If you think about Muskegon Lake, what comes to mind? Yellow perch, after they move in from the big lake, usually when it’s cold, maybe through the ice (if we ever get ice anymore)? Walleyes, especially at night? Chinook salmon, when they’re fresh out of Lake Michigan, still silver and full of spit and vinegar that can be jigged up in the channel or trolled up in the lake?
All are fine fisheries.
Ben Nielsen shows off a Muskegon Lake largemouth where drop shot rigs produced on weedy flats and points.
But if you ask Ben Nielsen what makes Muskegon Lake shine, it’s bass fishing.
“It’s one of the top bass fishing lakes in the state, easily in the top 10, and arguably the top among the lakes along the lake shore on the west side of the state,” says Nielsen, who is a regular tournament angler and works in the Consumer show industry (think, Outdoorama). “It’s a fantastic lake that continues to hold up.”
Nielsen invited me to join him for a full shift on the 4,150-acre drowned river mouth, where we caught about 40, all but one, a largemouth. We fished weedy points with slab wood on the bottom and thick walls of weeds (mostly coontail) in 12 to 15 feet of water.
Our day started slowly. It was brisk in the morning (hoody weather) with an east wind, and Nielsen had me down four or five to zip until I finally connected on a Texas-rigged plastic worm, which I insisted on fishing against advice because it’s been a while since I fished that way, and I kind of miss it.
Nielsen, meanwhile, was using a drop shot rig with a Zoom worm he had rigged weed-less. And he had me down about that many more when I gave up and rigged a drop-shot. My catch rate went up quickly.
We spent the morning fishing weedy flats and points with plastic worms and swim jigs. We caught some nice fish; the best was just short of four pounds (3.87 on a hand-held scale) with a couple of threes and a wad of two-pound pluses that felt heavy for their length. Healthy fish.
I asked Nielsen what made Muskegon Lake tick and why it was arguably the best of the drowned river mouths.
“Lake Michigan is the catalyst to the whole thing–it’s a good size lake, has all the features you want–flats, deep-water access, structure, and you get influxes of alewives and other things that enable the lake to have a great forage base.
“I think Muskegon Lake’s got a lot more structure in it than the others, and a lot of that goes back to when Muskegon was a lumber lake. A lot of that wood wound up in the lake and created a lot of structure for the fish to relate to.
“It’s got large flats; that’s where they spawn, that’s a good nursery area. Those large flats produce and maintain lots of fish.”
As we moved into the afternoon, Nielsen suggested we start flipping weed beds. It was alternately sunny and overcast, so when the sun disappeared, Nielsen used his forward-facing sonar to keep us on the edges of the weed patches. It worked well. We flipped pegged worms (me) and creature baits (Nielsen) with heavy weights (to punch through the thick stuff) and caught ‘em pretty good. The fish were in there, and they were fat and feisty.
But we both got bit off twice. Pike?
I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve fished it for a pike pretty successfully a couple of times, once, about 25 years ago on the last Saturday of April (when I took a break from the opening-day walleye madness) and once, many years ago, with Kevin Van Dam, in the summer when he was working on a deep-water spinnerbait pattern that he planned to use in an upcoming tournament in the South. (And oddly enough, we wound up with a limit of walleyes that day, too. On spinnerbaits.)
Of course, Muskegon Lake is probably best known for walleyes, and it’s an excellent fishery, first put on the map by Mark Martin and his walleye fishing exploit at night. That tradition continues. But that’s one of the charms of Muskegon Lake, Nielsen said. It’s loaded with all kinds of fish.
“It’s a lake where you can catch a five-pound largemouth, a five-pound smallmouth, a large flathead and a 20-pound salmon all in the same day,” Nielsen said. “And you can throw a muskie and pike in there.”
The one smallmouth we caught was on a weedy flat mixed in with the largemouths. But we didn’t look at the kind of places where you can expect to catch smallies in the summer, like on the break walls or the deep wood piles (say, 15 to 25 feet) that Nielsen said haven’t been producing well lately.
“Interestingly enough, I fished here four or five days ago and caught 75 percent smallmouths in most of the same spots we’re fishing today,” Nielsen said. “Depending on the day, you can catch both species in the same places. But seasonally, it’s more largemouth than smallmouths in the heat of the summer. But if you were here in April or May or in September or October, you’d see more and more smallmouth in the mix.”
I’ve seen it myself, of course. I’ve been on trips when the smallmouths outnumbered the bigmouths and times when they outshined them size-wise.
Not that I’m complaining. We had a great day of it. Though we never caught a kicker fish–our best five probably went around 15 pounds–Nielsen said we had a pretty fair showing.
“That’s pretty much classic Muskegon Lake,” he said.
