Seneca Lake out of Watkins Glen 9/25 + Keuka Lake 9/26 PM
Seneca Lake out of Watkins Glen: Guided Doug and his son Steve for the full-day on Saturday. We did a bunch of different things – more or less mixing it up. In a nutshell, there is no shortage of smallmouth bass on this lake. We had 4 or 5 areas produce fish – all in all the guys might have landed 15 to 20 bass or more dropshotting Gulp in around 15′ to 25′ of water. Only “problem” is that most ran around 10″ to 11″ with maybe a few hitting 12″. We didn’t measure the fish, but they were small. There are some large smallies around on Seneca Lake this year – Doug caught a 19″ fish a week ago. But the majority of bass we saw were small. The guys fished pike for around 45 minutes with no luck.
I think the bass are starting to stage a comeback now that the pike population is so low. It makes sense. We will likely see perch numbers go up as well. Bass on this lake grow fairly slowly, but a lot of them are just around 11″ and a 12″ to 15″ smallmouth is a fun fish, so I’d keep an eye on this lake in the future. I had the guys do a little bit of pike casting without luck. We did manage some rock bass too.
We checked on lakers around the Severne Point area. We marked a lot of fish but they weren’t cooperative around noon when we fished them. 90′ to 115′ or so was the depth. Surface temp was 62 today.
Keuka Lake out of Branchport: Boats are being pulled off of Keuka in droves now and the lake is quiet! It might be my favorite time of year to fish. Barry and his daughter Julie met me at the launch at 12:30pm. They fish with me once a year or every two years. We ran to the Bluff and found plenty of lakers but they weren’t very active. I ran into a friend who told me the bite was very good in the AM but had just slowed. When fishing, you have to fish on the “fishes’ terms” – not on ours! But sometimes PM fishing is better. Barry landed one nice laker and missed one. We did some dropshotting along weededges and points and the sunfish, bluegills, rockbass and even a small pickerel cooperated. The size of the pans was impressive. 15′ to 25′ was best. We went back to laker jigging and Barry filled his limit with fish to over 25″. Julie usually does better on the lakers, but today was Barry’s day! Generally good laker fishing and it’ll likely peak in October. Water temps were 67.