Reports

I set my alarm at 3 am in order to meet Wayne and his son Josh over at Seneca Lake State Park today for a shot at pike.  Pike fishing hasn’t been good for me or my contacts over there this season thus far, but I thought with a 5 am start we’d have a shot at them.  My favorite pike fishing months on the Finger Lakes are October through December.  I do some winter fishing for them and then it can be good again in May into early June.  Once alewives move in and the water warms up, they get tougher to target.   I believe that a lot of them feed at night – I’ve seen this occur on Owasco and Conesus Lakes.  People catch them while targeting walleyes.  Seneca Lake also has a tremendous amount of habitat and with baitfish all over the place from the shore out to deep water, pike could easily be gorging on sawbellies out in 20′ to 40′ of water.  I saw a guy pulling copper on Owasco Lake one year in June catch a pike down on bottom in 70′ of water!   Of course if a lot of them were out there, we’d pick them up jigging lake trout.  But in Lake Champlain in the summer in mid-lake areas (as opposed to the north or south ends) 20′ to 40′ of water for pike is commonplace.

I warned the guys about how tough Seneca could be and I felt another day on Owasco would be a better bet, but Wayne had never fished Seneca before.  We had zero action on pike.  Conditions were not good with a high sun and little wind by 7 am.  We worked three different areas that are all usually top-notch places for Seneca pike.

Josh had the hot hand yesterday but wasn’t in great fishing shape today after a long night last night.  So that didn’t help us any!

The positive from today was the lake trout.  After 2 1/2 hours of no signs of pike I did some searching for lake trout.  We had some action mid-lake as well as north.  I marked a ton of bait but also good numbers of trout.  Wayne missed three good hits but finally wound up connecting with a wild 24″ fish up in Geneva.  It looked good – one old healed lamprey wound, but it was a plump fish.  I marked quite a few fish up there and they were moving well for the jigs.