Seneca Lake out of Sampson State Park 4/4 PM
Got out here on my own for around 4 1/2 hours. I wanted to check on the lake trout deep bite and see what was happening. Now that the presence of round gobies was officially documented, I also decided to try a couple of shallower areas.
The bite was very negative today. The good news was that I marked a lot of fish in different parts of the lake from roughly 120′ to 180′ of water. I’m sure they were all lake trout. Near Sampson, I had a lot of hits and momentary hookups, but nothing stayed attached. I think these were young, small fish. In other areas, I had a lot of chasers but no solid hits. It was very similar to what we’ve been seeing here over the past 7 or 8 years. The overcast conditions didn’t help me and it’s possible the full moon hurt the bite as well. I spent one hour working 15′ to 40′ of water in two different parts of the lake, looking for signs of any trout moving shallow. As I mentioned in my article (in the articles section on gobies in Seneca Lake), I don’t believe the trout population is high enough yet for any sort of crazy shallow bite here, but there certainly will be one as the goby population expands and the lake trout numbers increase. If it’s anything like Cayuga Lake, we’ll likely see the better, more concentrated fishing further south on the lake where the lake topography is more extreme. Time will tell! No fish hooked (for more than a second) and no fish landed today. Water level is at full pool. Lake temperature ranged from 40 to 41 degrees. A few locals are out perch fishing. Overall I saw 3 or 4 fishing boats out. It’s still nice and quiet on Seneca Lake.