Guided Scott here today for a full-day trip getting underway around 7 am. As most of you know, I'm not an Oneida Lake guide, but Scott enjoys trying different places and having me show him around. We had a spectacular day on Lake Ontario jigging Kings last year. Prior to that, we did Onondaga Lake a couple of times and did OK on bass. Scott had never been on Oneida (he resides in Virginia) so I said sure, let's do it.
Fishing today was slow - no two ways about it. It was HOT outside with heat indexes reaching around 100. It'd be a nice day for Phoenix in September! The water temperatures here reached 85 (!!!!!) degrees off of the South Shore Marina. That's insanely warm and did not help us today. Another factor is the sheer volume of round gobies. They're estimated to number 22,000 gobies per acre here. Scott was snagging them left and right on his blade bait - sometimes two at a time on one hook! At other times he caught one on each treble hook simultaneously. It was insane, and I've never seen anything like that - whether on Lake Ontario or Cayuga Lake.
Although we were hoping for better fishing, it wasn't terrible. Scott nabbed 5 walleyes on the day - the best being 19.5" and he had two others right at 15". We let the barely legal ones go. Two others were undersized. Today's fish came primarily on bladebaits in 15' to 25' of water. A few came shallower. We had fish hit tube jigs and a jerkbait as well. I fished at times with Scott trying to figure out what would work best and nabbed a short walleye and a chunky smallmouth bass. I lost two very solid fish. Best fight of the day was an average sized drum that really put a bend in Scott's rod! We were hoping for at least one drum today and we got one!
Very few anglers were on the water today. When we launched, there was only a couple other rigs in the parking lot. When we got back in around 2:30, there might have been 5 rigs.
