Black Oak Lake

I spent the 4th at Black Oak Lake in northern Wisconsin and had a great time there. Put the boat in and drove around a bit. The lake is apparently the second deepest in Wisconsin, is near Land o’ Lakes and supposedly has some pretty decent fishing.

Seems like there are lots of smallies and rock bass in the thing, although the biggest smallie I caught was around 2 lbs. The lake is amazing, lots of structure and incredibly deep (90 feet). I figured that it must be just bad luck, not finding much of any size, and marked a ton of really huge fish suspended at 40 feet or so in the deep areas. People claim that there are large lakers in the thing. Wouldn’t have been surprised, since the size of the marks I was getting made the fish seem like the Loch Ness monster.

The thing is, the sunnies we caught were tiny. Most of them were no more than about 5 inches and looked poorly fed. We talked about this while I was there and decided that maybe the fish were stunted. Also, no walleyes and some little tiny northerns. I just couldn’t figure the thing out. Nothing much in the shallows except some small rock bass and those little sunnies and northerns. Not much at night, no matter where we went. Oh, and the perch weren’t big either.

I’m just wondering if anyone knows anything about the lake. Could it be that the warm temps drove everything deep or is the lake just filled with shrimpy fish? If so, at least the water skiing is good. It’s such a beautiful place that I’d love to go back, but I’d like to be able to feed people if I do. Huge clouds of bait fish were all at around 18 feet but nothing seemed to be lurking below them. It’s a strange place.

Anyone know anything about it?

Mike

mudInthru:

You have actually spent more time on it than I, although I am looking forward to checking it out. I have friends from my home town who do really well on it. Those big deep clear lakes can be hard to crack, but once you do its not too bad. Fish in the lake are also bigger than what you experienced.

Were you able to find any action on the deep breaks, any humps or deep bars. Fish really will relate to deeper structure in that type of situation, especially after the spawn. I once had a friend who told me about Trout Lake. He said if you are thinking that you are too deep and not catching fish, you need to fish deeper. Those hooks you talked about might have been suspended walleyes as the lake trout will be even deeper than that. Jigging spoons, deep slip bobbers, etc. are some ideas to get at those fish.

Let me know if you get back up here as I now live in Minocqua. I would be interested in trying some exploration.

mbenson

mbenson

Thanks for the advice! We did some deep trolling on Friday morning before the boats got started on the water. It was tough to figure the depths we were at, but just made one circuit of the lake. I kind of figured that it would take more than just a single pass to understand much about how and what were there.

We fished a few of the breaks, found lots of small perch in 18 – 20 feet and I figured that something had to be feeding on them. Jigging with a light jig and a worm seemed to be the only thing that worked to draw regular bites. The funny thing was that most of the time, we marked little or nothing at any other depth (except the suspended fish). I’d like to go back there, just to see what else is available. Will let you know.

Mike

mudInthru:

Make sure you check the regs on that lake. You are really close to some lakes that you can troll, but I don’t think that Black Oak is one of them. Sometimes you can set up a good drift troll and check a couple of contours. I fish Tomahawk a lot and am going to try depths to 50 feet even with the thermocline this summer. Anyway, my reply was to inform you about the trolling. I think that some of the Michigan lakes on the Cisco chain are available for trolling. Just make sure once you get into MI that you have their license also. Good luck.

mbenson

Thanks! Being from Minnesota, it never occurred to me that you couldn’t troll on a lake. I’ll get the regs next time I’m there. Bought an annual license because I’ll be back there a couple of more times this year.
Mike