HAYWARD, WI – The inland trout season closes Sept. 30, and the final three weeks just may be the best fishing of the year.

The summer’s extreme weather -- August’s intense rains and flooding in southern Wisconsin and prolonged drought in northern Wisconsin – haven’t seemed to hurt the fishing prospects for this fall much, according to state fisheries managers. And conditions are ripe for fish and anglers alike.

Grasshoppers and other terrestrial insects litter the water, luring big trout to take a bite. Cooling temperatures in bigger streams and rivers spur fish to be more active. And adult trout start moving into smaller tributary streams as they get ready to spawn, giving anglers a good shot at landing some nice big fish in stretches where they’ve previously pulled in smaller fish.

“Historically, September is great fishing,” says Frank Pratt, a Department of Natural Resources fisheries biologist stationed in Hayward. “These fish have the feed bag on in the fall.”

The drought in northern Wisconsin has meant record low flows at times on some northern streams, including the Namekagon, but Pratt reports that the fishing will be good, with the drought’s effects showing up in coming years.

“For fishing, the bottom line is: the Namekagon’s still a good bet for big wild browns,” Pratt says. Summer electrofishing surveys on the Namekagon River in Lenroot show fish densities are well above the long-term average, and that nearly a third of the fish available are larger than 15 inches, he says.

Dave Vetrano, fisheries supervisor in the La Crosse area, said flooding and high water levels throughout the area did little damage to most streams restored under DNR’s habitat program using trout stamp revenues. “In fact, these waters look better now than they did a month ago. Pools that had been inundated with sediment have been scoured clean leaving ‘new’ places to fish,” he says.

Shorter daylight hours and cooling water temperatures also work in the angler’s favor because they mean that large, adult brown trout are beginning their spawning migrations upstream to the headwater nursery areas where they were stocked or hatched, says Randy Schumacher, fisheries supervisor for southeastern Wisconsin.

“Large, adult brown trout are able to tolerate warmer summer water temperatures than young trout and thus tend to spend the summer in larger, warmer and more open downstream reaches,” he says.

While in their downstream lairs, large trout often intermix with smallmouth bass and feed heavily on abundant forage minnows. “Come fall, those big adults are feeling the spawning urge and start heading upstream into some pretty small headwater tributaries they called home as a younger trout,” Schumacher says.