Cayuga Lake out of Long Point 1/1

HAPPY NEW YEAR!  Let's hope 2022 is a good one.

1/1/22:  Cayuga Lake out of Long Point - Got out with my buddy Todd here starting at around 10:30. We fished until around 4 pm.  After some tough jigging back in November, I was wondering how things would pan out today.  Fortunately, it appears that we are back on track after the high water of 2021 and the extraordinarily warm water temperatures.  Todd and I checked the shallows for around an hour for any fish that might be searching for gobies or up shallow for some other reason.  We nabbed two lakers in the 19" to 21" range on bladebaits.  I had one fairly bone-jarring hit up high that may have been a salmon - I don't know, it didn't hook up.  We had one or two other grabs but nothing special and certainly nothing like we saw in close over the past 4 or 5 years.

I was really interested in checking out the deeper bite.  We found good numbers of lake trout in the usual mid-winter depths of around 120' to 150' of water.  Fishing was very good!   We had a double or two hooked up at times.  We wound up landing 8 more solid lakers (out deep) up to 31".  My 31"er had some weird sores on it (stuff I've seen on occasion on fish in different lakes) so it wasn't photo worthy.  Most of our fish ran around 25" long.   We both dropped a fair number of hits as well, but overall, I'd call the action very good and much better than what we were seeing out here in late October and November after the last deluge of rain and subsequent tougher bite.

The water level is low but still easily launchable at Long Point.  I saw a couple other boats on the water over the course of the day.  Looks like we're going to have some cold weather ahead of us this week with a couple days reaching somewhat reasonable high temperatures.  It felt great to get 2022 on Cayuga Lake off to a good start.  I cleaned a bunch of fish and they had very little in them.  One big alewife in one and maybe a small fish or two in another that I didn't look at.   One of the shallow smaller fish we released puked up what appeared to be a small goby or two on the way up.