Guided Steve and his friend Matt today for a full-day trip. Steve was out with me a good decade ago; he grew up in the area, moved away and is back to stay. Matt is a fishing fanatic who has fished and traveled all over the place, as well as done some fly-fishing guiding out west. We planned on launching at 7:30 am, but Seneca Lake was very "sporty" - with steady south winds gusting over 20 mph. A few bass boats were also waiting for the lake to settle down a bit. We had a storm cell in the area and the forecast was for light and variable winds. There's a fairly large bass tournament here this weekend. Having multi-day bass events on Seneca Lake heading into the fall is not a great idea, despite the good bass fishing. This lake is a different animal than Cayuga Lake. It gets rough like Lake Erie or Oneida, and it doesn't take much. It's easy to get in trouble.
We waited about a 1/2 hour before heading out. The lake was still rough but I wanted to see if we could get across it. It didn't take long to realize that crossing wasn't a good idea! As rough as the lake can be around Sampson, once you get halfway across, it usually will be 25% to 50% worse. Then you are screwed. I had an idea and long story short, it ended up paying off. We had superb fishing for a good 4 hours then fair fishing afterwards and by the last couple hours of the day (after the lake flattened out) the bite slowed down. The guys had 4 doubles on and I literally did not have time to re-rig messed up tackle for a good 20 minutes. Every time I'd get ready to tie on a new knot for a new leader, one of the guys would be hooked up. I'm sure it had a lot to do with the low-pressure system.
I'll reiterate what I've said previously, but anglers need to harvest lake trout here. I think the DEC did the right thing with increasing stocking, especially in light of the reduced natural production here with lake trout thiamine levels being very low (Google "lake trout thiamine deficiency" "Early Mortality Syndrome in Lake trout" or something similar and you can get the details) but that being said, the lake trout population is young here and it's pretty massive. Clearly the stocked fish are surviving very well! There are plenty of trout in the 18" to 23" range here, whereas Cayuga's laker population is much older with a lot more 27" to 29" fish. Too many older lake trout will impact the forage base and they are major cannibals of brown trout, rainbows and salmon. We have harvested a lot of fish here this year. They are top-notch on the table.
We did see decent numbers of wild lake trout today. Most were in the 25" range. There aren't a lot of younger wild fish out there - at least in the catchable range. No action on non-lakers today. We had a few follows that Matt saw, but he wasn't able to ID them. Lake level is still good and the water clarity is excellent as well.
