Winnebago Walleye Reefs

I have been asked a couple questions regarding the reef project underway by Walleyes For Tomorrow so I thought an update would be helpful. We now have 1,500,000 lbs. of rock down in Winnebago on 7 structures. Hopefully 4 or 5 to go. We are or were using barges to haul the rock onto the lake. 40 x 100 ft. barges hold 200,000 lbs of rock per load. They are huge, stand 6 ft. out of the water empty and 3 ft. loaded. Two 40'x100' barges with a long reach backhoe on one and rock on the other tied together & pushed by a tug boat. They had 200,000 lbs of boulders on the first load. All went down in one spot in 18' of water. Top of structure is 14' below surface. Will put down a total of 12 such structures. We are moving the loading location to a more user friendly site outside of Stockbridge on Monday.

I happened to run into this rig last summer out in 15 feet of water.

Have the coordinates been released yet

any updates on location??

Please share the location of this reef. 100's of us go to the WFT banquets and helped pay for this reef, we would like to fish it.

Any location update on this project?

We have not decided which format(Hummingbird, Lowrance or Garmin) that the numbers will be released in yet. Unfortunately they do not work in each others graphs. I will answer a couple questions that I have been getting pm's on for everybody. We have put roughly 150 reefs in Winnebago and also about 13 Sauger spawning reefs. This is just the latest project. This project will cost close to 100k by the time it is wrapped up and the gofundme goal is only roughly what was spent when we had to move the loading location out of Stockbridge. We have a meeting next week and should have another update after that. Fish Hound: We would love to hit our goal on the gofundme page and appreciate all who have donated to WFT.

I hope they don't release the way points until they reach their goal on "gofundme.com". Be a little incentive for people to toss a couple extra bucks at the project to enjoy the future fishing adventures.

any update on the gps cord's for these new reefs yet?...would like to punch them in on my locater for future fishing adventures.

Here's another update: Rock hauling portion of the project is done. Last rock went down on Monday morning. Bob Krupp had estimated 3,000,000 lbs. of rock. WFT moved 18 barge loads with approx. 200,000 lbs. per barge for some 3,600,000 lbs. of rock. Rock was dumped in 15 - 17 ft. water on the north sites and 14 -16 ft. water on the south sites. Each site pile form is different depending on the size of rock dumped and how they bounced of each other. Generally speaking they are 50 - 60 ft. long and come up off bottom 5 -7 ft. A breakdown; 5 - 7 quad axel dump truck loads per barge load. Took around 3 hours to load. Barge moved 5 mph loaded and 6 mph unloaded. Took 1.5 - 2 hours each way to get to dump locations because of the size of Winnebago. Only took around 30 minutes to pull rock off loaded barge with the backhoe on the second barge. So around 8 hrs. per load. We had to be on the lake for each load. Put down a buoy each day at a preselected GPS site and the barge was unloaded at the selected site. We have a number of big projects planned along with the hatchery operations. Please help us if you can at: gofund.me/wh63gk

We have eleven of the reefs complete and should be wrapped up later this week. We have photos on our gofundme page along with facebook.

The new reef coordinates will be available once they are completed. We plan on new maps after they are complete and also the coordinates for the reefs on Lake Goegebic that we have done. You can also follow the progress on our Facebook page and Gofundme for those able to help.

Can you provide waypoints of where the structure are?

Thanks for the update. Ches.