BirdTrout

Manitowoc-Sheboygan Watershed, Wisconsin

686 miles of mapped stream across 1,630 square miles of drainage in Manitowoc, Sheboygan, Calumet, Fond du Lac, Kewaunee, Brown, Ozaukee counties, in 28 named streams. Wisconsin designates 71 of those miles as trout water, on 16 streams. The 1 mainstem gauge with a July record read 74.8°F in July.

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Map key
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

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 Wisconsin DNR's own classification of the stream, not a measurement, except at the gauge dots, which read live. Grey is water Wisconsin DNR has not typed.

The watershed in numbers

HUC8 04030101 in the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset. Every figure below adds up the river pages in this basin — same records, one basin at a time.

686 mi
of mapped stream
1,251 NHD reaches
1,630 sq mi
drainage area
1,043,240 acres
74.8°F
July water temperature at the gauges
1 mainstem gauge, mean 74.8°F
28,147 ac
public land
2.7% of the basin · 13 units

Cold, cool and warm water

WDNR's trout stream classification, which types the stream by the trout population it supports rather than by measuring the water — every reach it calls Class I, II or III carries WDNR's own cold designation. It covers 10% of this basin's stream miles (68.9 of 686); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.

68.9 of the 68.9 typed miles in this basin — 100% — are cold or cold-transitional water. Every typed reach carries the same class, which is as likely to be the coverage as the water: Wisconsin DNR has typed 10% of it.

What makes this watershed distinctive

This is the Lake Michigan shore basin south of Green Bay, and its trout water is a small share of a farmed landscape: 71 designated miles on 16 of 28 named streams, out of 686 mapped miles, with 69 miles classified cold. The Sheboygan River runs 51.9 miles carrying Class I and II water, the Mullet 33.8 at Class II, the East Twin 29.0 at Class I and II and Jambo Creek 15.7 at Class II. Public ground is 28,147 acres across 1,630 square miles of Manitowoc, Sheboygan, Calumet and Fond du Lac counties, and it is wildlife-area ground rather than forest: Killsnake at 7,029 acres, Brillion at 4,971, the northern unit of the Kettle Moraine State Forest at 4,313 and Collins Marsh at 4,203. No gauge in the basin holds a July record.

Every named stream in the basin

All 28 of them, longest first. 12 have a page of their own and are linked; the rest are in the app. The class column is Wisconsin DNR's designation of that stream. "Now" is the live USGS reading where a gauge stands in that stream.

Stream Miles Class Now Designation
Sheboygan River 51.9 Cold — Class I, Class II
Mullet River 33.8 Cold — Class II
East Twin River 29.0 Cold — Class I, Class II
Neshota River 17.2 untyped — —
Jambo Creek 15.7 Cold — Class II
South Branch Manitowoc River 10.5 untyped — —
Onion River 9.9 Cold — Class I
West Twin River 9.5 Cold — Class II
LaBudde Creek 8.7 Cold — Class I, Class II
Francis Creek 6.8 untyped — —
Kriwanek Creek 6.2 Cold — Class II
Stony Brook 6.2 untyped — Class III
Twin Hill Creek 5.9 untyped — —
King Creek 5.6 untyped — —
Tisch Mills Creek 5.5 Cold — Class II
Thorn Apple Creek 5.4 untyped — —
Ben Nutt Creek 5.2 Cold — Class I
Weedons Creek 5.0 untyped — —
Krok Creek 4.3 untyped — —
Otter Creek 4.0 untyped — —
Feldners Creek 2.1 Cold — Class II
Millhome Creek 2.0 Cold — Class I
Mill Creek 1.8 Cold — Class I
Jackson Creek 1.2 Cold — Class II
Devils River 0.5 Cold — Class II
Black Creek 0.0 untyped — —
Schuett Creek 0.0 untyped — —
Pigeon River 0.0 untyped — —

Public land in the watershed

28,147 acres in 13 units, which is 2.7% of the 1,043,240 acres the basin covers. Private inholdings carried in the same source file are excluded, here and on the map.

Managing agency Acres Share Units
Wisconsin DNR 28,147 100% 13

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.

Best time to fish

The hatch calendar for northern Wisconsin, 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.

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

42 insects are recorded from northern Wisconsin. Each links to its own page, with the flies that imitate it.