Seneca Lake out of Watkins Glen 6/5 + 6/6
Guided a PM 1/2 day yesterday and a full day today on Seneca Lake. Water levels are good – perhaps a little high. Surface temps are in the upper 50s. There is some pollen and cottonwood seed on the surface. Weed growth remains minimal.
6/5 PM: Met Tom and Nick at the launch at 3:15. The guys had some GPS issues on the way over and we missed our scheduled starting time. We had a couple other delays and were finally underway. I ran into a my buddy Shahab and he keyed me into some salmon action he’d been having recently. The guys wanted to target pike originally but conditions weren’t great for them. We didn’t have much pike luck – a couple hits and follows. Salmon were following our lures in various areas – mostly undersized fish. Nick managed to nab a 14″ to 15″ largemouth bass on the jerkbait. The weather was pretty unsettled and thunderstorms were in the forecast as being possible but never did materialize. In my buddy’s area we found a decent number of salmon and had some follows. Nick wound up nabbing his first Landlocked Atlantic Salmon and he was incredibly stoked after some terrific jumps. We kept the 18 1/2″ fish for his dinner. We had one pike hit before we called it quits at dark. It was pouring rain for the last two hours or so of our trip.
6/6: Guided Mark I. for the full day starting at around 7:30 am. It was a foggy morning. He is mainly a fly-fisherman and enjoys musky fishing but after a tough tarpon trip in Florida and a tough day with me on Owasco Lake last month, he decided to go with the more forgiving northerns at Seneca rather than heading over to Waneta. Seneca out of Watkins still hasn’t been providing very good pike fishing as far as I can tell. It certainly hasn’t been good for me when I’ve been out guiding. The lake is fishing as if it were May 15th, not early June. We are around 3 weeks behind. Pike are still recovering from the spawn. I did tell him about our salmon fishing so we had a couple options.
It was a fairly miserable morning with moderate fog and a lot of mist. It was cool and the wind was blowing up to around 12 mph out of the north by my estimation. Mark did hook up with a 25″ pike in short order on a “squirmel” streamer he tied up. A half hour later and he got crushed near the boat by a well-fed gorgeous 29″er. I took a cast with a spoon in a shallow area while he was tying on a new fly and caught a thin 23″er. Apart from that, he had one other follow. The wind died and our pikin’ went south. We tried some salmon fishing up the lake in a few different areas with no luck. Funny how that goes – we pike fished yesterday and got a salmon and saw a bunch, today the pike were hitting and salmon weren’t around. They have fins and like to use them! Gorgeous day on the water today. We saw a few bass around as well.