Reports

Had a memorable day out here with Rich and his friend Dave.  Rich has had some great days lake trout jigging with me over the past 4 or 5 years.  He’s always asking about other opportunities.  Although perhaps 90% or more of my guiding these days is for lakers, it’s a very small percentage of what’s in my fishing repertoire.  I do love guiding lake trout, and the more of it I do, the more in tune with them I get.  I also really enjoy mixing it up, especially this time of year.

We decided to fish Owasco Lake due to proximity and good opportunities this time of year for lake trout, northern pike and smallmouth bass.  We started with northern pike and Dave hooked up with one on his first cast!  It was a 23″ northern – not a big one, but a good start and confidence builder.  Rich had some perch following in his jerkbait at times.  Once I got Rich fishing a spoon, things got interesting.  I saw him hook up and it was very similar to watching Drew hook that big tiger musky on the 6th – the fish didn’t seem to hit, it was just “on” as if it hooked itself.  I could tell Rich had a very good fish on!  It really ran out a lot of line and I had Rich put it to the pike.  We got it in the net and it was a beauty -38″ long.  With experienced pike anglers, I’d have them release a quality fish like that, but it was Rich’s first pike and we didn’t know if we’d get any more.  For what it’s worth, I weighed it and it went 13lbs on the nose.  Dave then hooked up a nice 30″er and we wrapped up on pike and moved over to lake trout.

The lake trout action was pretty good, although Rich was used to faster fishing during April/May or August on Cayuga.  The guys wound up with a half-dozen nice lakers to over 31″.  I’d say half of the ones we encountered had spawned and half hadn’t.  Fish here spawn a little later than the Cayuga Lake fish.

Lake temps were 60 to 61 degrees on top.  It’s a terrific time of the year to fish just about any lake in New York State, and certainly the Finger Lakes!  We saw two other boaters out fishing on the entire day – you just can’t beat that, and foliage is about as close to peak as we get before the wind and rain take their toll on the leaves.