Muskegon River Fishing Report – May 14, 2024 – Newaygo, Michigan

The Muskegon river is in transition “phase” as we saw the last of our slim spring steelhead run pretty much come to an end a week ago and now we’re into the onset of insect hatches and dry fly fishing.

As the steelhead leave spawning grounds, both resident and migratory suckers take over, which will provide the trout with easy meals of sucker eggs for a week or more. Indicator nymphing behind spawning suckers can produce some nice trout though and if you can fish the rig correctly, you will eventually be rewarded.

Smallmouth bass are showing up in good numbers and beginning to spawn as well, which means they won’t be eating much until they wrap things up in the next week – 10 days.

Resident Brown and Rainbow trout are starting to “look up” for the caddis that are now emerging and providing some good dry fly fishing opportunities at certain times of the day. Resident trout have also been feeding on small salmon fry on certain days and “if” fished right, those too can produce some good trout.

River levels have dropped below average, are running around 1600 cfs, normal for this time of year over 2000. River temperatures have gone up and down a bit over the last week or so due to fluctuations in day and night air temps and is currently in the upper 50’s.

With such an odd spring of up and down weather, nobody has a good read on what our hatch schedule will look like in the coming weeks, but based on river temps, we should see gray drakes soon…..which puts them about 3 weeks earlier than “normal” !

For now,

Jeff