Muskegon River Fishing Report – May 23, 2025 – Newaygo, Michigan

The Muskegon river in the Newaygo area is in great shape as we approach June and this should bode well for trout fishing through early summer. With such odd runs of unusually warm weather most of “spring”, it’s good to see river levels come up a bit and temperatures actually drop over the last near week with the much needed rain.

Prior to this recent cool down, the cinnamon Caddis hatch was starting and will get going again in the days ahead. The annual sucker spawn is coming to a close and resident Brown and Rainbow trout will be keying on other sources of food, with small baitfish and insects being their primary foods for a while.

Due to the quite warm weather over most of the last few weeks, the Smallmouth Bass spawn is in progress as well, which is 2-3 weeks earlier than usual, but river temperatures are the primary driver of this and temps had gotten as high as 61 degrees. They should wrap up their spawning in the next week or so.

The summer “schedule” of fishing on the Muskegon river should go as follows.

*Trout-dry fly fishing through June, unless we go into drought mode with an extended heat wave.

*Smallmouth bass fishing will pick up considerably once they’re done spawning and go through early August.

*Some Northern Pike should be around come early July and the Musky that were planted about 10 years ago could be showing themselves more this summer….I did come across a couple of them last summer.

*Onset of the fall 2025 Chinook salmon run should be first week or so of September.

For now,

Jeff