Reports

Guided Bill and his son Tim.  They’d last been out with me back around 2017.  They are renting a place on Owasco Lake, so we went there.  It was good to get out there. although it had been a while since I’d been out there – 8/19 to be exact!  That was a great trip.  I’ve had a few recent reports but haven’t heard of anything out of the ordinary going on there lately.  Fishing was fair today, with maybe an hour of good action.  The lake level is down maybe 6″.  Surface temperature was 68 degrees.  Most fish here appear to be around spawning areas.  We had loads of fish around us, but the bite took some time to get going.  Some nice hits were dropped, but the guys did well with a half-dozen lake trout landed between 23″ and 27″.  One was kept for dinner.

Lake trout fishing here cannot be compared to Cayuga Lake at this point in time.  Cayuga Lake has a very abundant population of lakers – it’s loaded and DEC may even cut stocking here;  Owasco’s population is fair.  DEC and NY State are trying to develop Owasco Lake’s full potential, which is to be a trophy lake for brown and rainbow trout.  They already have a “lake trout factory” in Cayuga Lake (and Seneca/Canandaigua.)  Landlocked salmon were stocked here back in the 1990s but didn’t do well here.  I remember catching a few dinks when I first started fishing here in the fall of 2001 with my first boat.

The lake has trophy potential due to zero lampreys and abundant baitfish – both alewives and smelt (which occur in much lower numbers here than alewives but are still a forage fish component.)  No other Finger Lake has this combination.  Canandaigua Lake has no lampreys, but does not have the fertility and the massive forage base.  Seneca and Cayuga Lake have ample forage but both have lamprey populations.  We all know what’s going on at Keuka and Skaneateles Lake, and Canadice/Hemlock are too small and inaccessible to really be part of the conversation – plus they both have more modest salmonid populations, despite good baitfish numbers in Hemlock, plus no lampreys in either.

So what I told the guys as we got underway, is that a half-dozen lakers is a solid half-day of fishing here, and lo and behold, that’s exactly what they caught!  We certainly had some rainbows chasing our jigs around.  Best colors were space alien, black and Arkansas shiner.  We didn’t do anything on chartreuse today for what it’s worth.  Only a handful of boats were out here, mostly fishing today but a few were cruising.