10-05-2025
Winter fishing pressure on Lake of the Woods falls short of record
May 10—Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, fishing pressure this past winter on Lake of the Woods didn't set a record, despite ideal ice conditions and marginal snow cover that made it easy to get around.
According to preliminary results from a winter creel survey conducted by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, anglers logged just over 2 million hours of fishing pressure on the big lake during the winter of 2024-25.
While fishing pressure on Lake of the Woods was up from the winter of 2023-24, when anglers spent just over 1 million hours on the ice, the pressure fell well short of the record set during the winter of 2022-23, when anglers logged about 3 million hours on the ice.
A late freeze-up and marginal ice conditions hampered
fishing pressure during the winter of 2023-24,
but conditions this past winter were favorable well into March. Ice road operators took advantage of the good ice and sparse snow cover, plowing roads of nearly 30 miles in length in some areas along the south shore of Lake of the Woods.
The DNR
in recent winters has implemented a new creel survey design
to more accurately measure the extent of overnight ice fishing pressure on Lake of the Woods. Instead of a "roving survey," in which creel clerks traveled the ice by snowmobile or pickup truck interviewing anglers actively fishing, the DNR now uses an "access-based" design, setting up at popular access points and some of the larger resorts and interviewing anglers and fishing groups as they come off the lake.
While anglers tallied more than 3 million hours of fishing pressure in 2022-23, the new creel survey design made the results kind of an "apples and oranges" comparison with previous creel surveys.
"We're now accounting for overnight pressure," Matt Skoog , area fisheries supervisor in Baudette, Minnesota, told the Herald in September 2023. "There's no good way to get a directly comparable number" with the old roving creel surveys.
Upper Red Lake, another popular winter fishing destination, uses a similar format, which provides better data on pressure from anglers who stay on the lake for extended periods of time, a trend driven by the growing popularity of deluxe wheelhouses or ice camping in portable hub-style pop-up shelters.
According to Marc Bacigalupi, Northwest Region fisheries manager for the DNR in Bemidji, operators on other big lakes such as Leech and Winnibigoshish, along with smaller 5,000- to 10,000-acre lakes around the state, may be catching up with Lake of the Woods in terms of plowing ice roads. A phenomenal jumbo perch bite this past winter on Mille Lacs Lake also caught some traffic heading north, he said.
"When we hit 3 million (in 2022-23), it was one of the main games in town because the ice wasn't as good in other places as it was up there," Bacigalupi said of the record winter on Lake of the Woods. "So, we were below the record levels (this past winter), but the catch rates were really good. Decent-sized saugers were getting harvested and so there was good poundage out there."
Preliminary numbers show that anglers harvested about 175,000 pounds of walleyes and 150,000 pounds of saugers this past winter on Lake of the Woods, Bacigalupi said, up from about 75,000 pounds of walleyes and 102,000 pounds of saugers during the winter of 2023-24.
Anglers kept about 94,000 pounds of walleyes and 121,000 pounds of saugers during the winter of 2022-23, the ice season with record fishing pressure.
The DNR's "target harvest" for walleyes on Lake of the Woods — the poundage of fish that can be kept in a given year without adversely impacting the population — is 540,000 pounds annually, based on a six-year moving average. The most recent annual harvest, based on that six-year moving average, is about 400,000 pounds.
A new fisheries management plan for Lake of the Woods that is nearing completion
calls for changing sauger management goals from a target harvest to an "exploitation threshold," or percentage of the population that can be harvested in a given year.
As the Herald reported in January, the exploitation threshold accounts for changes in sauger abundance. If sauger abundance goes up, more pounds of sauger can be harvested without affecting the exploitation rate — or vice versa. The exploitation threshold for this past winter is still being calculated.
"We have been consistently harvesting over our (sauger) harvest poundage thresholds and not seeing any negative (biological) effects," Skoog, the Baudette area fisheries supervisor, said in January.
