Northwestern WI Fishing Report, 8/25 to 8/27/06

Summer’s days are drawing to an end, and the familiar rythm of the academic year is upon us. Our finny friends realize this as well, as slowly cooling water temperatures and browning weeds signals an inevitable end to the bounty of the warm water period. The Labor Day weekend usually marks the time when my inland success starts to rebound after the late summer doldrums. This past weekend found me on three different bodies of water in northwestern Wisconsin, including two lakes in the Hayward area in addition to Lake Wissota, my home waters. Some subtitles to this report might be "A little bit of everything", or ,"Don’t be picky, take what you can get."

First, some general information that you might find useful for the upcoming holiday weekend. In the Hayward area, we found water temperatures in between 70 and 73 on Spider Lake and on Lac Court Oreilles. Water levels remain low, but they have actually rebounded somewhat since the 4th of July. The big public landing on LCO is really shallow….use care when launching for the rest of the year unless we get a monsoon up north. Lake Wissota has main-lake temps in the upper 70s to around 80 and is pretty green. I spent all of my effort above the lake in the Chippewa River, where I found temps in the mid 70s and much MUCH cleaner water. With our recent rains in the Chippewa Valley, there is a nice gentle current in the Chip above the Lake, and the combination of a noticable flow and clean water helped to activate some of these upriver fish. Here’s a nice 20" Lake Wissota eye that visited us briefly this afternoon for a quick photo.

Spider Lake only coughed up a couple of LM bass for us, so I’ll focus the rest of this report on LCO and Wissota. On LCO, we pulled cranks for a bit just to get the feel for lake, and only picked up one fish, the 30"-class pike shown in the first picture. The rest of our trip was spent fishing crawlers on 1/8-1/4 oz orange jigheads, targeting rockpiles that topped out at 12-14 fow and the sand flats surrounding them. We only scratched out one decent eye, shown here, but caught really nice numbers of SM bass in 20-24 fow on crawlers fished S-L-O-W-L-Y on the bottom. These were neutral to negative fish that really needed to be convinced to bite.

We also did a bit of cranking on Lake Wissota, and picked up 2 nice slot eyes on white glass shad raps on leadcore in 15-17 fow. The cranking bite was a little slow for us, so we ran upriver to a shallow midriver rockpile. Clean water and gentle current really gets this spot going, and my partner Tim and I had a BLAST catching walleyes, smallies, and two kinds of cats (including the 24" flathead shown here) nearly at will for the better part of two hours. We were pitching 1/16 oz orange jigs with whole crawlers and just working them slowly over the rocks that are strewn around this area. We also had a brief, exciting encounter with a lower 40"-class broad-shouldered musky that tatooed a 12" walleye which was about to be hoisted aboard. We ended our Wissota trip with about a dozen smallies topping out at 16", a similar number of walleyes including a 20, an 18 and ~ 6 slot fish, two kitties, two rockbass, and two BIG smiles!

A few more pictures from our weekend on the water are included below. Enjoy the last official weekend of summer, and we’ll see you on the water!