Seneca Lake out of Sampson State Park 4/1 midday
I had an alarm go off on my motor a few times over the past two months. The first time was my trip with John on Keuka Lake. I took it over to Silver Lake Marine a few weeks back and no faults showed up. And for some reason, no “faults” were showing on my Mercury Vessel View App, until the fourth time the alarm sounded, where a “Service Required” notice showed up. Silver Lake Marine is my main sponsor, but Barrett Marine in Geneva is much closer and is a certified Mercury dealer/service center. They also do fine work and I’ve been a customer there for years. The tough thing over there is making an appointment. Fran has run a top-notch operation for decades and is always as busy as can be. I thank him for getting me in today!
Anyways, I had them take a look at it this morning. A fault did show for over-heating. Gary over there ran the motor for awhile and everything checked out fine. The thermostat appears to in good working order and Fran tells me that the new Mercury impellers are supreme. The warm-up issue probably had do with all of the dead leaves and organic matter at Long Point that my motor was dragging through and likely sucking up, given that I’d had zero issues for the first 120 hours of running the motor and the Keuka trip was on March 5th, and I guided out of Long Point on March 4th, as well as earlier in the week. No need to be a detective to figure that one out. But I’m still not sure why it sounded again. Hopefully with the fault cleared, I’ll be in the clear! We’ll see. I’m very happy with my 2023 Mercury 115 hp four-stroke. It’s super quiet, has a great, clean, logical design and nice hole-shot, especially with my 4-blade prop.
Might as well try Seneca Lake out of Sampson! I was the only angler that went out of Sampson today. The campground will open in around 3 to 4 weeks over there. Anyways, I brought perch gear and wound up marking what was almost certainly a good group of perch after motoring around for a while. The lake is super-clear and I could see bottom in 25′ of water! I only saw a few bullheads in the lake. At Barrett’s, I did see an early-season smallmouth bass poking around On the lake, not long after I started fishing, the skies became mostly clear and the wind completely died down. For what it’s worth, I could not get those perch to bite at all. About another 1/2 dozen boats were out perch fishing. 40 years ago, there would have been 100 boats out chasing perch on Seneca.
After a few hours of no hits on the perch, I tried Sampson for lakers. I hooked a 20″ fish on my first drop that got off just before I got ready to net it. I probably jinxed myself by opening up my livewell before I landed the fish and thinking about how I was going to prepare it for dinner! I had a few more hits, but none landed. Lots of fish were out from 140′ to 170′. A friend, David, nabbed a nice laker in short order south of Long Point on Seneca today. This fishery is improving by the year. I think the weather pattern and time of day had the fish negative today on Seneca for some reason, although I’m sure guys did well on Cayuga.