Lake trout fishing appears to be improving on Cayuga Lake, although we stumbled on the 15th. Fish are widely scattered from 20' of water out to 150' or more. They are on bottom, in the middle of the water column and high up near the surface. Baitfish are just about everywhere and fish are gorging heavily on multiple year classes of alewives. There's still some debris floating around, but most of it from Long Point to Dean's and north is small. The Ithaca to Taughannock stretch of lake is a different story with some big stuff to keep an eye out for. Midge action (bugs!) has been heavy, so don't wear good clothing out when fishing - these things don't bite, but they stain clothing when they get smushed, which happens a lot!
5/15: Guided Zach and his friend Matt for a half-day trip getting underway just before 7 am. The guys had to be off of the water by 11:30 am since they needed to be back home around 12:30 or 1 pm to attend to their respective dogs, thus the earlier than usual start time. I had high hopes for today's trip, since Zach and Matt were out with me on a fairly brutal day last December where air temps never got more than a couple degrees about freezing. A couple of dinks were landed by Zach on that trip and Matt lost a good hookup, but apart from a bunch of bites Zach had on bottom, it was tough. Today was another very tough day for us. We had plenty of bait on the sonar when we got underway and some fish as well. The guys had a few good hits but no hookups. Zach does a lot of his own style of jigging, which I'm not sure works well alongside of what I had Matt doing, but either way, things were tough. However I do think we would've had a fish or two at least had he stuck with my method - we did have some fish chasing up and down at times. We'll never know! We tried a bunch of areas without much action. It was supposed to be a mostly sunny day but it was cloudy all morning until about 10 or 10:30 am. I felt that the bite was going to get better and had some signs of that, but the guys had to hit the road. Zero fish landed and we didn't even have a good hookup! Ouch! One guy I talked to, who starts really early when he fishes, said he had a good bite from around 5:30 am till about 8 am and then they completely shut down. Hot morning bites aren't uncommon - they are the norm, especially in the summer, but these Cayuga fish tend to cycle on and off and there's usually another peak bite or two this time of the year later on. This was not the way I wanted to start my three day run of trips!
5/16: Guided Denis and his brother Jim for a full-day starting at 8:30 am. The weather forecast for today looked ominous. When I checked the radar in the AM, a severe line of thunderstorms was heading our way. Our starting time was 8 am and I arrived at Long Point around 7:45. We decided to wait the storms out in our respective vehicles. Fortunately the storms were pretty much past our area within 15 to 20 minutes! After that, we had an AMAZING weather day - simply beautiful! I knew we'd probably be in business after seeing a ton of bait on my sonar, plus knowing that yesterday's bite was so tough for us (maybe they had eaten at night, thus the hot AM bite yesterday.) Jim hadn't done any of the laker jigging before and quickly hooked up in our first area. The fish got off, but I did feel a sense of relief - it was already a better day than yesterday! He landed the first fish in probably 40 to 50' of water and we were underway. I think he landed another and then Denis got hot for awhile. Most of our fish came from 45' to 70' although we nabbed one out in around 120' to 130' later in the day when the lake completely flattened out. We wound up with 9 very solid fish landed - all but one ran from 27" to 29". They were full of bait fish and in good condition.
