Got out here on what has become more or less an annual scouting trip on Seneca Lake. Today I wanted to check on salmon fishing and pike habitat. I also wanted to see if there was any kind of inshore movement of fish feeding on round gobies.
My good south end Seneca contact Pete happened to be out trolling, wrapping up just before I launched. He had some good salmon action today with mostly smaller fish but a couple of good ones. On the day, using spinning gear I caught a few salmon, all were sub-legal. (I will go to the fly-fishing gear once the water cools down a little bit more.) I had follows from a decent number of fish including a couple of good ones. I did not find any good pike habitat of note. The phosphorus issues that wound up choking the shallows of this lake with milfoil have likely been dealt with! There's still some milfoil around on this lake, but in far lesser quantities than the past few decades. Once you get rid of the milfoil aka pike habitat, the pike population declines. That's what we've seen here.
I tried some areas out with goby imitating lures and did not have any action. We may or may not see Seneca Lake set up like Cayuga Lake did a decade ago with large movements of fish inshore. The southern portions of Seneca Lake do not have nearly the numbers of lake trout that Cayuga's or Seneca's mid-lake and northern lake areas have, so if the goby-bite sets up, it may wind up being better up the lake. Of course the cold water season is just getting underway, so things may change a lot in the next month or two. Stay tuned!
As for salmon, casting and fly-casting will produce fish now, but many are still deep. This bite should get started in earnest in about two to three weeks if we continue to get cold weather. I think we're going to have another solid salmon/trout season here on Seneca and on Cayuga Lakes. We shall see. Surface temperature was 51 degrees today. The lake level here is very low and launching wasn't as easy as it usually is over at Lucky Hare/Schamel's.