Reports 7/5 – 7/7
My schedule this past week was a bit more varied with trips to Skaneateles and Keuka Lakes as well as the usual Cayuga Lake stuff. Boat traffic has been reasonable, though on Keuka Lake the boating gets a bit more intense and there’s more boat wake action due to the narrowness of the lake. Fishing has been a bit more challenging overall this past week.
7/5 AM Skaneateles Lake: Guided Steve and his dad Tom for the morning. Steve just bought a place on the lake last fall and had been doing a bit of kayak fishing. They were hoping to pick up some new techniques and areas today. We started with about an hour of lake trout jigging. They enjoyed it despite not landing any fish. The guys had a few good hits so they at least saw that the technique was feasible.
We did a little dropshotting, tube jigging and fluking. The fluking really tripped the guys’ trigger so that’s what we focused on. A lot of hits and fish were missed but that’s what makes it fun. Around 1/2 dozen fish were landed. Not great but the guys were psyched and within an hour after the trip ended I had two photos sent to me of fish Steve had taken with the flukes off of his dock and kayak!
7/6 Keuka Lake: Guided Scott, who joined me here last year for a fantastic day of smallmouth action with 5 fish landed in the 18″ to 19″ range along with some smaller ones as well. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t apprehensive about this trip. Although we had good conditions, we are now talking about 2 summers with zero alewives to be found. A lot of the smallie fishing I’ve done here over the years focuses on alewives – we use topwater, tubes, flukes, spoons and other techniques to match the forage. On top of that, most of the places we fish are areas where bass can hammer alewives. Do we have to throw that stuff all out the window now? I don’t know.
All I can say is that the fishing was tough. Bass still came up for the flukes (they do so pretty much everywhere they’re found – including on Skaneateles Lake, which has zero alewives) but we didn’t find any good numbers – certainly no “pods” of bass, which is usually commonplace here. Scott dropped a beauty that had to go 20″. He then landed a 15″ that fought well. Other (mostly smaller) fish were missed/dropped and one solid fish (probably a largemouth) was lost under a dock. Dock fishing would’ve been very good, but we didn’t focus on that. Some fish are likely still spawning but there should have been some hungry post spawn smallies around. Tough day.
7/7 Cayuga Lake out of Long Point: Had a slow AM with Jerry and Dan but fortunately things picked up after around 2 hours. Stormy days in the summer usually result in on and off fishing. The bite can get great before a storm rolls in, but oftentimes the AM bite is non-existent. Anyways the guys wound up with 5 nice fish and they also dropped a few. Trollers were doing well. I think everybody out there was catching fish.