4/21 Watkins Glen: Monday through Wednesday were my days off from guiding this week, but after the hot action for large salmon on Sunday, I had to get out and try it for myself, despite being quite tired. Conditions were forecast to be similar for Monday, so how could I go wrong? Well the thing about salmon is (as Peter Thilveros says about smallmouth bass) is that they have fins and they use them. A few fish were around the usual areas like the canal, but it was clear to me after a short while that a lot of fish had moved out.
I only had 3 hours to fish before I had to get back to Ithaca to teach my Cornell classes. Unfortunately it wasn't enough time for me to connect on my flies. I worked 3 or 4 areas and finally found some fish, but after missing a hit I had to go. That's how it goes!
4/22 Cayuga Lake out of Long Point: I had an email from Joel, who was looking to get out for a 1/2 day for lakers or salmon so I decided to forget about a day off. I wasn't going to do salmon after the cold evenings. I figured gear fishing would produce fish, but I didn't want to chance it, so we went after lakers. Laker fishing wasn't easy. We moved a lot in order to locate fish. After some searching we found lakers very deep. Joel wound up catching his limit of 3 fish which we kept. All were 24" to 25". Lamprey wounding wasn't bad - one fresh scar, one clean fish and one with a healed wound. We found fish in upwards of 190' FOW, though some were in as shallow as 110'. Water level was high. Not too much debris was around.