Good morning from the Quiet Lakes, I think after this past week’s snow, we can probably call the end of the open water season for 2025. There may be a little bit of open water, but landings are going to be almost impossible to get in and out of, and it looks to get COLD for the coming week. I am seeing temps mostly in the teens and mostly single digit lows with a random -8 in there for Wednesday night. To say we should start making ice is an understatement!! Since we do not really have safe ice to report of (I’m sure there is some, I just have not heard of any) I figure it’s a good time to recap the open water season.
We finished the 2025 open water season with some good numbers of all species being caught! A number of good walleye over the slot of 24″ were caught as well as a bunch in that 15-20″ keeper range were caught on the area lakes. Panfishing was good as fish were plentiful this season although we do not have great sizes on the local lakes. It seems like the Chippewa Flowage held some of the biggest panfish (crappie in particular) in the area. We ended up filling up 3-1/2 musky charts with the largest fish coming in at 49″ on Lost Land Lake. At 35 fish per board, we had about 125 fish posted and many more caught that were not put up on the board. Pretty good numbers given we had a very warm summer and the fishing being fair I would say. There were lots of 40″+ fish out of the area lakes and a few mid to upper 40″ taken out of Moose, Teal, Spider, and of course Lost Land. Northern pike were caught in pretty typical numbers and sizes this past year, as were largemouth bass. Smallies really took off with good numbers of fish and great sizes on all of the area lakes. It’s never too late to start booking trips or thinking about next year’s open water season!!
Sorry for not much of a report on actual fishing but with this week’s temps I don’t think an ice report is too far off!! It appears we may see more snow tonight as they are forecasting another 1-3″ tonight. Have a great weekend and we will talk soon.
Greg