Below this…

…through this…

…after some of this…

We caught some of these…

Kevin, YakViper, and I paddled and fished a 5 mile stretch of the Genesee River Gorge today and it was everything we hoped it would be. These weren’t the largest of the 35 smallmouth bass that we caught today, but they are the ones we managed to take photos of. I had possibly the largest smallmouth of my life hooked, but didn’t get a good set and it shook it right as I got it to the boat – easily a 5-6lber.

This was our very first trip on the river and we actually only fished the first half – nowhere even close to being thorough because we were under a time constraint and had to paddle through lots of great-looking water without wetting our lines. After getting our permit from the NY State Park office and getting our equipment offloaded and a vehicle driven to the takeout, we got a late start and were in the water by 10am and took out at around 3pm.

Gitzit 3.5″ tubes ruled the day drifting them along current seams and at the tails of riffles. These fish were incredibly aggressive and if you missed them the first hit, all you had to do was just pop it off the bottom again and they’d hit the tube twice – sometimes three times. AWESOME FUN and lots of leapers!!!

The water was pretty low and we scraped the bottoms of our kayaks quite a bit through the rapids. I did end up dumping after getting sideways on a rock, and later snapped a paddle (had and extra) and had to walk through a 20ft section, but it was nothing to strenuous or catastrophic.

We plan to hit the “Genny” again very soon – there’s miles of great-looking smallmouth water upstream of this location all the way down to the PA border. ;) I’m only wishing we would have tried this long before today.

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Pike, I like.
Trout will make you shout.
Salmon are slammin’.
But BASS, are a kick in the –

I decided to take a break from the trolling in Lake Ontario for trout and salmon due to unpredictable weather and to catch up on some of the bass fishing that I missed earlier in the season. I had a fun time fishing two very different bodies of water. First was a wetland/pond complex and fished topwater – Spro frog and caught a number of bass in the slop. I also caught an evening bite at a beautiful Finger Lake fishing tubes in deeper water on the bottom – 30 ft – off of points and coves with great success. Here are some of the highlights of both trips.

I capped the evening off with this nice smallmouth. It was a neat experience fishing two completely different bodies of water on back-to-back trips, one eutrophic and the other oligotrophic to mesotrophic, and which required drastically different approaches to catch fish.

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I was prepared to chalk up my first success at trolling for trout and salmon on Lake Ontario a few days ago as beginners luck.  However, Jude and I went out Friday for just under four hours and had some success during mid-day and reportedly slow fishing conditions.  I caught another king salmon – a bit larger than my last, but not much.  Jude caught a nice rainbow trout.

We caught these both about 2.25 miles out in the lake north of Sandy Creek in 150 feet of water.  We were using 001 Dipsy Divers trolling 100 ft down with Northern King 4-in spoons.

Nice rainbow trout that Jude caught.

Another small king salmon – I’m told the big ones will be showing up soon…

We went out again early morning yesterday.  Jude caught two similar-sized king salmon right off the bat about 2 miles out.

I didn’t catch anything until we were about to head in and had paddled over 10 miles.  I was happy to pull in this nice brown trout after all that work in rough water and steady easterly winds.  I love to paddle and fight powerful fish.  I’m finding this type of fishing to be challenging and a heck of a lot of fun.

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