Muskegon River Fishing Report – July 23, 2016

Muskegon River Fishing Report – July 23, 2016

Mark, from South Carolina, holds a “mule” of a Smallmouth bass caught while fishing with Capt. Jeff and son Will on the Muskegon river.

Muskegon river fishing report for the last leg of July is all about the unusual variety of fish being caught as of late.  We’re typically well into our mostly Smallmouth bass fishing, but this summer has been a mix of resident Brown and Rainbow trout, Smallmouth bass, Rock bass and even Walleye.  With water temperatures having stayed cooler much longer than normal into July, the trout have still been willing to chase down streamers and some are even taking dry flies off the surface early in the morning and later in the afternoon. 

Will holds an extremely scrappy Smallmouth that spent as much time out of the water as it did in, before coming to hand.

Although nice to see the trout remain more active than normal for this time of July, our focus has been on Smallmouth bass as of late and whatever else we get is a bonus !

With both fly fishing and light spin tackle equipment, we’re catching fish both on topwater poppers and waking flies or lures, as well as subsurface with crayfish and baitfish imitations, as well as a few general “attractor” patterns.

With some of our warmest July weather in recent years, we’ll surely see all bodies of water across Michigan feel the affect and likely come up in temperature.  The heavy rains that came through most of west Michigan this past Thursday did dump a LOT of water and most rivers came up as a result of it.  Those rivers that did come up will surely drop down shortly as earth is quite thirsty !…it hasn’t had much to drink over the past couple weeks.

Present water temperature in the 70-71 range around Croton, a bit warmer downstream near Newaygo.