Minocqua Area Fishing Report July 1st, 2025

Another wild weather week with storms, wind, heat, and lots of rain. Tough to get a good

handle on patterns when it's hard enough to handle a boat and some of this weather.

Despite all of this and may fly, hatches, too ...anglers are still finding some good catches with some notable trophy size fish to boot!

Largemouth bass; Good-Very Good

    Actively smacking spinner, baits, chatter, baits, shallow, running, crank baits, and all types of top water lures such as frogs spiders and noisy tail baits. Anglers finding bass at times not as active using wacky worms to pick up picky eaters. Docks and boathouses  holding fish on sunny days, top water in early morning or late evenings. Cloudy windy days, providing best bladed action.

Bluegill: Good

  Work weeds of 4 to 9 feet using mini mites, tiny gulp leeches,small live leeches or worms. Early and late on calmer days, anglers catching gills on poppers, using fly rods or with spinning rods behind casting floats.

Smallmouth Bass: Good

  Periods of warm to hot weather pushing some smallest to deep Coontail edges. Others are starting to relate to offshore Rock comes. Drop -shotting and Ned Riggs have been best.

Musky:  Good

  Some real monsters reported last week, including a behemoth 52 inch musky on a gram of bait! As well as a 48 inch tiger musky! Pre-storm conditions best, keep an eye on the sky!

Crappie: Good

  Flowage crappies  relating to wood, taking half crawlers, and medium fat heads. On lakes, finding fish in two locations. Mostly 8 to 12 foot weeds, but on heavy wind days ( and we've had plenty ) crappies are found stacking up and feeding on the Windward side of lakes, and 3 to 5 feet of water!

Northern pike: Good-Fair

  Cocktails, spinner baits, and chatter baits over weed flats best. Bite slow? Jig 4 to 6 inch chub or sucker through the heavy weeds of 6 to 10 feet.

Yellow perch: Good-Fair

  Most anglers report catching perch on medium fat heads or Beaver tails in 7 to 12 feet of weeds. Flowage, perch scattered, some wood, others, cruising shallows as Waters have risen into the flooding vegetation.

Walleye: Poor-Fair

  Lots of mayfly hatches this past week have seemed to put a kibosh on walleye bites on a lot of lakes in our area. Good news is, most are over. That takes one major food source off the menu which should improve our chances and enticing better bites from walleyes.

  Forecasted highs in the low 80s mixed with a holiday weekend will put a lot of boats on the lakes. Take advantage of early mornings, evenings or overcast/rainy days so as not to have to share as much with the pleasure voters. Or try keeping onto smaller lakes that don't appeal to the water sport crowd.

  Summer pattern should start to firm up and hopefully bring some stability and predictability to the Fishing in our area.