Reports

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 wasoriginally looking at nasty conditions, but fortunately the forecasts moderated to partly sunny then cloudy witha 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 Woodvillelaunch 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 notlanding any fish, I was very impressed and enthusiastic about what I saw today and where I saw it. There area 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 wechoose our days wisely. H2O was 45 degrees on top. The only other fishing boats I saw were chasing crappies and perch.