Owasco Lake 9/23 AM
Did a 1/2 day AM trip starting at 7:30 with Greg and his friend Mike. We had an eventful day with some decent laker jigging. The guys nabbed 4 nice lakers to 26″ and Mike nailed a bonus 26″ walleye in around 65′ FOW. The ‘eye hit as he was dropping his jig. That’s the first walleye we’ve caught while vertically jigging for lake trout. I’m somewhat surprised by that – I would think we would encounter more in Owasco. Even when the lake was being stocked heavily with walleyes, we never caught them. I know of a couple that were jigged with spoons by anglers targeting lakers. Anyways the fish was chunky around the head and then a bit thin. Probably in the 5lb range. It looked like an old fish. DEC has not documented any successful natural reproduction of walleyes here over the past couple decades. Smelt and alewife populations are the reason. They are efficient predators of walleye fry.
A lot of bait is around and we marked a lot of negative/neutral lakers. They probably would’ve hit better later in the day but we were off the water around 12:15 pm. There’s no shortage of baitfish on this lake and I expect it to fish like a small version of Cayuga – i.e. good! Surface temps were 72 degrees.