Got out here with Ron and Rachel for a full-day starting just before 8 am. Water levels here are very high and slightly cloudy in places but overall lake conditions for fishing are good. There are some large "debris-fields" around, so beware! I'm sure they are much worse down by Ithaca/Myers/Taughannock. Those tributaries can push logs into the lake the size of telephone poles.
Mid-May with a good amount of warm rain (at least warmer than the lake) generally starts the shallow push of the lake trout. We worked areas from 40' out to 80' with some hits/chases to start. After maybe two hours, our bite got going pretty good. We are around a full-moon and that can slow down the bite at times, but usually there's a peak bite around midday, and that's what we had. Fishing was good, not great. We had double-digit hookups, but wound up shy of the double digits for fish landed. "Big Fish Rachel" did come through with a couple nice lakers - one at 29" and one just over 30". We had one small lamprey come up on one fish. Ron did a good job on the numbers and one of his smaller fish really fought great. Fishing slowed quite a bit after 1 pm, but we still had some good chases and hookups. Bait is starting to move in big-time. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the nice salmon around 24"+ that Rachel had follow her jig in! As is generally the case this time of year, the silver fish are around Long Point and Dean's Cove. Fun day with PERFECT weather! (Much better than last time we were out together!) Midges weren't too bad either. Only a few loons remain on the lake as far as I could tell. Surface temps got up to around 52/53 today, but the water just underneath remains much colder.
