Muskegon Lake HOTD 2025 - Tournament Day

There were no surprises in the forecast for tournament morning. The wind was here and it was real. There were going to be huge sections of the lake that were just going to be unfishable. A lot of the stuff that you can count on covering water and catching fish when the wind does blow were toast. There was just too much of it to stand in the boat and try and control it. Trevor was trying to get into a college event all week that fell through so I had Cameron riding along today. Poor guy was about to get wet on the ride this morning!

Since we weren’t in the early draw, we were at the back of the pack. Fine by me, we weren’t racing anyone today. It was all about survival and we got going around 22 miles an hour at blast off. First time to ever go that slow, the waves were packed tight, big, and it was just brutal. Sorry about the soaking you took Cameron! There was an area we wanted to start in but I thought surely it would have boats on it. Shockingly it was mostly open except for one boat that made a few quick casts and left. This could be good!

My first bite was a good one on a drop shot. Until it turned out to be about a 5 pound dogfish. I have not caught many of those on a dropshot or in that area. It was a big letdown and of course ruined my whole setup. New hook, new worm, and some retie time. Cameron was catching them but they weren’t the right size. We both jumped off a keeper, landed #1, and I lost a fancy topwater to some rocks. Not a great start but we were just hoping to get a limit and maybe a good bite or 2. That produced a lot bites but nothing worth while so off we went to the good stuff. First stop had it going on and we caught a big catfish to start. Which also ruined all my tackle and took forever. Meanwhile Cameron was busy filling our limit and despite a lot of bites we never landed anything solid. Usually when one spot like that is good so are all the rest. Today that just wasn’t the case. It was a struggle to get bites and when we did, they just weren’t quality. Usually, a bad day on this program is 13-14 pounds but something was off. We started bouncing between shallow and deep. Some bites were coming shallow but we were missing some of them. Just not eating it right or something. I also had tied up my shallow stuff very last minute before the launch and regret not snelling my hook. I was only using a ½ ounce weight but I feel like if I snelled it that I might have landed a few more. We culled at least once up there but it wasn’t a big deal. We needed to cull by pounds and not ounces.

We were just kind of fishing everything in front of us because there weren’t a lot of options and it wasn’t one of those days I could run a bunch of small spots and make culls. We just had to kind of fish around. I was pitching the Googan Baits bandito bug around and got another bite. It legit didn’t move at first when I set the hook. But then it came up just wallowing and coming towards the boat. It was a true KONG and the bite we needed so desperately. It all happened really close to the boat so as I readied for the boat flip he just came off. I’ll be honest it was devastating. It would have been a huge boost to our bag and likely would have been a big bass contender (big bass ended up being 5.6 and it wasn’t that big). There’s nothing we could do now except try and catch another one.

It did focus me in shallow for a bit and shortly after culled with our biggest fish out of some pads. It was getting down to crunch time and we were for sure in survival mode. Usually in survival mode we can pull a few tricks out at the end. But there were just so many boats everywhere it was manageable to fish. We tried the north side of the lake for a minute and instantly regretted it. There was no place to hide on the north side in the region of the lake we were in. We just ran out of places to go so we hunkered down in a grass spot and culled 2 more times at the end of the day. There aren’t that many times that I’m just ready to be done fishing but today was one of them. Somehow, we ended up finishing in 17th place with our 11.99 pound bag. Just a few spots out of the money. Knowing that big one puts us in the top 5 definitely hurts but maybe he’ll swim back up in that area and I’ll get another chance this year.

Time for some redemption at Hardy Dam this weekend. I don’t know what to expect up there but I do know that it will be refreshing to fish a new lake. I’m also expecting it to be challenging between the actual fishing and the boat traffic that everyone talks about. Wish us luck!