Reports

Guided Dave and one of his son’s, Dapper Dan today for a full-day getting underway just after 7:30 am.  What can I say about today?  The smallmouth bass fishing was excellent, but the weather was awful, as has been the case over the past three days.  Some of you may remember Dave and Dan.  Sometimes Dave fishes with “Dismal Dan,” but usually it’s one of his sons instead!  He’s been coming up here using his own boat for the past few years, but he sold it, so I hope to see more of him in the future.

We spent the day on the northern 1/2 of the lake due to the wind and weather.  I absolutely love taking people down to the southern half of this lake due to the sheer beauty and oftentimes, solitude that can be experienced there, but many times the fishing is just as good, if not better, up north.  Unfortunately the boat traffic is typically heavier up there and that includes the tour boat as well.  The guys hadn’t eaten rock bass in years and never out of a clean, cold lake, so we were hoping to get around 15 or so good ones for the cooler.  The guys also wanted to keep 6 to 8 smallmouths to eat as well.  We were easily able to take care of those requests.  The rock bass were all over the place – everywhere we fished from shallow to deep.  The same could be said about the smallmouths – we caught them from 4′ of water out to over 30′.  Drop-shotting was best for both species, but we took plenty of fish with tube jigs and some nice bass with the Superflukes later in the day.

Best fish of the day was Dapper Dan’s 20″ smallmouth!  Great specimen for this lake and we released it.  Most bass ran the usual 10″ to 15″, but we had a lot of 13″ to 15.5″ fish that fought great and hit with gusto.  No walleyes or perch today, but Dave is an avid fan of this website and read that the Skaneateles Lake lake trout were top-notch, so we fished those for around 90 minutes.  He landed one at 17.5″ that we kept.  It hit a tube jig that resembled a young perch in some ways.  The wind was downright brutal at times gusting into the low-20s and my trolling motor power diminished in fairly short order but never ran out.  Batteries worked well despite really being pushed hard!  My Simms Raingear also did a great job for me today.