Skaneateles Lake 7/6 + Owasco Lake 7/7
Did a 1/2-day trip on Friday AM on Skaneateles Lake. Hank has a place on the lake and wanted to learn a few new areas. He had done very well on numbers of (mostly small) smallmouth bass a few days earlier. The shallow fly-fishing bite slowed down considerably for us on Friday. Hank’s son Joe (I hope I got that name right – it’s been a couple days!)joined us and used some spinning gear. Small bass were in the shallows. We could see some larger fish hovering around in the deeper weedbeds. Hank’s floating line probably wasn’t getting down enough – a sink tip or a full sinking line would have gotten his unweighted flies down. He didn’t mind – he was expertly casting his Sage DS 5 wt. rod with a floating line and having fun. We got to one area and had a few nice follows from some very good fish. But they wouldn’t grab the flies! I showed Joe how to work superflukes, tubes and some hard jerkbaits. He picked up one halfway decent fish on a fluke. After the morning was over I went back on my own and did a little fishing with the same basic results. A few fish but nothing special then the wind came up and I was pretty beat – so I took off. Hank reports that the Hex hatch has been going strong lately. Overall I’d say the hot shallow smallmouth bite is done on Skaneateles for the most part. H2O was around 68 on the top.
Owasco was a full day trip with Paul and Dave. Things started out great with 3 fish landed and hits on just about every drop of the jigs for the first 10 or 15 minutes! Just a fantastic start on lakers running from 22″ to 26″. Fish were in around 65′ to 85′ of water. Bait was around in good numbers. The action slowed for us a bit but we had a very good day with 7 nice lakers landed and numerous fish missed and lost – fun stuff! We tried a little dropshotting and jigging for bass with a hand sized sunfish and rockbass to show for our efforts. Fishing slowed in the afternoon but we located some more in around 80’+ around 1 pm. One pair of anglers fishing copper line caught a nice northern (probably around 30″ to 32″) on bottom in over 55′ of water!!! The presence of alewives in these lakes really messes up the “conventional fishing”.