Canandaigua Lake out of Woodville 4/15
I had a day off, so it was time to check on Canandaigua Lake for lakers. I’ve been chomping at the bit to get out here since I got my deep jigging gear set up and my Lowrance HDS-5. Last year I tried for deep fish but my electronics were sub-par and I didn’t look deep enough. This lake is a good drive for me (like Honeoye and Conesus) but I enjoy the change of scene from the usual Seneca/Cayuga on occasion.
The tough thing about guiding a lot is that a lot of the prime weather days get booked up! So today I was originally looking at nasty conditions, but fortunately the forecasts moderated to partly sunny then cloudy with a chance of rain. Cloudy, dark conditions aren’t great conditions to fish deep lakers in. Anyways, it took me almost 2 hours to get from Trumansburg to the Woodville launch and out onto the lake. By 12:15 pm I was cruising up the lake watching my electronics as I rigged a couple rods. As usual, I didn’t mark much bait on this lake. There was some around 140′ and 170′, as well as some scattered fish both high and low. The sun was shining brightly when I took a random drop and had a fish come up for the jig. I marked a few fish then dropped in a jig and had a half dozen hits as I brought the jig up. Then the skies started clouding up and the fishing slowed considerably. I marked a lot of fish. I hooked and lost one very nice fish (for this lake) and lost one or two others. But they had shut off – likely due to the weather.
Despite not landing any fish, I was very impressed and enthusiastic about what I saw today and where I saw it. There are a lot of lakers from 195′ out to 215′. I’ll take the shallower ones! I don’t see myself doing much a lot of laker guiding on this lake since it’s so far away and Cayuga, Seneca and Keuka have so much to offer, but I will be doing some – and I’m absolutely confident we will do very well here if we choose our days wisely. H2O was 45 degrees on top. The only other fishing boats I saw were chasing crappies and perch.