging. I was pretty darn tired for the event with eleven trips in the past 9 days prior to the event (and if you want to count, 16 trips over the past 17 days.) That didn’t affect our fishing but I was worn out big-time.
Many friends and past clients were out enjoying the beautiful weather and quite a few of them put up some nice fish, some of which wound up earning nice prizes. My job as a guide that specializes in teaching this stuff is to give you guys the best head start possible and given how well my past clients are doing in these events, I know I’m doing my job!