I had a few days off so it was time to do some "homework." I try to keep tabs on the lakes I guide and with gobies being a fairly recent arrival on Seneca, it made sense to give it a good shot. I went out of Sampson State Park yesterday (8/6.) The weather has been steady - hot and hazy with light to moderate thermals in the morning out of the south. I did a quick check on lake trout, hoping to pick one or two up for dinner. I did not mark many or hook any but I only gave it around 20 minutes. After that, it was trying the weedline that Scott caught a pike off of back on 7/23. No luck there, apart from a bullhead that hit a tube jig!
I found some weed clumps and fished bass with just one hit. One weedy finger surrounded by deep water got me a hit from a pike and a quick hook-up and drop. There's a reason I much prefer fishing for pike in the fall - more fish up shallow. The positive was the smallmouth bass fishing. I nabbed 5 nice fat goby-fed smallmouths on the day as big as 18 1/2" long. They were fighting superbly! Those came via drop-shotting. I did not have many hits from round gobies until I started fishing further downlake. Areas south of Sampson down to Watkins Glen appear to have the heaviest goby infestation.
Today I launched out of Lodi State Park. I started running south when I stopped the boat for a minute to dispense of some of the morning's coffee. Lo and behold I was marking a group of what appeared to be fish below me (I run a Lowrance Elite regular sonar.) No bites on the dropshot but when I reeled it in (it was in around 35' of water) I got hammered a couple cranks off of the bottom. After a great, strong fight I netted a chunky 19" brown trout that went home with me for dinner. I had good smallmouth bass fishing in the area.
There are some big smallmouths on Seneca Lake and we may see some record-class fish caught here in the future, but the problem is that the round gobies are pretty much everywhere and the bass population is pretty modest, so fish are scattered. They just aren't very concentrated for the most part. You might get 20 goby hits for every one smallmouth bass, if that.
We should see some good numbers of lake trout moving in shallow this winter here, along with browns, rainbows and salmon, given the sheer volume of gobies. I'd also expect the bass numbers to gradually dwindle down as goby numbers increase and bass spawning success suffers. Perch will also be big winners here - they generally spawn over vegetation away from gobies, then as they grow, they can take advantage of the goby feast. Pike will do well too, but the lack of vegetation is keeping their numbers down.
