Did a trip out here out of Penn Yan with Bernard and his friend Mark. Back when I lived in Trumansburg, I used to run upwards of 20 to 25+ trips on this lake a year, usually for lake trout and/or smallmouth bass. These days - being further away, I only run a handful of trips on Keuka Lake. Nowadays we're usually fly-casting for lake trout from February through April, or I'm running a tutorial trip here (learn the lake and a few techniques) on occasion. My largemouth bass experience on this lake stretches over a long period of time, but isn't very extensive in the number of times I'd go. I'd fish the lake for bass maybe a couple times every other year at most. This goes back to 1986 or so, fishing with a friend in his boat. In addition, my old Cornell boss and I fished in a few bass tournaments here in the mid-2000s. So in a nutshell, I'm not very dialed in on the bass fishing over here these days, especially the largemouths.
Bernard was aware of this and just wanted to get on the lake and fish with his buddy Mark. First things first, the launch fee at the Village Launch is up to $15 a pop! That's pretty pricey for the FL region, but it is what it is. It beats driving the extra 7 to 9 miles or more (certainly 10 minutes or more worth of driving) to the State Park (Branchport Arm) and doing a long run to get up to Penn Yan, that's for sure, so I dealt with it. We took a logical approach today and it paid off. We had some very solid bass fishing with largemouths caught up to around 18" or 19". We had a few smallmouths and decent numbers of pickerel as well. We even had a couple of bullheads that hit artificials! We had one lake trout come casting along with some nice perch and one dink. We also had a couple of rock bass. Bernard dropped a large lake trout on a bladebait too. Mark even foul hooked a carp just randomly, so it was a very interesting day. No northern pike or walleyes. Water temps were 54 on top in Penn Yan and those "warm" temps went all the way down past 25' or 30'. Very good to excellent fishing today with largemouth bass stealing the show!
