Seneca Lake out of Sampson State Park 7/21

Guided back-to-back 1/2 days out of Sampson State Park.  Here's the rundown:

AM Trip:  Guided Ben, his brother John and their father Tim for a 1/2 day starting at around 6:45 am.  Ben had jigged lake trout before on his own in his kayak on Cayuga  - the other guys might have done a little, I'm not sure.  We had a bit of a bite-window happening right at the get-go off of Sampson.  Ben nabbed a laker around 19" in short order and then a nicer one a little later at 29" and around 8 1/2lbs.  John had some hits, as did Tim but they were unable to connect.  Later on, Ben lost what appeared to be another decent one after a short but decent fight.  After the first 90 minutes or so, the fishing turned into a lot of what we've seen on Seneca Lake for years - fish chasing and hitting lightly but not grabbing very well.  I couldn't have asked for a better group of guys today, but unfortunately the fish didn't cooperate nearly as much as I wish they would have.

PM Trip:  My afternoon trip got underway around noon.  It was with "Big-Brown Leo" and his wife Ada again.  They usually do two full-day trips with me on their vacation, but due to my truck issues, we went with a 1/2 day today.  Yesterday was open, but they like to have a day between fishing trips to rest and do other activities.  The rest of this month is booked up with the exceptions of Sunday July 28th (predicted highs in the low-90s) and July 31st.  The first two weeks in August remain open for trips by the way...

Leo and Ada have done a whole lot of my style of lake trout "jigging" with me over the years.  They have it dialed in very well - the retrieves, hooking and fighting of the fish, as Leo's monster brown of 7/19 proves.  I took them to some areas that we didn't fish this morning;  we basically continued working down the lake.  Leo had hits/hookup on his first three drops of his jig.  We were clearly into another bite-window.  The fish were getting off, which often means that they are smaller lake trout - and that proved to be the case.  They wound up landing 5 lakers from around 19" to 25" and one nice chunky 22" brown just under 6lbs!  Ada nabbed the brown, which was great.  I've never had many browns on Seneca while targeting lake trout.  We used to target browns here with the jigs in the early 2010s with some good luck.  Ada's brown came from 105' of water!   We kept picking away at lakers with some more drops and then our bite window also shut down.  That's the way it goes, especially in the summer!

A few notes from today on Seneca Lake:

With the tougher bite today and short bite-windows, I figured what fish we caught would be full of bait.  They were not!  The large laker from the AM trip had maybe two fairly well digested alewives in its stomach.  The smaller one from the AM didn't have much at all.  Leo and Ada's lakers had digested a few alewives but not many.  Zero gobies showed up in any of the fish.

Decent numbers of wild fish still abound on Seneca.  The good news is that there are a lot of 18" to 21" lakers out there.  These fish will help to knock down the round goby and alewife populations once they get bigger.  Seneca fished better for us last year, but we are well over the hump here.  It is worth fishing here for the most part.  It's not fishing as consistently as Owasco Lake or Cayuga (when the bloom isn't going on), but it's still worthwhile fishing here.

Lamprey wounding is next to non-existent on these smaller lake trout and Ada's brown was super-clean.  Lampreys usually select for larger prey, but if they were super-abundant we'd likely see some on smaller lakers.  None of the lakers had fresh scars.  The 29"er from the AM had healed wounds but the mid-20s inch fish from the PM trip were clean.  Good job there Region 8!