Skaneateles Lake 5/19 + Cayuga Lake 5/20

Guided back-to-back full-day trips on Skaneateles and then Cayuga Lake over the past two days.

Skaneateles Lake 5/19:  Met Mark I. at the launch around 8 am and we were underway shortly thereafter.  We had tough conditions to start with very little wind, which makes fishing here much tougher.  We didn't have much luck in the first couple hours of the trip.  Mark wound up hooking an average lake trout on a bladebait, but it got off.

Eventually we started getting into some smallmouth bass on a jerkbait.  I took a water temperature and although my depthfinder read 55 or so on the surface, five feet down I had 45!   Mark had great fly-fishing out with me last year out here with cooler temps on top, but today's warm surface temperature was misleading due to the hot weather of the past couple of days.  The lake remains darn cold!

With that in mind, I took Mark to some early-season bass areas and we had some very good fishing for the remainder of the day.  He had some great action on the fly-rod (a 7 wt with an intermediate line and olive woolly bugger or chartreuse/white Clouser minnow - both flies worked great.)  Most fish were typical 13" Skaneateles bass but he had some around 14" to 16".  All of them fought great!  We had one rockbass as well.

Very few anglers were on the lake today.  During the afternoon, we saw some jet skis, kayaks and paddleboarders.  I can't blame people for wanted to get out given the long cold winter we had and the cool wet spring.  That being said, with the lake being so cold, they are taking some risks if they wind up in the water for long.

Cayuga Lake out of Long Point State Park 5/20:  Today I guided Rick and his two college buddies both named Gary.  We had another slow start to the day today.  The forecast called for NW winds 5 to 10 mph with occasional gusts over 20 and sunny skies.  That's not too bad, but we arrived just before 8 am with NW winds cranking around 15 mph or more and some light rain.  One boat launched just before we did and came back in within 5 minutes due to the chop.  We launched and took a long run to a calmer, more fishable part of the lake.  We checked the shallows and marked very few fish but did have one chase big Gary's lure right to the surface.  We worked some other shallower areas out of the wind without much doing.  The guys missed some hits here and there, but nothing real solid.  Rick worked a bladebait and lost one laker.

We had decent numbers of fish deep (100' to 150') but the bite wasn't significantly better.  We went for quite some time (hours...) before landing a fish.  Rick got us going!  Once the winds died down a bit and we had a little sun, our bite really turned on and we wound up having some very good shallow fishing to wind the trip up - solid double-digit hookups and 9 nice fish landed with another that I almost netted.  Quite a few fish were dropped today as well.  Smaller Gary (aka "The Schaef...") had the hot hand today.  Usually it's big Gary with this crew but we may be in for a new paradigm moving forward!   I would not count Big Gary out though.

It's always a lot of fun with Rick and he first joined me back in 2006 for some deep jigging out here, way before it got popular.