Seneca Lake out of Watkins Glen 3/13 + 14

I fished Thursday on my own for the afternoon and on Friday I guided fly-fishing regular Mark I.  Fishing is good to very good for landlocked salmon and a lot is happening on Seneca Lake right now.

3/13 PM:  I was pretty psyched to get a chance to fly-fish on my own today.  Over the past couple of years I've had a list of clients waiting for good salmon fishing (both gear and fly) on Seneca or Cayuga Lakes, so I did offer some folks the day!  I was happy to fish on my own - it's been quite some time since I was last out.  From reports I had, the AM bite today was a bit slow - that tends to happen this time of year with cold nighttime temperatures and cold water temps.  Just like any species, salmon have their bite windows and they vary depending on the day, time of year and conditions.

I timed things right today and by my third cast I had a follow from a nice salmon.  About 45 minutes later, I had a very good bite-window for maybe 2 hours.  I landed some nice fish including a fat chrome 22"er that jumped 4 or 5 times and did a lot of digging as well.  That fish had a good-sized fresh lamprey wound on it, so I kept it.

After my bite slowed down,  I spent a good 1/2 hour motoring around in hopes of finding a perch school.  I had no luck after covering maybe 3 miles of lake.  However, my best contact on the lower lake - Pete, and I were texting since he had also been out fishing earlier.  He told me that he'd marked a large school of perch!  I was able to locate it pretty easily thanks to Pete's great directions.  I hit the bite-window perfectly and had a hit on virtually every drop for a half-hour, before a good sized lake trout engulfed one of my perch plastics!  That slowed things down for a bit, but I was able to locate them again shortly thereafter.  I took home 19 really big ones and a couple smaller ones (Seneca "small" is 9") that I couldn't release due to the depth I was hauling them up from.  They were all spitting up young gobies as I reeled them up.  What's odd though, is that my laker (which I kept) had a few HUGE alewives in its stomach.  My salmon had gobies in it.

Friday March 14th:  It was good to see Mark after my 2 month lay-off guiding.  I had to cancel a late-December trip due to my water issue.  I had salmon casting equipment onboard, but Mark spent the entire day fly-fishing - with maybe a half-hour period when we took a break and he caught some perch to take home.  He's not a fan of killing salmon, browns or rainbows if he can help it.  No doubt they are all beautiful fish and much harder to come by than lake trout.  Our fly-fishing was slow for our first hour, but picked up shortly thereafter.  Mark had a very good day with what I'd call slow but steady fly-fishing throughout.  His best fish went 19 1/2" and his smallest was 14.5".  The fish in-between ran 16.5" to 17.5".  The fish are fighting great and "outpunching" their weight-class.  He had at least one, if not two encounters with bigger fish.  I saw a silvery flash just as he got a hit that did not hook-up - and it was a broad flash.  Definitely a mid-20s inch fish.

These fish were spitting up loads of round gobies on the way up.

In a nutshell, what we're seeing here on Seneca Lake now is very reminiscent of what we saw on Cayuga Lake around 2015 or so - the round goby population is starting to peak and fish are changing their usual habits to take advantage of the goby buffet.  No doubt the perch growth rates are going to take-off.  Same with the bass and other species like drum, carp, lake trout and so on.  But we may see smallmouth spawning success suffer.  We may also see the salmon get more bottom oriented in the winter.  As alewives move "up and in" around mid-March, even goby-fed salmon start looking up more.  They definitely prefer feeding up higher rather than on the bottom, but they will adapt accordingly as we saw on Cayuga Lake when the goby population peaked.  I may get out here with some jigs shortly and see what's happening.

As for hot nearshore lake trout fishing, Seneca Lake doesn't have nearly the lake-trout population density (abundance) that Cayuga Lake has, so it's very much a toss-up regarding whether we see some hot nearshore winter action here on lakers, like what we experienced on Cayuga Lake in the mid-2010s.

The Catherine Creek electrofishing was very impressive!  Rainbow trout are still facing predation and attacks from lampreys, but they are in good condition (they are fat) and numbers are much improved over past years.