Seneca Lake out of Watkins Glen 5/3 AM
Guided the Hermans today for a 1/2 day starting around 8:30 am. I wanted to go for an earlier start, but they have a long drive up, so we went a bit later. I don’t think it hurt us today – we had some nice winds out of the south to start, then they turned calm and finally came up lightly out of the NNW.
Another fairly tough day today. We worked some areas on the south end of the lake for salmon and pike. We saw a few pike but no solid hits. John said he had one hit, which may have been a salmon. Some nice carp were cruising the flats and it looked like one boat was taking advantage of the fly-fishing opportunity. I’m not sure. But it’s a great chance to nail a 20lb+ carp on the fly, and something I should do one of these days, but I’m too busy.
Laker jigging on the south end remains poor. There are a lot of fish around, but I think the murky water makes them negative towards the jigs. People are catching some salmon and browns casting from shore at Clute Park. Eleonore had one nice follow from an average (18″) brown trout near there.
We worked up the lake doing some casting for pike and salmon. John had a good hit on an alewife colored tube jig. I thought he hooked a nice pike, but after a great fight and some good runs I slipped the net under a 25″ wild lake trout. It came out of around 15′ of water with sunny conditions and relatively little wind – go figure! We kept it and it was packed with alewives.
I felt we could have scored on salmon or pike had we spent the entire time targeting one or the other, but I moved us around hoping to capitalize on the wind while we had it. Without trying to sound like a broken record, I must say that I’m fairly certain things will pick up shortly with the warming conditions. I expect good pike fishing and good salmon/brown trout fishing as the lake warms up. Laker jigging action should pick up a lot this week. Time will tell!