Some of you may recall how last November my good friend Max, who is a familiar face on this blog, invited me down to New York to fish Finger Lake tributaries for Atlantic Salmon. Well, this year, Max and his family graciously did the same thing again. This time, we went in the 4th week of October with uncertainly on how the run was going to be.
There's something unique about heavily migratory species that fascinates me. When the gills of my beloved stripers hit sweet-water in the spring time, that's when I know my river is about to come alive. While I don't quite feel to same connection to landlocked Atlantic Salmon for simple proximity reasons, it's still an endless source of fascination. These fish have been raised in a hatchery by humans and stocked into a lake to grow up and live out the rest of their lives. But somehow, despite everything we do that screams of suppression from their natural instincts, the lake became their ocean. Somewhere inside each fish still exists a natural clock that says, "here is the river, you must go up to spawn, like your ancestors did long ago and what your descendants will do for generations to come." It gives me hope for sea-run salmon in North America, both Atlantic and Pacific strain. Someday, when the dams are destroyed and the rivers run free, the salmon will come back.
But back onto the Finger Lakes trip. If you're not familiar with the standard New York Salmon Season protocol, here's a brief run down. Every fall, these fish run up the streams to spawn. The Chinooks and Cohos of the Great Lakes start to rot from the inside, eventually dying after making their deposits. Atlantic Salmon, which exist in both the Great Lakes and the Finger Lakes, go back to the lake after they lay their eggs. They typically don't eat much during the run, so you can either piss them off with egg sacks, jigs, or other lures, or be a complete ass-hat and snag them. Don't be a complete ass-hat and snag them.
Max and I arrived at our spot that we fished last year early in the morning. The first thing that immediately jumped out to us wasn't a salmon, but a mental notation about how the water levels this year were much higher, with the water making up that level being more stained. A sight for sore eyes compared to the gin-clear water last year that resulted in tough fishing. The lure I started off with was a combo I had made up myself by placing a pink gulp worm on the back of a black marabou. I started casting to a current break, letting it sink, then snapping it off the bottom, hoping to trigger an attack. Within 5 minutes I was hooked up to a nice hen Atlantic Salmon, a fish that took me an entire day to catch last year. When Max sunk the net around that fish, the slack I let out in my line correlated with a huge weight taken off my shoulders. The fish were here and hitting jigs.
Given how quickly that first one hit, I decided to try something else. Deviating a little bit from salmon fishing norms, I put a keitech swimbait on a jighead, exactly the same set-up that was pulled me so many smallmouth from the river. Jigging the exact same way I caught that last one, I soon got slammed again. Another hookset, and soon the hit is converted into a leaping salmon, this one a hook-jawed male. It leaps several times, evading the net, and after I managed to turn it out of a set of rapids, Max manages to get the fish into the net.
After that fish, the bite slowed down a little. I eventually broke off the keitech and decided to go back to the jig I caught the first salmon on. I made a cast on the edge of the current, then let the jig slowly sweep downstream, giving it little hops and twitches along it's way. Suddenly, it stops. I reel up, and instead of feeling the weight of a snag, a series of headshakes reverberates down the line and through my rod. The sound of drag pulling comes off my reel. All of a sudden, it gives a jump, and I realize that I have the biggest fish of the morning by far. It runs into the current and I can't put enough pressure on the fish with 8lb test to turn it around. To add to the chaos, Max's dad pulls out his phone to record a video and then accidently drops it into the creek. Max is preoccupied with the net attempting to scoop it up, so I slowly fight this fish to the bank until I can drag it to the shallows and grab it by the tail. Eventually, I landed the fish, a beautiful kype-ed up Atlantic Salmon, just under 28 inches, with my black hair jig sticking out of the corner of the mouth.
After I caught that fish, I went over to where Max and his dad were. Unfortunately, we couldn't find his phone that day with the water levels. Eventually, the hole that I caught my 3 fish at got beat, so I went upstream to a large waterfall with a big plunge pool. On my second cast, a small 18 inch Atlantic smokes my jig and I scoop it up with my net to make my total fish count for the day four.
Eventually, the morning bite shut off and we went back to the cabin to reconvene and eat lunch. Later that afternoon, we went to a different spot. Max, who had been struggling that morning, connected with a large female Atlantic. The fish started running downstream, peeling drag. We were forced to do a steelhead run, chasing the fish down the rapids, stumbling and falling through the stream, when after a great deal of adversity, I managed to get her in the net. We had egg sacks to tie for tomorrow.
At that spot, I earned myself a few hits, but nothing hooked up. Eventually, we were soaked and freezing, and decided to call it a day. That night, we ate salmon around the campfire, tied egg sacks, and planned for the following morning's fishing.
Unfortunately, the conditions had other plans for the following morning. The water levels had significantly dropped since the day before, as well as cleared up, making for tough fishing. Max eventually caught another hen salmon on an egg sack from his fish the day before, but other than that, the spot got pretty beat.
Luckily, with the low water this time, a local found Max's dad's phone, which somehow worked after over a day in the water. We continued fishing that hole for another hour or so, drifting egg sacks on light line. Max and I were catching small wild and stocked rainbow trout, as well as a small brown trout for me and a large fallfish as well as a round goby for Max, increasing the amount of species we checked off for the trip.
However, the lack of salmon prompted us to make a decision to finish our trip at the falls where Max caught his salmon yesterday. Managing to secure a spot underneath the falls with a great drifting angle towards the deepest hole, we proceeded to cast egg sack rigs with a rosary bead of split-shots into current and letting it sink down. After 30-40 minutes of nothing, my egg sack got crushed and I set the hook to a small keeper brown trout. Eventually, as time dragged on, we realize that fish would be the fish we closed out with. As the sun slowly crept across the sky, we dragged ourselves toward to parking lot and headed home.
The salmon fishing scene of New York has an almost tangible character to it, one that you see in not just the fish, but in the participants and the places that anglers often merely dismiss as hosts for the fish that fuel this wonderful addiction we are all complicit in. But then again, it's hard to ignore when you're getting hit in the face with waterfall spray, and everywhere around you the tips of leaves are changing to hues from fire-red to sunset orange. The tribs in the fall sometimes get a bad rap for being an absolute clown show, and in times and places they certainly are. But if you keep your head up and are willing to adapt, you'll find yourself laughing along with the locals amidst leaping salmon and calls for the net. If you are willing to go off the beaten path and fish hard, you can still find places with plenty of unspoiled fish and little people. While I certainly have a preference, neither is a bad option.
Cheers fishy people.
