Sleeper lakes

How does one go about finding these sleeper lakes people talk about?

Great question-I am always looking for them too! Some will say to look at Lakefinder That site sometimes makes lakes look better or worse than they actually are. If a lake once produced great fish but froze out, give it time and it should come back. Asking on this site may or may not work asking at a grocery store up north could. If the lake is difficult to get to or hard to fish it could be a sleeper-super clear lakes sometimes have short and dark ‘windows’ can also be sleepers too. Baitstores have people who want to help, people working there can be very knowledgable or not so much, plus they are telling others what they just told you, so BTW i tell them nothing (and hey don’t be mad that they blab its their business!) Good Luck-PM me what you find!

lakefinder, navionics, troll youtube videos searching for scenery you recognize or images of coordinates on a boat GPS.

Look for lakes that have a creek or stream feeding into it from a bigger body of water that holds fish.

At the end of the day the only way you will really find them is to get out and punch some holes

Great info. Keep it coming. I’ve been bit by the ice bug and am trying to take in as much info as possible.

Pick a lake, and do a google search on it. If you get a half dozen or more hits about the lake, look for a different one. If its on lake link, run away from it. Best thing about “sleeper lakes or spots” is that they get over looked.

Sometimes you find them by accident. Sometimes its like Elk hunting. You just need to go further and deeper than anyone else is willing to go – with the understanding that it could be a complete bust.

crappie55369 wrote:

videos searching for scenery you recognize or images of coordinates on a boat GPS.

Ha! I’ve actually done this. Not necessarily to find a sleeper lake but to find the hot spot on a particular body of water.

1. Fish where other people don’t or won’t. The Mississippi is a classic example of this, it’s not a secret, but many lake guys are afraid of and intimidated by the river because they’ve heard horror stories about wrecking props on wingdams and of hitting floating snags. Also, 95% of MN anglers won’t fish a body of water where they can’t keep fish.

2. Fish bodies of water where access is too difficult for the average angler. The average MN angler is very, very lazy. He needs a huge, wide launch ramp so he can launch his 18 foot boat with his >200 HP motor in comfort. He needs lots of wide open parking lot. It can’t be down a gravel road or his trailer will get dirty. It can’t be shallow. It has to be within easy reach of home so he can be home in time for dinner. It has to be mapped and hotsports marked for him with GPS pins.

Some of the best walleye and panfish producing waters in this state are almost completely unfished because the average MN anger demands too much in the way of easy access and comfort to bother with them.

Grouse

I spend a lot of time looking the DNR Lake Finder and Fisheries survey’s. Then try to project it out as the surveys can be pretty old.

As crappie said, only true way is to start punching holes.

Lakefinder is definitely a good place to start, but it’s not an end all and some lakes that don’t look good on paper I’ve had darned good luck with.

Come winter I target panfish mainly. Could’ve had a nice limit of 11-13″ crappies last night on a not so good on paper lakefinder lake.

Randy Wieland wrote:

Pick a lake, and do a google search on it. If you get a half dozen or more hits about the lake, look for a different one. If its on lake link, run away from it. Best thing about “sleeper lakes or spots” is that they get over looked.

Sometimes you find them by accident. Sometimes its like Elk hunting. You just need to go further and deeper than anyone else is willing to go – with the understanding that it could be a complete bust.

And as Crappie says….
“At the end of the day the only way you will really find them is to get out and punch some holes.”

I’d stop and think about the lake finder stuff though. Hundreds of people are relying on that. Instead I’d be looking at retention ponds that basically are everywhere today since they’ve been penciled in as a “must-have” for all residential and commercial building plans today. The dnr says nada as far as them having stocked them goes, but miraculously most seem to have panfish in them. City planning departments can give you particulars are far as required depths for these pond…..choose the deeper ones as a target and locate the deeper water areas where there is also some sort of drop or weed line. You might surprise yourself with what you can catch.

Another thought here is to get out of town. Both Austin and Albert Lea have lakes that hand out some handsome fish every year and you hardly hear a peep from the locals…..for a reason. The Faribault area lakes are other good sources yet little gets said about them. Circle Lake comes to mind as a serious sleeper lake in the Faribault area….SE corner of the island for panfish AND walleye.

Searching is half the fun and half of the learning thing. The last place I’d search though is where half the state is searching. Quite often your best fishing is right under your nose. When you find it though, keep your mouth shut or it won’t be good for long and certainly don’t go there day after day or you’ll be drawing attention.

When I lived in southern MN, I always took a liking to the shallow and hard to access lakes. You would see a handful of houses on them each year and I always did well with the Walleye. Lakefinder can only get you so far with these types of lakes, as most were last surveyed in the late 80’s or early 90’s.

Being an avid duck hunter, I always brought my fish finder with in the duck boat to “survey” the lake in the fall after a hunt. Most were duds, but 2 of the maybe 10 lakes I hunted were gold mines for the gold. Unfortunately, you just need to put in the time and don’t talk about them to the guy behind the counter at the bait shop.

Plenty of small sleeper lakes in the area between Mankato and Faribault.

Emailing the DNR specific questions about lakes has been very helpful for me.

There is no fish in circle lake

David Blais wrote:

There is no fish in circle lake

Only for those who don’t know how to fish.

Now these are the places I want to find.

Round lake has always been good for me.

Circle is no longer a sleeper. Lakes down there are boom and bust. A lot are bowl shaped so nothing tricky about going every day and giving them the ‘spank’

Stocking reports and surveys are a good place to start. You can sometimes line up stocking info with a later population survey. It could shed light on growth rates…but don’t just look at the species you are targeting. Pay attention to the forage base as well.

On my “home” lake I fish it hard after a so called freeze out. A lake won’t completely freeze out unless it freezes right tight to the bottom. My lake is a definite “sleeper” that people think freezes out. It doesn’t. It can’t. It’s spring fed. What happens is that during a harsh winter when people think it freezes out it actually knocks down the abundant forage base. The desirable species are fine but for a year or so the forage is depleted and the gamefish still have to eat. It’s easier to catch them when they aren’t stuffed already. It’s great because it “froze out” and people stay away. I have no problems perpetuating the idea that it was hit hard by winterkill.

Then when others think it has recovered it really hasn’t. It’s just going through a down (by my standards) part of its cycle. Having days where you can jig up a dozen or more pike in the 10-15 pound range with not a soul around is great. So maybe it’s not a sleeper lake as much as it is a lake that others are not fishing when it’s awake.

I like the lake survey in the area that I live there mainly done every 3 years on some of the bigger lakes the cool thing about it is that I can go back in the years and track to see if the fish are getting bigger and what the numbers are doing from years prior will help determine whether I’m going to fish that lake or not cuz if the numbers are declining doesn’t really pay sometimes

I will take a lake and I will fish it in multiple different spots for the whole ice season and really learn the lake. And that means using an underwater camera checking out different structures for instance last week I found a hump in 31 feet of water that had Sunfish stacked up on it that I caught that went 9 to 10 in but In a week from now or two weeks from now they might be up shallow up against the weeds but by learning the lake and its structures I’m finding different places that I can Target and put myself on fish faster but I’m not saying that’s only lake i fish i will try fishing other Lakes to find new spots and those hidden gems

1st time I went to the horse track I bought one of those tip sheets, started reading it and thought wow! this thing is great! Then I saw a bunch of people with the same tip sheet-they had the same “hot’ tips as me! Lakefinder is like that-yep its a good starting point but thats about it. Like that tip about getting access via a connecting water, trouble with that for me is that water is often flowing and makes for poor ice. Is finding the sleeper worth all the PI work? Absolutely-peace and quiet, nice fish, usually more critters to look at too.

This is where having access to a university library pays off. You can dig up basic statistical data off of a website in regards to survey data but that’s just an appetizer. Get your hands on the written reports of those surveys which often include a deeper explanation of stocking programs and you find yourself with the meat and potatoes of a particular survey. Those write ups are an absolute goldmine of information.

Tom-so you go to the library and read a deeper explanation of stoking data and if thats interesting great-not sure how this would put any more fish in the bucket
(BTW they have an interesting rationale for not stocking lakes every year-again policy stuff won’t help you get one if you go out tonight)I used to fish a lake that was awesome for crappies, size and numbers, the DNR report made the lake sound only fair. Most of the lake was fair or poor so they were technically right-One bay was awesome. They probably did not put a net in that bay when they did the sample-Can’t put them everywhere.