Cayuga jigging

[lakerchaser]

Launched out of the park and trolled to rocky dock for salmon with no takers, only a couple small lakers. I then went to my jigging spots and had good results. Put 5 in the boat and lost quite a few, My wife took the enclosed pictures. Two had lamp marks and one attached and the darker laker was a wild fish at 30 inches. Caught on 1.5 jig head with white ice tube and chartuse 2 inch berkley grub. Did not mark a lot of fish but enough. A lot of the time you wont see them until they come up after the jig. Beautiful day

[Nautitroller]

Awesome believe I saw you today.  Marked a lot of big fish only ended up with 4 lakers before 10am.  Glad someone got them to bite.  The moon was under foot at 8:30AM or so thats when the bite turned on for us.  I believe that you can target these fish by moon cycle and clarity of the previous night.  6 hours then a minor feeding pattern  if it coincides with the moon over head or under foot look out !!!    Nice fish!!!!

[Sk8man]

Nice fish! I don't know the sequence of the catch but the native laker has much more pronounced (deeper) coloration,,,,they are that way on Seneca as well and usually their flesh is a richer color as well...pretty cool!

[ERABBIT]

Real nice fish WTG...... must have been a hoot getting them that big while jigging....

 

IMHO looking at the color of both there end fin color I would bet the meat of both fish would be a deep orange color......and the best taste you get from lakers...... so the lakers are now or should I say have been reproducing in Cayuga ????....... or are the not fin clipping them any more in there ???

Hermit once posted way back the lakers color reflects what they eat......having a lot of mistic shrimp in them produces that awsome color............ anyway after he posted that I paid careful attention for a few years and found clipped and unclipped fish color up and not color up...... all that were colored up were the darker orange meat color from 18" to 27" 28"  or so.......... at one time I thought it was a size thing but not any more !!!!!

[Sk8man]

That could be it Ed. I've noticed that the farm raised salmon in the store appear to be a lighter color than the wild salmon too....

[lakerchaser]

All 3 lakers that i kept  had nice  flesh, especially the native which was real orange. The native had no lamp marks either where the other 2 did and one had a lamper on it when netted. All fish were just stuffed with sawbellys.Quite a treat on light tackle.

[DtD]

Well....about the farm raised salmon. I had a discussion not long ago in a local store at the fish counter, about the variation in the orange flesh color in these salmon. Guess what.....the producers buy  feed that is colored to give THE HEW THAT THE STORE WANTS. I was told, you can have any tone you want.....sort of picking it off the color chart. Now I have trouble buying this product. It seems that the store tried offering natural non- colored salamon and the public did not want it. I'll stick with the Finger Lakes fish as they come.

[Bigfoot]

According to the DEC 2012 Cayuga diary cooperator report all lake trout and most of the rainbow trout stocked in Cayuga are fin clipped. A 2011 gill net survey (checking on the incidence of lamprey wounding) revealed that 9% of the lakers they caught were wild.

[Nautitroller]

Great info guys.  Two of the lakers I kept the other day were not clipped and one was,  the one that was had a lamprey scar.  Also the colors were less vibrant on the clipped fish but he also may have been stressed from the lamprey.... They all tasted really good!

[Sk8man]

The farm raised salmon are fed pelleted food while the wild salmon from the ocean have krill in their diet (from the baitfish they feed on) which yields the Omega 3 and 6 nutrient value for humans. Farm raised salmon do not have the same anti oxidant properties. The question I've always wondered about is: What are the differences in nutritional value of the Pacific salmon raised in the ocean vs. those raised in the Great Lakes? I've never seen any scientific studies on it.

[hermit]

Hey I've been away a bit and missed this conversation but just had a thought.  First nice fish lakerchaser!  Fatties!  Sounds like a fun day.  Since color has a lot to do with diet, and a lot (but not all) of the wild fish have the orange color, then they probably learned to eat the different foods (shrimp) as young and kept up the habit when older, while many of the stocked fish may not have ever learned to eat the shrimp but some did.

 

As for store bought fish I don't remember what we buy these days but I know we've gone back and forth between the wild and farmed.  There's always some news telling you to eat one or the other!

Edited August 25, 2013 by hermit