Elbow Lake Fishing guide

Elbow Lake has two inlets: one originates from a small lake to the north and the other is Elbow Creek which originates near Eveleth. Elbow Creek has a history of receiving sewage effluent from the city of Eveleth. During unusually wet weather events, Eveleth's treatment facility at times is unable to completely keep up and partially treated overflow can make its way into the creek. The most recent events occurred in the spring of 2014 and 2016 where partially treated effluent was able to enter the creek and lake. This excess nutrient load can supplement the natural nutrient load and at times cause strong algae blooms which creates the lakes green appearance. The only outlet (Elbow Creek) flows south to the St. Louis River.

This survey used gill nets, trap nets, and night electrofishing to assess the fish population. Fish species sampled included northern pike, largemouth bass, black crappie, bluegill, yellow perch, walleye, white sucker, pumpkinseed, golden shiner, and tadpole madtom.

The northern pike gillnet catch was 15.5 fish/net which is comparable to other surveys from the lake and very good compared to other similar lakes in the state. Sizes ranged from 18 to 36 inches with an average of 23 inches and three pounds. Sizes were larger in this survey than any other survey on the lake.

Electrofishing was used for the first time on Elbow Lake to sample largemouth bass. Two and a half hours of electrofishing captured 36 largemouth for a catch rate of 14.4 fish/hour, which is slightly below average compared to other lakes in the area. Sizes ranged from 3 to 18 inches with an average of 12 inches. The average weight was one and a half pounds. It appears Elbow Lake has the ability to grow some big largemouth with just over a third of the fish measuring larger than 16 inches. Growth rates were extremely fast with a four year old bass averaging 14 inches long.

The black crappie trapnet catch was 23.3 fish/net which is very good compared to other similar lakes and the highest catch rate on record for Elbow Lake. Lengths ranged from 4 to 13 inches but the average was just over 5 inches. Although the catch included a lot of small fish which brought the average size down, there were a lot of sizes that would be appealing to anglers. Forty-six crappie measured larger than 8.5 inches. As with the largemouth, the growth rates were extremely fast. The average length of a four year old crappie was 10 inches long.

This is only the second survey that sampled bluegill from Elbow Lake, the first record was from 1998 when one fish was captured. The 2016 trapnet catch rate was 14.3 fish/net which is above average compared to other similar lakes. Sizes were from 3 to 9 inches with a 6 inch average. Just under half of the bluegill sampled were over 6.5 inches long. As with largemouth and crappie, the growth rates for bluegill are quite fast compared to other lakes in the area.

The yellow perch gillnet catch rate was 6.2 fish/net which is above average compared to other similar lakes. Sizes were small though with an average length of 6 inches and the largest reaching just under 8 inches.

Noticeable by their absence were black bullhead. Black bullhead dominated catches in both gill nets and trap nets in the past three surveys with high marks of 144/gill net and 333/trap net in 1998. It's not entirely known what happened to have such a die-off of this highly tolerable species, when the lake appears to be doing fairly well for other game species.

Other species sampled but in low numbers were one walleye, white sucker, golden shiner, pumpkinseed, and tadpole madtom.

Some smaller sized northern pike were infested with neascus (black spot) although the bluegill were all relatively clean.