Sodus Bay/Lake Ontario 8/5
Had a great day with Mark I. We fished together last year trying for gar and struck out. Last fall we had some good landlocked salmon and OK pike fishing on Seneca Lake. We met at 11 am and went searching for gar. We finally found a school of fish suspended in around 18′ of water in the bay. A type 6 sinking fly-line produced a couple beautifully colored longnose. Later I had Mark try LC-13 and the 30′ head fished on an 8 weight produced another good fish. These gar were feeding on deep bait and it’s a new dimension in my gar fishing. Generally we’ve chased these fish near the surface with a sight-fishing approach, but sometimes they are deep and we had to go “down to where they were”.
I hadn’t been on Lake Ontario in what seems like forever, so in the evening we shot out there. We worked one of my favorite bass areas and were quickly into fish. Mark nailed a couple beauties – both 17″+ fat smallmouths! I fished a little bit too and caught a couple pigs myself. In less than 2 hours we’d landed 5 fish all in the 2 to 3lb range and a bunch of small ones, some rockbass and a perch. We dropped 3 or 4 big smallmouths as well. The fishing was as good as anything I’ve seen out there since the late 1990s. The rocking northwest winds helped, and the 1′ to 2′ waves kept most boats off the lake. The choppier the better for Lake Ontario smallmouths! We saw a nice school of alewives in shallow too. Bass were hitting on the usual suspects – drop shot rigs (fished with discontinued Berkley Emerald Shiner Power bait drop shot worms) and green pumpkin tender tubes (Bass Pro Shops) fished on round jig heads. I’m sure plenty of other presentations would have worked. I can’t wait to get out there again and spent a full-day whacking smallmouths. We used to fish the lake quite often for bass and it’s nice to see the great fishing, despite the gloom and doom re: VHS.