Guided Jay and his friend Steve for a half-day trip out of Sampson starting at 6:30 am. Fishing during the first hour was a bit slow for us, but we made a move and it paid off in fairly short order. Fishing wound up being good and the guys landed 8 nice lake trout running around 19" to 26" long. One of the fish was wild. Best fishing was from 75' to 95' FOW or so. We had luck on chartreuse silk, white, white/chart. tail, and alewife colors.
After getting everything put away, I noticed DEC was present and doing some research. They are finishing up their standard gill netting for lake trout. I talked to the guys and in a nutshell, the lower half of the lake had very sparse numbers of lake trout and the upper half - roughly from Long Point to Geneva had lots of fish. Only around 20% to 25% of the fish are wild at this point in time. I can say that the lake trout here are looking very good. No signs of gobies in their stomachs - they are eating alewives and sculpins. A few salmon and browns (at least one brown) were also caught as bycatch.
