Reports

Guided a full-day trip with Carl, who’s been a fan of this website for awhile.  His family is renting a place on Seneca Lake this July, so he was looking to get out here and see what the lake was like.  He also has a boat and fishes the Finger Lakes.  This was a gear-fishing trip, so I brought rods set up with stickbaits, plastics, bladebaits and more.  The goal today was to highlight some of the different opportunities available on the lake.  I don’t guide perch here, but I am happy to show people some ways to target them on their own.

Salmon and trout fishing appears to be slowing down somewhat here.  There are still a lot of fish around, but we need some warmer days to help concentrate them.  They are definitely spread around and fish are likely well up the lake now in decent numbers.  Carl had some hits and follows on salmon to start but the bite was slow.  We hit some different areas.  In one area he had a follow from what appeared to be a pike.  We checked on lake trout jigging and had some fish move for the jigs, but they weren’t very aggressive.

We set up in an area that I rarely fish, but have had occasional success at over the years going back to the mid-2000s.  Carl worked a blade-bait and hooked up in nearly 40′ of water just off the bottom!  Lake trout?  Nope, we saw silver.  I slipped the net under a rainbow trout!  Why are rainbows on bottom like suckers in 40′ of water?  Is this where a bunch of the salmon are now?  The answer to the first question is round gobies.  The answer to the second question is YES – a lot of them.  If you troll the lake, you’d best forget about flatlining and you’d be better off running dipseys or riggers down towards the bottom with goby-colored lures.  Just an idea…

Like Friday, the salmon bite didn’t get going until later in the day, after the wind picked up considerably.  We also had very light winds (like Friday) which make for very tough fishing compared to windier days.  Carl got dialed in on the salmon during the last 2 hours of the trip and landed 3, two of which we kept.  He had a lot of hits and some other hookups too!  Best one was around 19″.  All in all a fun and interesting day.  Things keep changing and the goby-bite here is setting up markedly differently than the goby-bite did on Cayuga Lake back around 2015.  The fish here seem to be deeper.  Water temps are still cold at 40.  We had 43 in one area as well.  Perch action still appears to be slow for the most part, although they are around.