Muskegon River Fishing Report – October 6, 2026 – Newaygo, Michigan

The Muskegon river is seeing the first good batches of fall run Chinook salmon starting to congregate around spawning grounds as they get into their fall spawning run.

The rains of last week did not provide as much water to the river itself, much of this can be attributed to a very dry last couple months in the key parts of the Muskegon river watershed….if those rains didn’t fall “in” the river, not much was getting “to” the river since the ground water very dry and thirsty !

That being said, we are seeing more salmon arrive, as well as a few early fall steelhead and of course the resident Rainbow and Brown trout are anxiously waiting for more spawning salmon to show up as they provide easy, super food meals in the form of loose salmon eggs.

We have had some Caddis hatches up river that provided some dry fly fishing opportunities, as well as good nymphing with indicator rigs on lighter 4-6 weight fly rods. Streamer fishing was good when we had the slight bump in river levels, but the river has since dropped and we may have seen the last of the good trout “streamer bite” for 2026.

As we get further into October, more salmon and steelhead with show up, with the peak of salmon most likely being the from mid October – early November, then fall steelhead take over up to mid-late December, depending on what mother nature does for us.

Current river levels are below average, with last readings being in the 1,100 cfs range and river temperature around 60.