Pere Marquette River Fishing Report RSS

A few of us got out over the holiday weekend, and despite the heavy canoe traffic, low clear water and blue skies, the Trout fishing was decent. We caught several Trout on nymphs out of faster pocket water. Stoneflies and soft hackles were the main producers.  Mousing continues to produce in rivers that aren't over-run with Salmon, although the lower water levels exposed the weeds on the surface and it was tricky to put the fly in the right spot on the inside bends without getting weeds on the fly. We didn't roll a ton of fish on mice, but...

Over the last couple weeks we've seen rain showers and cooler temperatures move in. We're finding most of our smallmouth congregated around rocks or mid River structure. We have found that the bass in both the Grand and Muskegon river systems have started to migrate and school up. Being that most of the smallmouth are grouping up, you may have to do a little bit of searching to find where they're at. Once you find them, focus on that stretch and look for similar areas that other schools might be using. For flies we've been using small to medium size...

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,...

Over the holiday break the water level was still up and the water temperature was down so I took advantage and chased some trout on our local waterways.  The trout seemed healthy and happy to play.  Smaller streamers, nymphs, and foam bugs all worked well.  The first heatwave is behind us but we are entering that part of the summer when more heat is sure to come.  With that being said I'm sure the focus of our fly fishing will switch over to warm water species.  Personally I have not focused much on chasing smallmouth around but I did hook into...

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...