D and R Sports Classic 2026 Muskegon Lake/Grand River- Practice

A classic tournament on the home waters, what an opportunity. It would seem like this would be a huge home turf advantage but in reality it was terrifying. Both Muskegon Lake and The Grand River can be extremely fickle later in the season. Combine that with the fact that usually we don’t spend much time fishing here in the fall. Usually we have an out of town Classic right about now and we haven’t fished around home since mid September. There are actually other places we know more about in the fall than the ones in our own back yard. But we were still going to be pretty familiar with the fishery and that was going to help out a lot. We took a split approach to practice, I took Muskegon and Trevor took on the River.

I had hoped to get out an pre practice around Muskegon Lake. But Amanda was out of town the weekend prior and after taking a few days off for Houghton Lake, I wasn’t going to take a pre practice day during the week. The girls and did make it out on the lake for a few hours Saturday night but we were chasing fun instead of work so salmon were the target. We did find out there were plenty of those around. Trevor was around them on the river in pre practice like he always is.

The fish got a break for a week and then Friday was the official practice day. Very warm conditions and little wind meant this was going to be an interesting practice day. To make things more interesting, the forecast was calling for a big south blow the day of the event. No surprise for Muskegon Lake to be super rough during a tournament but it would for sure change my practice plans. I got almost every TFO I own out and they all got used at some point during the day. It was nice knowing that we were going off take off number 4 but I won’t lie I was feeling the pressure of finding somewhere good to start. We couldn’t win it on day one but we had to catch them to stay in it. My expectation was that a team would need 13 plus pounds to have a chance after day 1 and that the winning 2 day weight would be 30 plus pounds. Weights always flip flop on 2 day events but especially with the Grand River thrown in, anything could happen if you survived day 1.

My morning did not get off to a fast start and I wasn’t seeing any of the feeding activity I was hoping for. I was seeing some salmon though and I needed to get away from that distraction. A few stops in and I was getting outside my comfort zone on Muskegon Lake and just fishing with MEGA Live 2. I caught a drum, then I found another bait ball with some fish on it, that one bit too. I could tell something was off with this fish and after a lengthy battle I found out why it was kicking my butt. It was a salmon and luckily there weren’t more to get distracted with. Shortly after I caught a nice smallmouth and then a nice largemouth. I was seeing some encouraging things and filed this away to explore more later. Despite my best efforts I struggled to duplicate this other places. I was striking out on a lot of places I had high hopes for. I had little confidence in covering water with no wind either and that made it tricky to find any sweet spots on big flats.

I had to check on a few things to see if a particular pattern would be in play. I went to one of my best spots and threw a chatterbait on it. It got eaten 3 times on the first cast and that gave me a ton of confidence. I checked on other area that was similar and caught a nice one. If this stuff was going to play we could absolutely catch a big bag. I went poking around in some areas that would be out of the wind the rest of the day. One area produced a big smallmouth and a couple other bites on a jig. That was a very strange area to be in the rotation but it was absolutely happening on Saturday.

I got a bite here and there the rest of the day but nothing really promising until the end. I tried the scoping thing again and determined it was a legit shot to do well. Oddly enough it was mostly largemouth and they were all the same size in big wolf packs. It was nice to know that it could work both in the morning and in the afternoon. I didn’t think it could produce any 4 pounders but if we could roll in there and get 5 bites they would be over 15 pounds. I went from having a lot of doubts all week to feeling pretty confident that 13-15 pounds would be an average day. If we got lucky a couple times maybe we could bust a big bag. Trevor had us around them on the river too but with that place that could equal 10 pounds or 17 pounds but at least we knew that we were going to get some bites. It just felt like we had a good chance for a high finish in this one and who knows maybe we could get a few special bites to put us towards the top.