Seneca Lake out of Geneva 5/17
In twelve years of guiding this is the latest I’ve ever done my first Seneca Lake trip of the season. I used to make a point of scouting out the area lakes; I’d hit Owasco, Skaneateles, Seneca and so forth in order to see what was going on. By now I’ve done enough guiding and logged enough hours on the water to feel fairly confident in finding fish without prior scouting – I understand the “lake rhythms” and how things set up and can tell in fairly short order what’s going on. That was the case today.
Tim’s girlfriend bought him a gift certificate for a full day trip last winter. I met Tim and his friend Kendall at the Chamber of Commerce at around 6:45 am. I’ve been starting trips a bit earlier lately, due to the time of the year. The guys do well trolling but wanted to learn the jigging.
We had a great day today with 9 mostly lunker lake trout coming to the net. The best fish was Kendall’s 33″ 12lb. 4oz laker that’s heading to the smoker with 3 other fish we kept. Nearly all the big lakers had healed lamprey scars on them. None of the fish were in great condition – i.e. they were pretty fish, but none were fat. Most were a little on the thin side. My guess is that they are just starting to feed a bit. There was plenty of bait around in the depths of Seneca. As usual for this time of year fish were scattered – they were common from 90′ out to 150’+. All the fish landed were wild ones today. We had one 20″er but all the rest ran from 26″ to 29″ and then the 33″.