Reports

Late fall is upon us!  Mark I. and I had fairly miserable conditions on the water throughout the day today – so much so, that we knocked off after just over 6 hours of fishing.  We were the only boat out on Otisco Lake all day long while we were out there.  Air temperatures might have hit 43 degrees today; we had a north wind around 7 (early on) to 14 mph (later in the day) and to top it off, it was completely overcast and rainy for most of the day.  It seemed to us like good musky conditions!

Mark is a regular of mine who really loves to fly-fish if it’s a reasonable option.  We’ve had some great fishing for a variety of fish on the fly over the years including northern pike, longnose gar, landlocked salmon, rainbow trout, pure-strain muskies and more, but tiger muskies have eluded us.  I’ve only caught a couple of tiger muskies on the fly-rod – both were on the same day, and neither one was very big.  I think I had a 19″er and a 25″er or something like that.  Other than that, I had one client some years ago who raised a bunch of good tigers on the fly and had landed at least one.  Mark had terrific musky beginner’s luck with the fly-fishing equipment on Waneta Lake.  He landed 3 muskies on his first time out – his best was a 47″er if I remember correctly and he had another 3 follows.  But tigers have not cooperated for us on the fly at all.

We had a day scheduled a week or two ago, but we agreed that the weather was “too nice.”  Today was the day Mark picked.  And it was anything but nice as mentioned above.  We had a good strategy and we stuck with it – basically get into what I felt was the best area and really saturate it, trying different flies and lines if need be.  We were one hour into the trip and just about ready to move when Mark got a great hit on a “figure-8.”  I saw the fish and it was a nice one!  He fought the fish expertly and we got it into my huge musky net after a nice jump/tailwalk!  It wound up being a 34.5″ beauty!  We never had another hit or discernable follow for the rest of the day and quit around 3 pm after the winds kicked up and we started getting another round of rain.