Reports 6/2, 6/4 and 6/5
6/2 Lake Ontario out of Oswego: Strong winds with a small craft advisory over the past weekend (mainly Sunday) really shifted water temps around over here. I arrived with heavy fog just having cleared and one trailer in the parking lot at Wright’s Landing. I checked a bunch of areas for salmonids and found very cold water down 20′. It would’ve been a troller’s game out here. I tried a bunch of stuff without much success and wound up having some good to excellent smallmouth fishing inshore in the harbor. That’s the great thing about the port of Oswego (as well as many other LO ports,) there are a lot of options and different species to fish for. Tube jigs and swim baits worked well for some chunky bass running 11″ to 17″.
6/4 Seneca Lake out of Lodi Point: Got out with my buddy Mike for some scouting and fishing for browns/salmon. We enjoy finding methods and areas that work for big browns and salmon that don’t involve trolling. We had no “catching” but a great day “fishing” if that makes sense. We each had some follows from big browns (Mike had a giant) in areas we’d never targeted browns in. We also found some active salmon (that weren’t “active” enough to gobble our flies and lure) in a few other areas. I eventually caught and released a big perch, but that was it. We covered a lot of water and learned a lot. The full moon may have played a part in the tough “catching” today. I don’t know.
I’m a huge believer (as is Mike) in doing this kind of stuff. It pays tremendous dividends in the long run. We’re learning what areas to fish, how to approach them, how they set up in different winds and what to do differently next time.
6/5 Cayuga Lake out of Myers: Guided Jack for a full day. He’s joined me a few times in the past with his son Willy (who also fishes with me on occasion.) He loves to fly-fish but is up for whatever works best. We searched for late (for my style of fly-fishing) salmon and found some small ones in various areas. They weren’t grabbing great. But I was happy to see these fish. Both Seneca and Cayuga Lake are showing promise for future salmon fishing, but these Sebago strain fish really do seem to scatter. I thing it’s a good thing. With many of these fish avoiding being caught easily, we’ll likely keep seeing some of the exceptional specimens that we’ve seen thus far this year. Who knows, maybe I’m clueless here, but it’s a feeling I’m getting. Some nice perch were following in Jack’s streamers at times.
We did some laker jigging and Jack nailed 3 solid fish. All were in less than 75′ FOW. Bait is moving in big-time and I think most of the 1 and 1/2 oz jigheads and heavier gear can be put away for the next couple months. We’ll see. Jack also dropped some good hits. Fish were pretty active. Water temps are all over the place – from 49 to 61 degrees. Most of the lake was around 52/53. Great salmon/brown/laker temps but these fish have “temperature” all over the place along with bait. It should be good fishing for the trollers.