Cayuta (Little) Lake 8/20
After 11 years of living about 12 to 14 miles away from Cayuta Lake I finally made it out there. We are so ridiculously spoiled here in the Finger Lakes region it isn’t funny. Within an hour’s drive I still have a handful of terrific fisheries that never fished or only fished a couple times – like Whitney Point Reservoir, Waneta/Lamoka, Tully Lake, Little York Lake, Chenango River etc….
I got onto Cayuta at around 11:45 am and spent my first 1/2 hour or so just cruising around the lake taking note of interesting areas and the lake’s overall structure. There were two other boats on the lake fishing – that was it. The lake’s visibility was around 1′ at best, due to an algae bloom. Water temps were in the upper 60s – clearly they’d been dropping after the past couple cold nights. I didn’t see much life in the lake. Nice weeds, but not a whole lot stirring. The shallows didn’t produce much of anything for me and I wasn’t surprised (given the cold nights.) I went at least an hour to two hours without any hits. I finally found a steep dropping shoreline and scored on every nice 3lb.+ largemouth on a Senko. Working moderately deep water with sparse weeds on the bottom yielded a couple nice bass (2.5 to 3lbs or so) on med. running crankbaits. A spinnerbait caught fish rounded out my catch of “good fish”. Throwing around the lake’s ample docks yielded plenty of small largemouths.
Overall I left with a good impression of the lake; I’ll be back. I fished some very obvious stuff and some not-so-obvious stuff. A friend of mine had been catching a lot of fish there a few weeks back. This lake clearly gets a lot of fishing pressure. (My trolling motor prop got fouled with a big wad of fishing line. That’s the first time that’s ever happened.) Some people are intimidated by the large Finger Lakes (or they have small boats). There are numerous camps surrounding this lake and nearly every boat I saw docked had a few fishing rods on it. Out of the 4 good fish I caught, 3 of them had hook scars or holes in their mouths. These fish clearly get caught a lot and (fortunately) released as well.
Cornell has been stocking a lot of walleyes in this lake in an attempt to see if they can rid the lake of alewives. The lake has apparently been producing a few decent walleyes. It was nice fishing a lake that was so different in character from the Fingers and Lake Ontario bays. I realized just how much of my tackle selection is geared towards clear water!