Windy Lake

On the LakeGrade scale Windy Lake grades a B, with clarity at 5.5 ft and 11 µg/L of phosphorus placing it above the Minnesota median. The lake's weakest score is on Secchi depth — the water looks more turbid than its phosphorus number alone would predict.

Mesotrophic conditions dominate at Windy Lake: enough nutrients for a healthy fishery, not so much that algal blooms become a chronic problem. A maximum depth of 39 ft puts Windy Lake in the middle of Minnesota's depth distribution. Windy Lake covers 456 acres alongside 6.0 miles of shoreline — a mid-sized water that supports a working fishery without being so large that conditions diverge between basins. Windy Lake sits at rank 92 of 159 in Lake County, in the lower half of the local distribution.

Windy Lake has no invasive species recorded in Minnesota state databases as of 2025, though prevention practices still apply at all access points. Walleye are documented at Windy Lake, one of 7 fish species on record for the lake. Public access is available — the lake is on the Minnesota PCA public-access list. Monitoring depth is thin here: the LakeGrade rubric is applied to a small number of sample years, and the grade will be revised as more data accumulates.