Reports

Cayuga Lake fishing has been starting to shade from fair/good to excellent over the past four days.  The algae bloom is pretty much over with now and the lake features good transparency.  Weedmats are still an issue for trollers in some areas.  Water fleas haven’t been too bad.  Boat traffic remains moderate to heavy on the weekends and light to moderate early in the week.  Bait is virtually everywhere and salmon, browns and rainbows are augmenting our solid lake trout catches.  The past week has also resulted in good numbers of large 30″/31″ lakers being boated.  They remain super clean with virtually zero evidence of lampreys.  Trollers are catching plenty of the aforementioned “silver fish.”

8/6:  Guided Dan and Maris for a full day starting at 6:30 am.  We had a solid day of fishing with plenty of lakers and a couple solid browns in the mix.  I think the guys had around 10 or 12 lakers. The bite was pretty good throughout the day.

8/7 AM:  Guided a 1/2 day AM trip with Greg.  We tried some areas for non-lakers and he managed one chunky brown around 19″.  A couple lakers were also landed.  Conditions weren’t great for what we wanted to do but we gave it a good shot.

8/7 PM:  Guided Nate and his son Graham for a 1/2 day starting around 11:30 am.  I guided Nate and his wife around 6 or 7 years ago on Keuka Lake.  He has had good jigging ever since.  We had a slow bite to start and then Graham picked up a nice laker and salmon during a bite window.  He wanted to head back to their rental so I made a run right when the fish started hitting.  After dropping off Graham I had Nate try a bunch of different areas that we wouldn’t have fished had we not ran uplake.  He wound up hooking more lakers and landed another fish or two.  Fair fishing at best for the day between my AM trip with Greg and this one.

8/8 AM:  Guided Tom and his friend from his childhood – also named Tom.  We had terrific fishing all morning long with around 14 to 16 lakers landed if I remember right.  We also had a nice rainbow too.  Just a smooth steady bite throughout the entire trip.  I have guided Tom a fair number of times over the years and he always seems to pick good days well in advance!  Wound up having a trolling motor issue but using my trusty driftbag didn’t hurt us a bit – it probably helped and we fished some areas I hadn’t worked in a long time and it really paid off.  A lot of big lakers today that fought great!

8/9 AM:  The terrific fishing that is August through mid-September on Cayuga Lake (and lets be honest – fishing is pretty darn terrific on Cayuga throughout the year, perhaps with the exception of a few days or maybe a week during the peak of the algae bloom) continues!

Had Zach onboard with his always entertaining son Kieran and Kieran’s friend Ben for a half day starting around 7:30 am.

Ben started things off with a nice brown that chased his jig up.  After that it was mostly lakers with the exception of Kieran’s personal best salmon- a 23″er.  Zach almost had a solid rainbow whack him a couple times, so we could nearly taste a Cayuga slam, but again – everything would have had to line up starting with Ben.   Anyways we wound up with another 15 fish + day and we left them hitting.  Steady August weather really gets these Cayuga fish feeding.  Browns, lakers and salmon will spawn from October through November (and sometimes December) and they feed heavily in August and September in anticipation of this life stage.

August – 22nd is available for a full or 1/2 day. That is it for August.  

September open dates remain pretty much the same as my last post – 9/5, 6, 7, 12, 20 -21 and 28th.

As is nearly always the case this time of year – most dates in October and onwards are open!