Lake Winnie — Third River Weeds, and Pack Your Own Fillet Table

There’s a moment every October when you pull into a landing and realize the lake has started closing up without telling you. The dock’s gone. The porta-potty’s gone. A lone gull is standing where the bait shop sign used to be, looking at you like you’re late for something that already happened.

That’s roughly where the Grand Rapids area was on Friday, according to one guide who had to try four landings. The fish are still eating, though. Two public notes from the last few days, so let’s do both.

Big Winnie: Third River and the River Bar

Capt. Jeff Johnson of Northern Drift Outfitters posted a short Oct. 16 update on the lakewinnie.net report page. Short, but it names places, and that’s worth a lot.

• Where: walleyes are turning up in good numbers around the Third River Flowage and the River Bar.
• How deep: 6 to 9 feet, both in the weeds and just outside them. So don’t just park on the edge. Work through it, then slide out a little.
• What: jig and minnow is his main tool.
• Also biting: crappies, on the same jig and minnow.
• Water: still dropping as the mornings get colder. He doesn’t give a number, so we won’t either.

That fits the last few weeks of Winnie cards, which keep finding fish shallow and close to cover. The new part is the map. Our recent cards leaned on Little Stony and general shoreline breaks. This one names the Third River side of the lake.

Around Grand Rapids: the season is shutting the doors

This next part isn’t from Winnie. Jeff Sundin’s Oct. 17 Fishrapper post covers a Friday trip on some smaller lakes in the Grand Rapids area that he doesn’t name, with north-northwest gusts forecast near 30 mph and air temperatures in the low 40s. He skipped walleyes and went for perch and crappies. What he found at the landings is the part every late-season angler around here should hear.

• The first landing had no dock and no toilet. The next one was closed for the season, and the one after that was under construction. He finally launched at a ramp that still had a dock.
• At the end of the day, he found the door locked on the Pokegama Dam fish cleaning station. He cleaned his fish on his truck’s tailgate using river water.
• His warning: the resorts around there have mostly shut down for the year, and public cleaning stations in the region are few. Have a Plan B for cleaning fish before you go.

So the fish are still around, but the help is thinning out. Bring a board, a sharp knife, a cooler with ice, and a pair of gloves you don’t care about. And maybe a backup landing in mind before you leave home.

What he caught on those unnamed lakes

This isn’t Winnie, but it’s a useful hint for anybody looking for a perch or crappie fry nearby:

• Perch: a weed flat in about 7 feet, around patches of coontail and eelgrass, with the surface at 56 degrees. He fished small golden shiners on 1/8-ounce live bait jigs and got enough jumbos to call it a win. Pike kept crashing the party, and that’s just life in a Minnesota weed bed.
• Crappies: 18 feet of water, cooler at 53 to 54 degrees where the waves were rolling. The wind made him go up to 1/4-ounce jigs to stay near the bottom. He tipped them with several plastics and fished a slow lift, then let it walk back down. The crappies mostly grabbed it on the way down, and he says every tail he tried worked. That made 15 crappies.

How to use this next to the last card

Keep The Boat Next Door Was Dragging Suckers for the crawler-versus-big-minnow debate and the 53 to 54 degree shallows from Oct. 15. Use this card for the newer Third River and River Bar location, the 6 to 9 foot weed range, and the reminder that the area’s docks and cleaning stations are closing up.

Fine print

Johnson’s update is a few sentences with no temperature, fish counts or sizes, and we didn’t add any. Sundin’s trip was on lakes he chose not to name, so treat those details as an area hint, not a Winnie report. On Winnie and its connected waters, the walleye slot and other special rules still apply. Check current MN DNR regulations before anything goes in the livewell, and check that your landing is still open before you drive up.

Sources

• Lake Winnie Fishing Reports, October 16th report, lakewinnie.net / Capt. Jeff Johnson, Northern Drift Outfitters
• October 2026 Fishrapper reports, “Dodging the Dodge-Able On A Gusty Day,” Oct. 17, 2026, Jeff Sundin
• Prior card: Lake Winnie — The Boat Next Door Was Dragging Suckers