Ice Report – 1/25/26 - West Michigan
That all happened fast! We went from very little fishable ice and lots of open water along the lakeshore to likely running machines everywhere in 2 weeks. Our house got hit with the flu pretty bad so I missed the front end of this cold blast but I am ready to go now. Temps in the single digits aren’t making things easy and it is tough to go hunt them down in those conditions. So instead of going on a Muskegon Lake perch mission (which I so badly want to do). We chose an area/species where waiting them out inside a warm shanty was going to be the approach. That place is going to go unnamed for a couple reasons but one being unstable and constantly changing ice.
This was a high risk/high reward mission for lake trout and whatever else might be around. There were lots of unknowns, for one we didn’t even know if the ice would be there or how thick/consistent it would be. But these temps and wind conditions were our chance to find out. We were greeted with great ice conditions but that would be the end of our excitement. Sometimes there can be too much of a good thing and we were in one of those scenarios today. There were shad everywhere, acres of them. The screen was always lit up.
To make things worse, they were loosely schooled, comfortable, and unafraid. Whether you are on the ice or open water, you don’t want to see baitfish behaving like that. That’s a clear sign there are no predators around and there haven’t been for some time. Still, we held out hope that some lakers would be streaking through. With Humminbird Mega Live2 it is much easier to interpret fish behavior vs a standard flasher or 2D graph. While some big fish did show up, they showed no interest in our offerings and elicited no reaction from the shad. I don’t believe any of them were any sort of predator fish. Some certainly appeared carp like on the ML2. It probably took longer than it should have but we finally gave up hope.
I guess it was entertaining always having something on the graph to watch even if you knew they wouldn’t bite. I’ve heard the shad population is high in a lot of the drowned river mouth lakes right now. Winter and these cold temps should start taking a toll on them soon. Until then it might be tough for predators in places. We’re going on perch patrol at some point this week and then through the weekend. So be on the lookout for some fresh Muskegon Lake Reports.