Seneca Lake out of Watkins Glen 3/12
Steve first contacted me a couple years ago for a late season trip, but due to the weather we weren’t able to coordinate anything. We finally got a fly-fishing pike trip with his wife Christine set up. The forecast for today really changed a lot over the past few days, but we weren’t expecting the north winds around 10 to 12 mph this AM when we met at 8:30. It also was raining at a good clip. We took a long coffee break before heading out just before 10 am. The rain subsided a bit and the winds did the same.
Water temps warmed up a degree or two over the past few days and the pike were very cooperative. Christine landed the first few fish – nice 29″ to 31″ thick bodied pike. The pike fought great. By the end of the elongated half day around a dozen or so fish had been landed – most in the 27″ to 30″ range. Various set ups worked well – at first a floating line and double bunny fly did the trick. Later in the day, an intermediate line and deceiver worked best.
After the trip’s great fishing, I felt compelled to do a little fly-fishing of my own and managed to land a couple nice pike before they shut off. It’s tough to beat the grabs of aggressive pike – especially on the fly. Pike season closes Friday, so this will be it for the pike for us for awhile.
Re: Fishing superstitions – I’m not very superstitious. A lot of people, including fishermen and guides/charter captains are. One common one is that if you catch a fish on the first cast, that’ll be the only fish caught that day. I have seen things happen along those lines, but the answer is that chances are you arrived late for the morning bite and caught the tail end of it.
The “bananas on the boat” one is really goofy. We had fun joking with it this past week. It probably started way back in time where perhaps someone had a bushel of bananas onboard with a poisonous tarantula or something like that – maybe it was a ship transporting bananas. I don’t know. But I hear stories to this day of Charter Captains (often in Florida or somewhere warm) literally getting very angry at people for bringing bananas onboard. Can you imagine Al Lindner, Larry Dahlberg or Kevin Van Dam blaming bananas for poor fishing? Not a chance. Experts don’t do that. Any Capt. blaming bananas for poor luck needs to look in the mirror and do more homework. It’s a bush league move. We like to joke about it, but seriously? Anyways feel free to bring whatever you want to eat with you on a guided trip. If the fish don’t bite I’ll at least come up with a more creative excuse than the bananas you ate 😉