Sodus Bay 8/5 + Seneca Lake out of Sampson 8/6
Sodus Bay 8/5: Guided Mark for what’s become an annual fly-fishing gar trip on the bay. It was what I now call a “Faucett Day” – on and off! (If you were a Charlie’s Angels fan, you could have called it a “Fawcett Day”.) Fishing started out fantastic with abundant, albeit mostly smaller gar chasing and hitting on nearly every cast for our first drift. Mark landed 4 gar – mostly fish under 36″. After that, the wind came up, the sun became obscured by clouds a bit and the bite just died. We moved around, we tried deep sinking lines and slower sinking lines with not even a follow from the prehistoric fish. There were schools of what appeared to by YOY (young of the year) alewives around, and that’s what I think the gar were keying in on.
After a few hours of fruitless casting, I ran the boat back to the launch and we got some gear rigged up for bass. Mark did some dropshotting and casting a Senko and managed to catch a couple 14″ largemouths. Boat traffic got pretty heavy with the weekend underway, and we called it a day.
Hit Orbakers for dinner on the way home. Terrific burger, onion rings and malted milk shake. You’ll forget about “Five Guys” and “In ‘n Out Burger” in a hurry over there! Well worth the trip…It’s about 9 miles West of Sodus on Rt. 104.
Seneca Lake 8/6: By the time I got back from Sodus it was 11 pm Friday night. I met Kyle and Joe over at Sampson at 6:30 am and we got underway. Seneca Lake was threatening storms -with some wind coming up from the south around 10 to 12 mph. We shot over to the west side N. of Dresden and started fishing. Joe had a couple hits. The lake seemed calmer (probably the illusion of calmness via Long Point) so I tried running the guys N. to Belhurst. As we got up there, the lake started whitecapping pretty good and by then the winds were up around 15 mph. We gave it a short try and then after taking a wave over the bow and having some tricky boat control issues we ran back south again. No question about it, we had some stormy weather in the general area, but Kyle’s IPhone showed no signs of T-Storms – just a lot of impending rain.
There were plenty of fish and bait on the west shore. Joe wound up hooking and landing a couple 17 1/2″ cookie cutter wild lake trout. He dropped a couple as well – one that felt heavier. Kyle had a few hits. Rain started coming down good and the wind cranked back up so we called it a day. Tough day,but given the conditions I thought the guys did well.