Muskegon Practice 2025
I was certainly looking forward to a July Muskegon tournament. I haven’t really spent much time on the lake this year other than Monday Night events and the one really windy HOTD tournament. So with a weekend off of a tournaments and it being my birthday, I was going to get an early day out there.
I’d actually planned on going to White for a bit to hopefully swing on some birthday bass in the grass. But when I got there, the parking lot was full and there were high school and middle school tournaments going on. The last thing I wanted to do was get in anyone’s way who is fishing the event so I sent it back down towards Muskegon. The day was uneventful for the most part and I never caught any big ones. I did get clued into some areas of the lake that had a lot of life though. You would see this fuzz on the Humminbird, it didn’t look quite like baitfish but it was something for sure. I was noticing a lot of bird activity just randomly out in the middle of nowhere too. I started looking closer and these tiny young of year alewives were dying and getting eaten by the birds. It seems like the alewives have the potential for a good year class based on how many I saw! There seemed to be something going on with that even though the bass weren’t really eating the alewives. But I did catch fish in some of the areas that were thick with them. Those same areas also seemed to have a perch presence. In bass fishing areas with life of any sort are always worth looking at. At the end of the day, I didn’t really have much, nothing really specific or special anyway.
Trevor hopped into a Tuesday morning event and eliminated a bunch of water. He also ran into some of the right ones for the win with 16 pounds. We were going to have drastically different conditions on Saturday but it gave us something to build on an areas to look. We took Friday off to go practice, I absolutely hate practicing on Fridays but that is the only day I could make work. We got there early and got a hot start throwing a Googan Baits swim jig. It gave us some more areas and while they weren’t big fish it was looking like we were going to catch a bunch of them. That is pretty much what we found throughout the day. Getting bites was really easy, getting quality was not. Another strange thing is some of the places we were catching them really didn’t look that good.
We also found 2 more really isolated sneaky spots. They didn’t have big ones on this trip but I know they will pay off in the future. It was obvious when they showed up on the Humminbird Side Imaging that they were different and the “right” kind of spot. Side Imaging is such a valuable tool even though it doesn’t get talked about as much as forward facing sonar. I have found so many good spots throughout the years idling around watching the side imaging. Always leave it on, you never know when you will find the next thing.
The biggest fish we caught on the day was up shallow in some isolated pads. It would be late in the day if we ever got to this area since it had so little to go around. But it was potentially on the list depending on how the day unfolded. A lot of stuff we were counting on, we just never practiced. I always find it more productive to find new stuff than check old stuff. The really trophy of the day was this big drum I caught on C Flash Crankbait. It was a long battle and I was starting to wonder if I’d ever get my crankbait back.
At the end of the day we had a lot of different stuff going on which meant the boat would be loaded up with TFO Rods for tomorrow. One rod I was really liking for that swim jig is the Option Bass 735, that rod actually does a lot of things really well. It’s versatile and I like to run 30 pound braid with a swim jig. The biggest question for tournament day was going to be the size. If they are biting, I feel like we can go through more bites than most boats. Hopefully resulting in a bigger bag at the weigh in but I’ve seen that work out into 2 pounder fests and lots of random success too. The only thing that was for sure is we were going to try our best to get some big ones and hopefully build on our angler of the year lead.