Lake Winnie — Location Beats the Thermometer

There’s a kind of guy at every Minnesota landing who reads the surface temp off his graph out loud, like a weatherman doing the noon show for an audience of one. I am that guy. This week’s Winnie update is a polite note to people like me: the number is not the problem.

Jeff Sundin’s Oct. 6 Fishrapper post is the sequel to Sunday’s frost-and-fussy-fish report we ran yesterday. This one zooms out to the whole week, and the takeaway is simple enough to fit on a bait shop receipt. The fish are biting where they are. The trick is being there.

The short version

• Water temp: he puts the mid-to-upper 50s in the good range for fall walleyes and says he’s never had a bad fall bite in that window. So the thermometer is off the hook.
• Depth: every really good walleye bite he knows of from the past week came in 5 to 7 feet.
• Two kinds of spots: rocks, especially on windy days, and the tops of low eelgrass, where minnows tuck into what’s left of the weed growth and walleyes sit tight waiting for one to make a bad decision.
• Bait: crawlers had their week and it’s over for now. Jig and minnow is doing better.
• The jig: a plain, unpainted 1/8-ounce round head on a #1 red hook keeps beating every other head he’s tested.

Same lake, same day, very different boats

Here’s the part that should make you feel better about your last trip. Or worse. Depends on the trip.

The water dropped hard, 62 down to 57 degrees, and within a couple of days his walleye fishing went flat. Spots that held good numbers on Tuesday were empty by Friday. He worked his whole list that Friday and never found a real group. Then, back at the cleaning station, he saw somebody else’s pile from that same day. Nothing humbles a guide like another guy’s cooler.

Sunday played out the same way with other people in the story. He wasn’t fishing, but he heard from friends. Some of them came up dry everywhere they tried. A different friend reported locating a fired-up school and catching 40-plus walleyes within a few hours. That’s a secondhand count, so hold it loosely, but the point stands: same lake, same weekend, and the only real difference was where the boat sat.

He owns it, too. On the days he doesn’t find them, he says that’s on him, not the fish. Respect. I usually blame the minnows, the wind, and a gas station sandwich, in that order.

Why Winnie is so streaky right now (his read)

Sundin is clear that this is what he thinks, not a lab result:

• For years, anglers had it easy because of strong 2018 and 2019 year classes. More fish meant more schools to bump into.
• That population has come down, so the schools are smaller and take longer to find, sometimes longer than a day on the water allows.
• Meanwhile, the forage is loaded: small perch, shiners, and other little gamefish all over.
• Fewer walleyes plus a full buffet means they don’t have to work for it. They can feed in short, hard bursts and pick the timing and weather they like. Hit the right spot during one of those windows and it’s very good. Miss it and you’ll swear the lake is empty.

It’s like a church basement potluck where the hotdish table is so full nobody lines up at once. They wander over when they feel like it. You just have to be standing by the bars when they do.

Gulls, still

He’s had decent luck this week near gulls diving on minnows, and he flags it might be coincidence. A lot of that commotion happens in water too shallow to get a boat into, but he figures some of the bait has to sit a little farther out. So: shallow flats with big minnow schools and working gulls go on the list of places to try first.

Can’t find unpainted jigs?

Fair. They aren’t on every pegboard up north. His suggested backups are black, dark green, or blue heads with red hooks. That’s his idea of what to try, not a tested ranking, so treat it like advice from the guy in the next slip. Good advice, though.

Outlook (his, labeled)

He expects that cooling water will eventually become the thing that slows Winnie down. For now, in his words, “location is the key.” He’s booked every day this coming week and plans to keep posting updates, and if you spot his boat out there he’d be glad if you pulled over to wave. That’s a nice thing about this lake. People still wave.

How this fits with yesterday’s card

First Frost, Fussy Fish, Shiners Back on the Jig is the single-day snapshot: one windy Saturday, 57–58° water, a wind-limited map, walleyes no deeper than 5–6 feet. This card is the week-wide read from the same guide: 5–7 feet, rocks when it blows, eelgrass tops, gull flats, plain 1/8-ounce heads with #1 red hooks and minnows, and keep moving until you find a school. One guide’s notes plus a couple of secondhand reports isn’t a lake census. It’s a solid head start. Confirm current MN DNR regs before harvest.

Sources

• October 6, 2026 “Sundin’s Mystery of the Missing Walleyes Part 2”, Jeff Sundin / Fishrapper (Early Bird Fishing Guide)
• Prior MN Fish On card: Lake Winnie — First Frost, Fussy Fish, Shiners Back on the Jig