Seneca Lake out of Geneva 10/6
Got out here on my own for another “catch ’em and eat ’em” mission. I am starting to like September and October for doing some panfishing, especially since it was such a hot summer that conditions really haven’t set up yet for optimal pike fishing or salmon. Plus I love to eat fish when I can.
I scouted a bunch of areas for perch and wound up finding a few groups of them. I wound up landing about a dozen mostly very solid perch up to the 13″ range. They hit soft plastics. The perch on this lake get hammered throughout the cold months so I’m not going to give locations or depths but it’s a nice time to be on the lake with very few anglers out. It was a bluebird sunny day and quite windy in the AM – not ideal perch conditions so I was happy with my catch. I also caught a smallmouth around 12″.
Cayuga Lake Propagation Netting: It’s over! The guys had the most successful netting in the past 15 years (at the very least) with all the eggs they needed being taken in two nights. Some nets were set last night to help a graduate student procure some fish for some thiamine studies but that was it. No real monsters but decent numbers of 11 to 13lb fish. Not as many wild fish as in the past either. Wild fish production of lake trout on Cayuga Lake remains low. It’s under 10%. Last year I started seeing more wild fish than previously, but that was an anomaly. Most fish that I saw on my boat this year were stocked. It’s great seeing beautiful wild fish in the fishery, but from a management perspective having a fishery comprised of mostly stocked fish allows for easier balance – when forage numbers drop, less fish can be stocked to compensate.