D&R Sports Classic 2025 - Hamlin Lake - Practice

This was sort of a cool switch up. Hamlin Lake has never been a place that I expected to fish a big tournament on. No fault of the fishery itself, it is a great venue for a lot of boats but the launch facilities are not great. But with less than 50 boats this year, they thought outside the box and came up with something cool. Trevor and I had never been there but were looking forward to the adventure.

I didn’t know much about this place other than both largemouth and smallmouth could win. I started doing some research into the history of the lake (which is also pretty interesting) and found out it is more of a river/impoundment than a natural lake. I don’t know the true connection to Lake Michigan but I do know the dam increased the size of the lake quite a bit. One thing that was interesting to me is that the lake has freshwater drum in it but I did not see any evidence of shad. Another fish that is usually in places connected to Lake MIchigan, although I wonder if they were unable to successfully spawn in the lake. In that case they may have died out after the direct connection to Lake Michigan was taken away. I’ve always got a lot of fish thoughts but back to the fishing. One of the best things was Hamlin is only about an hour and fifteen minutes from home. Making pre practice before the off limits a possibility, couple that with a government shutdown and I hit the road for a marathon day.

The biggest challenge here is that I had no idea what I really wanted to find. Usually I’ll have some prior experience on a place or have heard what type of stuff dominates. I just knew about a couple areas to check and being a weird warm fall, pretty much everything was in play. But it was supposed to have a ton of fish in it and they are usually cooperative. That was not my experience for the first few hours of the day. I was mixing it up between covering water, looking around with MEGALive 2, and Side Imaging. I was coming up empty handed at every stop. Deep, shallow, in between was all a bunch of fish that wouldn’t bite and I was struggling to identify. I was able to tell rather quickly that there were a bunch of carp swimming around in this pond.

Finally I caught a fish dropshotting a flatworm and it was a solid smallmouth. I did not stay long to dissect the area but after what I had seen, I was dropping a waypoint on it. I had been mostly graphing or smallmouth fishing, letting the largemouth water heat up. Although the water was almost 70, it was in the 40s that morning and I wanted them to warm up. Eventually I gave in and headed to the upper lake. It didn’t take long and I found something special. I caught them on my first 5 casts to it and now I had a clue. I found some more of it and some more fish. It felt good to have something going on and while I wasn’t catching monsters, I did feel confident about catching limits. I kept trying to play the deep wood game too, hoping they would be coming to that with the cold front were going to get during the off limits. My effort out there was mostly useless during practice but I hoped some of those wood piles would play during the event. The highlight out there was a carp that ate my dropshot bait, I didn’t know what I had on but I hoped it was one of Hamlin Lake’s muskies. What a disappointment! I did get on a grass deal on the lower lake before the night was over. It seemed very repeatable, but I just ran out of time to keep checking.

Fast forward a week and I was just feeling really focused in. I also knew we had a ton of work to do on our official practice day. I did a little bit of bass fishing one day on Muskegon Lake during the week and then a buddy took me on an epic river salmon adventure. Definitely a trip to remember and it was exciting to catch salmon a new way. Of course while watching the forecast all week it became obvious that once again the wind was going to make things difficult. A big south blow on practice day was going to make much of the lake virtually unfishable for someone who was trying to explore vs checking spots. We did see the great white squirrel when we got to town though. A white spirit squirrel crossing the road was not on the radar of things I expected to see up there. It must mean we were going to win the event to see something crazy like that. Turns out the squirrels up there have some weird genetics and there are white squirrels everywhere. If you find yourself in the area, go for a drive on the east side of Hamlin Lake and check them out. I’ll save you the painful details but we really never got on much during official practice. It just seemed that no matter what we did, small fish were the norm and we were going to have to save our weekend during the tournament. It reminded me so much of the Charlevoix practice we had a couple years ago and that worked out well. This was nothing we hadn’t overcome before.