If that good news isn't enough to make you sharpen the hooks on your favorite plugs, keep reading, as we examine current prospects for a hookup in New York's best muskellunge waters.

Let's start with the lunker lairs in the western part of the state and fan-cast our way east.

CHAUTAUQUA LAKE
If you crave numbers of muskies, rather than the occasional hard-to-come-by monster, consider a trip to Chautauqua Lake. It's one of the few bodies of water in the East where an experienced angler can reasonably hope to catch several muskies in a single outing. While multiple-muskie catches rarely occur elsewhere, they are almost routine on Chautauqua, which nestles in the southwest corner of the state at Jamestown. When Muskies, Inc., holds one of its catch-and-release tournaments on this lake, it's not unusual for a single boat to report double-figure landings of fish in the 30- to 44-inch range.

On Chautauqua Lake, the keeper size is 40 inches, and a few 50-inchers are reported each season. Chautauqua's fishery is fueled by the state hatchery at Prendergast Point. Each spring, DEC crews net the lake to obtain brood fish. The biggest ever captured during such a foray was a 56-incher, according to Paul McKeown, DEC Region 9 fisheries manager. The Prendergast Point facility produces about 25,000 little muskies annually for stocking in Chautauqua. Any surplus fingerlings wind up in other western New York muskie waters, such as the Cassadaga lakes, Olean Creek and the Allegheny River.

Some 17 miles long and two miles wide, Chautauqua Lake has many points, dropoffs and weedbeds that reek of muskies. Some of the better-known spots include the pillars that support the Route 17 bridge at Bemus Point, the deep water off Prendergast Point and Ashville Bay, which is off Route 394 on the west side of the lake. Newcomers can find their way to these locations with a free fishing map available from the Chautauqua County Visitors Bureau at (716) 753-4304.

Chautauqua is about an hour south of Buffalo and two hours west of Elmira via Route 17 (the Southern Tier Expressway), which is being converted to U.S. Route 86. There's a state boat launch at Long Point on the east shore off Route 430, and several private marinas that allow launching for a modest fee.

CASSADAGA LAKES
Most of New York's famous muskie factories -- including Chautauqua Lake, the Niagara River and the upper St. Lawrence River -- are big, roomy waters where a 4-foot-long fish has no trouble finding a place to hide.

Not so the Cassadaga Lakes and their outlet, Cassadaga Creek. In the Cassadaga system, anglers who cast buzzbaits or other topwater lures around fallen limbs and other cover have a good chance of seeing a Chautauqua-strain muskie, or at least its subsurface swirl, before it's hooked.

These are intimate settings compared to typical trophy venues. The upper and lower Cassadaga Lakes, located due south of Fredonia in the Chautauqua County towns of Pomfret and Stockton, are a combined 210 acres in size. Although the water in the two lakes is slightly turbid, anglers can sometimes spot Cassadaga muskies suspended above the weeds that sprout virtually everywhere in August. Such fish aren't gigantic by muskie standards, but the DEC's McKeown assures that 10- to 15-pounders are caught fairly regularly.

Muskies of comparable size are scattered throughout the lower two-thirds of Cassadaga Creek, but especially in the meandering stretch between South Stockton and Ross Mills.