My wife and I spend 5 days on the Chippewa Flowage for the Labor Day weekend. It will be our last trip that direction until next year. I spent a couple of days figuring out the slightly different pattern the largemouth were on with the lower water levels but by day 3 I did great. Nothing really huge with 3.1# being the largest fish but quite a few in the 2.2 - 2.6# range. I fished smallmouth some but ran out of time before I had a good feel for them. The same spinnerbait we came up with in June produced the best again over anything else I used once I figured out where and how deep to throw it.
The good news is that the bog by the CC bridge should be out of the way for the rest of the year. The mud bogs are scattered around the lake and needed to be watched out for as we navigated around the flowage.. There were more of them on the west side than the east side as usual. The weeds are starting to go down with some of the beds we fished in June that were 6" from the surface now 2 feet below the water surface. Other areas, depending on the variety of weed made some areas unfishable. Water clarity varied dramatically from one area of the flowage to the other. Crane Lake, normally very clear, did not have the visibility because of the algae bloom near the top.. The water level was quite a bit lower than in June, by over a foot. In talking with some of the locals it got real bad in the middle of the summer but then they got quite a bit of rain over a short period of time that brought the level back up but now it is on the way down again.. I would say that while we were there the level was dropping at a rate of about 1" per day.
I did manage to catch one musky and lost one. Unfortunately the one I caught was the small one and the 45"er got away. Oh well there is always next time and I guess the big ones are the ones that always get away!!!.