Manistee River Fishing Report RSS

I sent out a text to the crew on Thursday: "Anyone want to fish tomorrow?" All I got back was "I wish, man" or "I'll be tied up with work". I'd be flying solo. I don't mind fishing from the boat by myself from time-to-time. It can be very meditative, and I'm able to explore different spots that we'd normally ignore. Usually I end up casting to a void, but sometimes you end up discovering new "ninja" spots that no one fishes. I digress... I launched the boat at first light with nothing but two spey rods in the boat....

It was around 3:00 AM Sunday morning and we were 3/4 of the way through our night float. We had been grinding through an hour long mousing lull, and I was about ready to call it. We had caught a 19.5 incher early on, and had a decent amount of non-committal bumps on the surface throughout the night. I was struggling to keep my eyes open in the rower's seat, when I heard a thrash on Shane's mouse. "Got him, good fish, GOOD fish". I gave one hard back-row and we turned our headlamps on. When we saw the fish,...

Thursday night we launched the boat around 9 PM and were able to lock down a good-looking spot and wait for bugs. The water temp was perfect at 65 degrees. Sure enough, around 10 PM, we started seeing spinners flying up river. Not long after, they were all over the water. We were thinking, “man, are there any fish here? They should be rising by now”. We were about ready to pull anchor when the river came alive. Brad heard a good fish rise upstream and I had 2 or 3 feeding right in front of me. Brad caught his...

Another week of shorter days and dark mornings, and even our first snow of the year, but the clocks roll back on Sunday and we have a "long weekend" to look forward to. Steelhead fishing has been a bit slow to start this year. There are certainly fish around, but it doesn't seem like we have gotten a big wave of fish in any river yet. There are a lot of skips around in the Grand River, and not a lot of big fish yet.  River levels are once again falling, but there is rain in the forecast so I am...

It feels like fall is starting to settle in.  The temps have cooled down and we finally received some rain.  Despite the rain we have received the water levels are still low (Grand River 2820cfs, Rogue River 150cfs, Muskegon River 990cfs, Pere Marquette river 460 cfs). Looks like we have some additional rain forecasted to come in the next several days so hopefully the water levels will continue to tick up, fingers crossed.  The king salmon are still occupying real estate in nearly every river and if you look hard enough you can find a steelhead or two among them. ...