Seneca Lake out of Sampson 6/25
Full day out on Seneca with John and Eleonore. I’m blessed to have some terrific repeat clients – they make this “job” a breeze! J & E wanted to get into some pike action and weren’t able to fish during the hot bite. Unfortunately the hot “pre-summer” pike bite has slowed down as I’ve been discovering. The weeds are up and the fish appear to be sulking in them. The usual stickbaits produced one decent fish for Eleonore. As J & E were working swimbaits and stickbaits I took a couple casts (I don’t fish during guide trips, except to check out things on occasion) with a tube jig and hooked a decent pike within a couple casts- that tells me that the fish are somewhat inactive. They would hit a jig in their face, but wouldn’t come up for a blade bait or stickbait. Water temps are around 64. Weeds are coming up very quickly. There’s still some good pikin’ to be had on this lake, but nothing to compare to the action of the past month. Pike fishers need to choose their days wisely.
My back up plan was lakers and around 11 am we shot back to Sampson. I marked some fish and bait in short order and John was onto a beautiful laker with his first drop of a jig! We all agreed that we’d rather have good to great trout fishing rather than fair pike action. Another 6 nice fish (all 25″ to 28″+) were landed and a few good ones were lost. This was during serious heat and zero wind! That’s why lakers rule! Bait and fish were hitting in 65′ to 75′ of water. We kept 2 fish for dinner – one for them and 1/2 a fish for me! After yesterday’s tough day I was glad to take some fillets. Boat traffic was very light. We had the park area to ourselves! That’s the way I like it.