Heavy snowpack and slush-covered black (solid) ice on most inland lakes have made travel trouble for walkers and machine runners on New York State inland lakes and ponds. But lake surfaces north of Toronto received less than 10 inches of snow during this past week's snow fest.
Ice/snow goings
Lake Simcoe is the place to go for good ice access and fair fishing prospects.
Leona Creber at Casey's Fish Huts had moved her huts out a mile and set up over 30-foot depths before the snowfall. "They're about a mile out and all the driving lanes are down to ice and open to quads," Creber said of conditions off Port Bolster and the Pefferlaw River area.
Simcoe's perch numbers are way up, but most anglers have to pick through runs of runt perch before bringing in a bucket of fillet-worthy fish. A lift off bottom or a slow drop to bottom with jig rigs may pull a few nicer ringbacks from the pack, but several recent year classes of yellow perch have yet to be thinned by larger predators and the sonar or video screen often looks more like a bait tank than a good fishing spot/hole.
A line given time well off bottom also has fair odds for the odd whitefish. Numbers had been down before the snow storm and anglers didn't do all that well on Sunday with white ones, but a few two-fish limits had been logged last week, Creber said.
Chautauqua Lake got hit with heavy snow, but the perch bite continues, walleye numbers have jumped slightly on both sides of the North Basin, and the crappie night bite is alright.
"Some anglers at Mayville have gotten a limit (25) of crappie after dark," said Lisa Green at Happy Hooker Bait & Tackle in Ashville. She added, "It's ugly out there, but they're going." Snowpack and slush, more than a foot deep in places, make moving rough, but the bite makes thing right.
Silver Lake dodged the snow bullet and still has more than a foot of solid ice under less than six inches of slush. Perch and walleye action has been slow; crappie and bluegill activity accelerates.
Most of the better "calico" and 'gill schooling has been deeper, well off weed edges at the south end. Most jiggers set up with light lines and heads, flies, or tiny spoon blades with a grub attached over 15-foot depths. If sights and bites are slight, a move out to 20-foot depths on either side of the mid to south section still produces more panfish than perch pecks.
Honeoye Lake also saw less snow than water bodies closer to the Great Lakes. Ice more than a foot thick holds a slushy surface of less than a half foot. The walleye bite is erratic, if that.
"They're seeing a better number of perch," Dan Sharpe at Honeoye Bait & Tackle said of the panfish runners working deeper drop-offs around the lake. Even bluegills, typically weed-edge huggers, have moved out to deeper waters, Sharpe said.
Twenty-foot water has been a good start for assorted panfish successes. Smaller 'gill are schooling in and around weeds. But the bigger, bull-sized bluegills have gone deeper. Lakewide, ice anglers have seen a sharp jump in chain pickerel numbers this season.
Irondequoit Bay perch have sounded. Destrey Chesboro at Bayside Boat and Tackle in Rochester has seen some nice sizes of perch coming from the deep, 40-foot spine well out in the bay.
"The solid ice is about 7 inches now and the slush and snow cover is deep, but the perch are biting and the guys are heading out as long as they can," Chesboro said of the bay's fishery.
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