BirdTrout

Thunder Bay Watershed, Michigan

1,431 miles of mapped stream across 1,250 square miles of drainage in Alcona, Alpena, Montmorency counties, in 79 named streams. Michigan designates 460 of those miles as trout water, on 56 streams.

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Public land — where the bank is open to walk and fish

USGS gauge — live water temperature

Water temperature — the colour of every stream in the basin

58 64 70

50°F and colder is cold, through cold-transitional and cool, to warm above 70°F — the same four bands the app paints. On this map the colour is MDNR's classification of the valley segment, not a measurement, except at the gauge dots, which read live. Grey is water MDNR has not typed.

The watershed in numbers

HUC8 04070006 in the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset. Every figure below adds up the river pages in this basin — same records, one basin at a time.

Cold, cool and warm water

MDNR's Valley Segment Ecological Classification, which types the valley segment rather than measuring the water. It covers 30% of this basin's stream miles (427.9 of 1,431); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.

• Cold 176.5 mi (41%)
• Cold-transitional 74.3 mi (17%)
• Cool 102.2 mi (24%)
• Warm 74.9 mi (18%)

250.8 of the 427.9 typed miles in this basin — 59% — are cold or cold-transitional water. The dominant class is cold.

There is no elevation model behind this page, so it carries no elevation range. MDNR's gradient class is the field that answers the same question, and over the typed miles it reads: high 188.0 mi, medium 105.2 mi, low 76.2 mi, very low 58.5 mi.

What makes this watershed distinctive

Every named stream in the basin

All 79 of them, longest first. 27 have a page of their own and are linked; the rest are in the app. Thermal class is MDNR's, over the reaches it has typed. "Now" is the live USGS reading where a gauge stands in that stream.

Public land in the watershed

151,984 acres in 102 units, which is 19.0% of the 800,158 acres the basin covers. Private inholdings carried in the same source file are excluded, here and on the map.

The biggest named blocks of it, each with its own page — the streams on that ground, what is open to hunt on it, and where the access sites are.

• Atlanta State Forest Area 287,556 ac
• Au Sable State Forest - Grayling Unit 265,737 ac
• Huron National Forest 177,310 ac
• Turtle Lake Club 9,488 ac
• Lockwood Lake Ranch 1,993 ac
• Hunt Creek 1,496 ac
• Lumberlost Farms 852 ac
• Hunt Creek Fisheries Research Area 712 ac
• Hubbard Lake State Game Area 459 ac
• Sage Lakes State Wildlife Management Area 248 ac

Species present

Recorded by MDNR at 0 survey stations in this basin, or in its stocking record. The temperature ranges are our own species table and are the same numbers the app's picker uses.

Best time to fish

The hatch calendar for northern lower Michigan, which is the region this basin's centre falls in — the same regions the app's hatch panel uses. It is a regional record, not a survey of this watershed: nobody has counted insects basin by basin. Year-round records (midges, scuds, sculpins) are left out; they are true every month and they are not what a calendar is for.

53 insects are recorded from northern lower Michigan. Each links to its own page, with the flies that imitate it.

Neighbouring watersheds

The subbasins that share a boundary with this one and carry coldwater streams.

• Au Sable 04070007
• Black 04070005
• Lone Lake-Ocqueoc 04070003

Plan a weekend around it

The weekend this basin adds up to — the biggest water in it, what is hatching when, the public land in range and a three-day plan.

• Thunder Bay fly fishing trip