Seneca Lake out of Geneva 6/30
Guided Ryan, his son, aka “The Collinater” and Ryan’s brother in-law Gary for a 6-hour trip. I had some trepidations going into the trip today, but due to my full schedule this week, changing the date would not have worked. We had the super-blow on Monday, then a cold-front rolled in Thursday night/Friday. We then had cranking south winds on Saturday gusting up to 30 mph followed by cranking northerlies today also gusting to 30 mph+. What that does, is it sets up a lot of currents going in different directions, especially on a lake like Seneca. Fish do a lot of moving around with the huge water plateaus and are more of less in a state of flux until some steadier weather settles in. The same thing happens on the Great Lakes.
I was looking at good southerlies this morning cranking up from the north in the afternoon. Most of our good fishing on Seneca Lake as of late has been from Sampson/Dresden north about mid-way up the lake from there. The usual great areas in Geneva/Belhurst have been slow for us, likely due to the winds. However, if I launch out of Sampson, we might get hammered by the northerlies in the afternoon on the way back in. We launched out of Geneva and ran south in short order. We marked a LOT of fish, but they were not hitting well at all. Gary had a momentary hook-up and missed a light hit or two. Ryan had a couple light hits and Colin only had one grab. Very tough day. The guys fished hard, but with two hours left in our trip, the north winds CRANKED up! That made our last part of the trip very tough. My Terrova was holding us at a power from around #7 to #10. It was windy. So no lake trout today. I think that was the first skunking on lake trout during a guided trip thus far this season. I know I tried fly-fishing for them on my own a couple times with no fish landed, but this was the first while guiding. It happens – but fortunately only occasionally! We got lucky on Owasco Lake on Friday with our two buzzer-beaters, that’s for sure!