Guided a full-day trip with Mihai and his son Alex. If you're a long time follower of this site, you may recall the name Mihai (aka "Mike.") He was one of my main lake trout jigging clients starting back around 2006 or so. Once he started his family, he laid off of the guided trips. I last saw him nearly 11 years ago in late 2014, and prior to that, I probably hadn't seen him in 3 or 4 years. Today he was joined by his son Alex, who is now in college. Alex was probably 7 or 8 years old during my last trip with his father.
I'll cut right to the chase here: the fishing was tough again. We were very optimistic since we had a lot of seemingly good to great opportunities with fish chasing jigs and almost hitting them, but not. In addition, a couple of friends of mine had very good fishing yesterday. Anyways, my guys each landed a nice fish today and Mihai missed a fair number of hits - mostly light ones. We fished thoroughly and were on respectable numbers of fish throughout the day. It was very reminiscent of Seneca Lake from around 2016 or so until 2022.
To help give a better perspective on the bite, I had a good client/friend out on the lake (Jamie) all week renting a house up near Dean's Cove. He's an excellent jig fisherman as is his son and the other guys with them. They were out on a daily basis - usually using two boats, sometimes fishing all day. During most days they averaged 4 to 5 fish, nearly all coming in the middle of the day during a short bite-window (so if they had started early and quit around 10 am or 11, they would have only landed a fish or two, if that on some of the days.) On one of the days, one of the boats landed just one fish all day long. Most mornings were very slow with maybe a fish or two landed. Yesterday was their best day (I believe they got into double-digits) and they even nabbed a 35", 15lb. laker. So during a week of fishing, they had one very good to excellent day and a bunch of so-so days by Cayuga standards. Another friend was on Canandaigua Lake today and boated one laker. I'm guessing a lot of this is a weather issue. We have not had a week of good, warming stable weather over the past two months.
Cold water had moved into some of the areas we were fishing today, so we weren't around much bait to start, which may have helped us. The fish up shallow were aggressive, but tough to jig up given the calm conditions. I did not bring any spinning gear set-up with bladebaits or jigs, but that might have been a decent call today (I did do that with Jack a week or so ago, and it didn't produce for us, but we didn't give it real long.)
It appeared as though every one with a boat within a 40 mile radius was on Cayuga Lake today. Who could blame them? Last Sunday was like a late-October/early November day - I never quit wearing my winter gear.
