Your new IDA home for the Hayward Lakes area

This is the inaugural post on the Hayward Area Lakes forum. I’ll be bringing you 4-season multi-species fishing information for this very popluar recreational area.

My family has a cabin on the Spider Chain of lakes, and we frequent a large number of bodies of water in this area, including our “home lakes” of Lost Land and Teal, Lake Namekagon to the north, Sissabagama to the south, Moose to the East and Nelson to the west. We also enjoy float trips down the Namekagon river as it runs south of Hayward, trout fishing on some small lakes in the Chequamegon National Forest, and the salmonid runs in the Bois Brule.

There’s a bounty of finny creatures to pursue up here, and I’m looking forward to this new forum becoming an active place on IDA!

Nice to see another forum. I have my cabin in Barnes and Fish the Eau Claire chain ,Brule river and Chequamagon Bay.

Mwal

I have land on Nelson and frequent Round Lake as well.

Jason,

What fish species do you target in that area most often? I’ve done a lot of muskie fishing on the lakes you mentioned.

John

Brooktrout!

Looking forward to your reports. I’m fairly new to Hudson and would like to do more exploring of the Hayward area!

Thanks,

Eric

My cabin is in the Danbury area and I am also going to be enjoying your posts. I like the upper Croix for canoeing and Yellow lake for Muskies but would like to get over to the musky mecca more often in the future. What kind of ice conditions do you have up there now.

John23,

Our targets depend strongly on the season. We do a lot of crappie fishing between ice-out and the general opener. In fact, we started crappie fishing last year about 2 days after ice out and had a blast all the way until Memorial Day.

May through June we target eyes. The lakes change, starting with smaller, shallow lakes and ending up on Namekagon, which has good to great eye fishing all through July.

July-September is quite varied. Some “on-purpose” musky fishing during the dog days, after dark. Lots of LM bass fishing now because they tend to stay active and aggressive. This is also our prime river floating time, as the bugs are fewer, the flows are lower, the warte is nice and warm for wading, and the fish are concentrated. We had some great smallie trips on the Nam last August.

October through ice-up is time for eyes and trout.

Ice fishing trips for us focus on pike and eyes, although we’re not terribly serious about the eye fishing at this. Big eye through the ice last year was a 25″ fish.

I’m not a musky nut, but the Spider chain is full of them so we catch them, by accident, with some regularity.

I’m in the neighborhood as well. Near Siren/Webster area. Looking forward to more discussion about these lakes “up north”.

I’ve suspected over the last year or so that there would be a critical mass of IDA people in this general area. I think we’ll have a nice active forum here, and I’m going to do what I can to keep everybody up-to-date.

Whiskerkev: I have an ice trip early next week, so I’ll post an update then. Last I heard, there was still not enough safe consistent ice for vehicle traffic.

Finally. I grew up fishing Lost Land, Teal and Spider. Mom now lives on Tiger Cat Flowage. Be nice to get an idea what’s going on before I head up there.

This is great. I go to Hayward numerous times during the Summer. Lost Land, Teal, Moose, Whitefish, Sand, Ghost, Big Chip, LCO, Grindstone and others. So much water, so little time. I have to try a float down the Nam or Chip river this Summer. Skinny water smallies and muskie are the best. Looking forward to the reports.

I’m happy to see a hayward lakes forum, its such a great area to fish. I have a cabin on Stone Lake and fish LCO,Siss, and other area lakes for walleye and muskie throughout the year. I can’t wait to have my first post, should be in a few weeks(Feb.17-18)