Reports 10/10 – 10/15
I had a busy week of fishing on my own (as well as with my buddy Mike) and guiding. As is usually the case heading towards November, the fishing is often good to great but the weather is the main factor. Here’s the breakdown:
10/10: I fished out of Oswego Harbor on Lake Ontario. It was a relatively short day – I started around 12:40 PM and was off the water around 6. Water levels are finally back down to a normal pool. My main target was smallmouth bass. The trip was fairly spontaneous, so I hadn’t thought things through much. Strong south winds over the prior week pushed warm water up towards Canada so I had 50 to 52 degree water inshore. No luck or sign of bass in the one area I checked, though a few gobies were around.
I spent a couple hours offshore looking for whatever I could find – kings, steelhead or browns/lakers. I didn’t have much luck there. I worked out to 200′ of water. I did mark some fish and some moved for my jigs a little bit but not much. Nobody was out fishing offshore that I could see. For people that think the main run of Chinook Salmon is yet to come – all I can say was I didn’t mark much in the way of possible staging fish.
On my way back in I found some warmer water and started getting some hits. For some reason I didn’t hook up. The hits were different than the usual bass hits. Next thing you know I was hooked up with a nice walleye. I landed the 20″er and kept it. A cast later I nabbed a 4.6lb smallmouth bass that was 20″ long. Ten minutes later I nabbed a 23″ walleyes and kept that. Another 5 solid smallmouths followed including one or two that were four pounders. Fun way to end the trip, which I had been regretting up to that point!
10/11: Fished Keuka out of Penn Yan with my buddy Mike on his Lund. Mike was in the area (he lives a bit further away from the region than he used to, so we aren’t able to fish together as often as we used to) and wanted to give Keuka Lake a shot for some bass. I met him up at Penn Yan around 11:30 am and we were underway a little later. Conditions weren’t easy there with a flat calm lake and high sun. We tried an area or two then tried to find better conditions. Mike had a point he wanted to try and we gave it a shot and had some luck. We worked a bunch of areas throughout the day and caught some nice fish. Nothing gangbusters but we had fun. Most bass ran 12″ to 15″ and we had a few bigger. Ned rigs, craws and swimbaits all did the trick. We might have had one or two dropshotting. I didn’t catch much but managed a couple quality fish – a smallmouth around 19.5″ if I remember right and a 20″ largemouth. I had one or two other 15″ range fish. Mike had a bunch.
10/13 AM: Guided Craig on Cayuga Lake out of Long Point. It was windy! We started around 10:30 am and fished maybe two hours then I gave Craig some fly-casting lessons onshore. Despite the moderate chop, Craig managed three nice lakers. We had a lot of fun.
10/14: Back to Keuka Lake out of Penn Yan with Mike on his Lund. We set up for lakers when we started around 9:30 am. Fishing was slow (for the fall on Keuka) but productive. We landed 5 solid lakers to 27″ (THIN!) and down to 17.5″. We marked what appeared to be “bait” on the bottom and at mid-depth but stomach checks on my fish revealed a few perch fry and nothing else.
We did three hours or so of bass fishing and did very well. I had some good fun throwing the Super Fluke and Mike did well with a swimjig. He also caught some nice fish on a drop-shot, including a largemouth. We had a couple pickerel on the day. Mike’s really good with his bass fishing and we wound up having a very nice day on the bass.
As an added note, Mike fished Canandaigua on the 13th out of Woodville and jigged up a 23″ rainbow and some solid lakers. He hit Keuka for bass on the 12th and caught a 21″ smallmouth along with plenty of other bass as well as a couple hybrid pike/pickerel (and some rockbass and perch.) I had never seen them before on Keuka. This year I’ve heard of three “pike-eral.” Cool fish!
Today was Cindy and her son Chad for a 1/2 day trip for Cindy’s birthday on Cayuga out of Long Point. Chad hadn’t done much jigging before. Cindy has joined me a couple times before with her husband Paul. She couldn’t have picked a better day! We had top-notch fall jigging from the start of our trip around 9:30 am until the end around 1:30 pm. We wound up with 9 solid lakers up to 29″ (including a 28″ wild fish) and one sublegal salmon that was obviously released. Fish I cleaned had a variety of alewives in them including a lot of YOY (young-of-the-year) alewives. The lakers looked great!
Here’s a shot of the second batch I filleted:
I have the following dates left in October for 1/2 or full days: The weekend of the 19th/20th and 26th/27th.
Lastly, shore anglers are starting to pick up some rainbows on Skaneateles Lake. Bass fishing is still good there and I’d expect perch action to really be picking up.
Expect good pike/pickerel fishing throughout the region. Lake trout action remains fair to very good depending on the day on most of the lakes.