Muskegon River Fishing Report – April 21, 2023 – Newaygo, Michigan

The Muskegon river spring steelhead run is in full swing and we’ll continue to see new steelhead come in from lake Michigan over the next couple weeks+. How long we have “fishable” numbers of spring steelhead will depend on river levels and temperatures. If we can keep some cool river temperatures through the end of next week, we will likely see our last good push of steelhead come out of lake Michigan over a week-10 day time period. If things warm quickly and/or we have big rise in river levels, we may see a lot of our “last batch” come all at once. This is how it has gone historically, but we’ll have to see what Mother Nature has in store for us this spring.

With both fly fishing and conventional equipment setups, we’ve been catching not only nice steelhead, but also some real fat and healthy Rainbow and Brown trout. The trout are eager to cash in on the easy meals of high protein steelhead eggs and based on the size of their stomachs, they’re finding enough of them !

It won’t be long and we will put the big game equipment away and pull out the trout rods for our best dry fly fishing of the year. This “typically” goes from late May – mid to late June on the Muskegon river. Hatches will include tan caddis, sulphurs, gray drakes, blue winged olives and isonychias for the most part.

Not far beyond prime trout dry fly time, we’ll see some great smallmouth bass show up and provide really good fishing through late spring and most of the summer.

Current rivers temperatures are a bit below 50 and river levels are running a little above average for this time of April.

Considering a guided outing this summer for trout or smallmouth bass ?…it may be best to touch base about open dates as I’m filling them every week of the summer at this time, Same goes for fall salmon and steelhead trips, but know that those are filling up fast !….my entire September schedule is already full.

More to follow in the days ahead…

Jeff