Reports

Guided Mark I. for a full-day on Owasco Lake starting just after 8 am.  Our target today was pike on the fly.  Mark fly-fished the whole day, save for 15 minutes spent casting gear in one marginal area.  We had tricky weather forecasts going into today – overall the forecast looked decent with overcast skies changing over the sunnier skies in the afternoon.  The wind kicked up a bit more than we would’ve liked, but that’s late-fall fishing.

We worked a bunch of areas on the day, but concentrated in the same general areas that Zach had fished successfully on Tuesday.  Clearly, we had different days with different conditions, but I didn’t expect pike to move a whole lot.  Fishing was tough for us today.  Mark felt a possible hit and then came up with some pike scales, so something was going on.  Later on, he snagged a perch on his streamer.  After a few hours with no solid action, Mark finally got a solid grab and set into what fought like a very good fish.  I netted the 28″ pike and we were both impressed that it had fought like a much bigger northern would have.  We were hoping that that fish would jumpstart our day, but it wasn’t to be.  We were on good habitat for much of the day but just didn’t get bit.

One positive from today was the sheer number of birds on and around the lake.  It was staggering!  If I was a “birder”, I’d offer birding trips, because you can see some amazing stuff out on the lakes.  Mark got some great video footage of a tremendous flock of either snow geese or seagulls.  It was hard to tell from where we were.  (I have seen huge aggregations of both species out on the lakes this time of year.) I tend to think that they were seagulls, because snow geese are often really loud and these birds didn’t make nearly the commotion.  We also saw a ton of Canadian Geese and ducks out on the lake.  It was really wild out there.  I wish the fish had cooperated more today, but that’s the way it goes.