Canandaigua Lake out of Woodville 3/22
I enjoy fishing Canandaigua Lake on occasion. It’s a good drive for me, but it’s very quiet during the “off-season” and the lake trout there are lean and exceptional eating. I brought gear for Seneca Lake salmon, but after seeing the dead calm conditions on Seneca, and then on Keuka I decided to keep driving west!
Giving the Canandaigua Lake rainbows a try on the fly-rod has been on my to-do list for awhile. I know it’s kind of a long shot in some ways, since unlike Skaneateles Lake, the fish here are primarily feeding on the lake’s scarce alewife population and not scattered around looking for whatever they can muster up. Many of the adult rainbows are likely spawning now too, but I arrived at 1:15 pm and decided to split my time between fly-fishing and laker jigging.
The winds were out of the north and very light for most of the day. Not the best fly-fishing conditions, but it wasn’t bad. Never had a hit or follow that I could see on the flies today. I worked an intermediate line and a RIO Deep 7, zig-zagging between the shallows and drop offs in around 50′ fow.
Laker jigging was excellent once I found them. I landed 5 or 6 fish in short order and basically kept a limit of fish to 29″ before going back to the fly-casting. There are a lot of big, old lakers in this lake and they likely cannabalise a lot of small lakers as well as stocked browns and wild rainbows. Shakers did the trick on 1+1/2oz jig heads. Magic depth was around 167′ smack dab in the middle of the lake.
BTW – Crappies, bluegills and sunfish are active on the south end of the lake in West River. I’d expect good crappie fishing throughout the State right now!