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I live in North Central WI. For the past few years I've been in a rut fishing the same flowage a few miles from home. With no bucks running around the hunting property that I'd shoot, I decided to spend this morning exploring other lakes near me. I would say the are conservatively 200 lakes with public access within 1 hour drive of my home (likely much more). I focused today on about a dozen smaller lakes off the beaten path (had fun 2 tracking the old Jeep XJ). Most of the lakes I visited varied from 10 to 50 acres in size. Most of them were in the 10-20' depth range. I'm just going off DNR maps as I did not find any walkable ice to actually go on the hard water today.Driving to find the lakes is one thing but waiting for solid ice and actually fishing them to determine what may be in them will be much more time consuming.Any Ice Shanty folks have thoughts / experience with "pothole" lakes in North Central WI? Are they generally worth a try or are there some general rules (i.e. 40 acres or larger, minimum depths, etc). I definitely want to try some this winter but I'm trying to somewhat strategically narrow my focus by prioritizing certain lakes over others because at the moment when I look at my GPS map with waypoints of lakes I could try, it's a bit overwhelming. Realistically perhaps I could try 15 new lakes in a season (which is getting shorter by the day with these warm temps) so it would take decades to try to fish every lake within a 1 hour radius.While I realize there will be exceptions (i.e. giant crappies in a very small lake), in general do fish get stunted in tiny bodies of water?Thanks in advance for your thoughts.
I will try any body of water that has safe ice.small lakes can surprise you..
Definitely worth a try. Some of my best sized panfish have come from small backwoods lakes in MN. Like talked about above, the lake characteristics will determine fish populations and size class, each lake will be different, some will be busts. Look for ones feeder creeks Try a few out this winter and see what you find. Next spring/summer start checking them out with a small boat or kayak also and see what you find.