Skaneateles Lake AM/Sodus Bay PM 6/13
Today was a long day! I met Gary at the State launch on Skaneateles Lake at 5:45 am. So I was up at 3 am! We went over a bunch of good smallmouth bass patterns. He caught a lot of fish- mostly smaller 9″ to 12″ fish, but he did managed 4 or 5 nice 14″ to 16″ fish. We saw a couple nice (big) rainbow trout around. I don’t catch too many rainbows on the green pumpkin tube jigs – they seem to hit streamers and hair jigs better – but a couple fish did show themselves on the tubes. A couple rockbass were caught as well – they seem to be recovering from the VHS virus of a year or two ago. Fish all looked healthy. Gary used tube jigs, hair jigs, a spinnerbait, soft jerkbait and hard jerkbaits.
After the trip was over I met my friend Jared at a convenience store on Rt. 89 and we drove over to Sodus Bay. Conditions were perfect for gar fishing. High, hot sun, low winds and warm water! We saw tons of gar – maybe 100 in one area. We tried some gear fishing presentations and didn’t have too much luck, but Jared coaxed one into hitting a soft plastic with a special rig. The fish fought great – 3 nice drag ripping runs and some topwater thrashing. I landed one small gar on a rope fly. The gar were near schools of sunfish. Conditions changed – we had a clueless water skier slaloming around in the shallows and the wind died down. The sunfish went deep and our gar scattered and moving deep as well. We’ve had some luck fishing deep gar but we decided to go after the abundant drum instead. The drum were not in a positive mood. We had a lot of follows, but few hits. I landed one small drum and that was it. We caught a load of nice largemouth bass – good fish. Most had hook scars – there’s clearly a lot of angling pressure on the Sodus Bay largemouths. We worked a lot of drum areas with nothing but bass and a small pike to show for our efforts. The heat and fatigue got to me by 6:30 pm so we got off the bay. Water levels are nice and the bay temps are in the mid to high 70s. The bass fishing is excellent!