Reports

7/28:  Guided three generations on Owasco Lake out of Emerson Park on Wednesday for a truncated full day –  Mike aka Grampa, son David and grandson Ethan.   Lake trout fishing was very good in the morning for our first hour or two and then it tapered off to a slower yet steady bite.  We fished a bunch of areas and had at least a little action everywhere we tried.  Ethan is 12 years old and he managed some nice lakers as well as a 20″ smallmouth.  All in all 10 lakers and the smallmouth were landed.  A good number of fish were also dropped as is often the case with jigging.  Four lakers were kept for dinner and they had been eating large alewives.

Reports from friends and past clients over the past week have been good to excellent on Cayuga Lake.  Seneca Lake is still painfully tough for lake trout jigging.  I haven’t heard anything regarding Keuka or Canandaigua Lakes lately, but I’d bet they are fishing well.

7/29:  Today was Grandpa – aka Mike and his grandson Ethan on Skaneateles Lake for smallmouths.  The first issue of note over there is that only one dock is in.  Some repairs were being made on the south floating dock.  The other news is that over the past week some boater crashed into the northern floating docks and most of the sections had to be pulled out for repair.  So launching/retrieving boats is once again a big hassle out there.  I arrived 20 minutes before I was due to pick up the guys from the Mandana dock and had to wait for two boats to launch.  You can’t launch and then pull your boat out of the way very effectively.  Hopefully these issues will be taken care of soon.  On the positive side, boat traffic has been slower than usual on all the Finger Lakes over the past few weeks and that was also the case today.

As can be seen in this photo, the concrete abutment or foundation extends past the floating docks on the north dock.  The other (south dock) is completely out.

We had a good chop on Skaneateles Lake today.  The guys wanted to learn some techniques so we did some soft jerkbait fishing (aka flukin’), casting hard baits and dropshotting.  The dropshotting was promising – I did a demonstration drop and caught a 16″ smallmouth bass in an area I don’t usually dropshot.  The guys really enjoyed the superfluke fishing but the lack of sun hurt us a bit.  We had fun fishing, but the catching was slow with a lot of 10″+/- bass chasing our offerings and a few landed.  Ethan’s jerk technique proved to be deadly!  Rain started moving in around 12:30 pm and the guys wanted to call it a day  early.  We finished with dropshotting a favorite area of mine and Mike landed a couple nice bass on consecutive drops then we headed out.  I would say bass fishing is generally very good to excellent here (as is usually the case heading into August.)

The rain pretty much passed right through the area, so why not go fishing on my own?  It’s been awhile.   I had another four hours to fish if I wanted to, but I was so tired I just pulled the boat, went home and crashed.  11 days in a row of waking up at 4:30 am takes its toll!