West Michigan Bass Classic 2026 - Houghton Lake - Practice

Houghton Lake 2026 sure had a different forecast than any other time I’ve been there. East wind and very little of it for 4 days straight. That meant no getting soaked during practice, no areas of the lake so rough they are unfishable, and no restrictions on where to go looking for fish. A much different atmosphere than the few other times I’ve been there in the fall. Temps were going to be cold at night (as low as 37) and hot during the day. Trevor and I had a rental house with Dave and Kyle for the weekend so despite the potentially challenging fishing conditions we were going to have a good time.

We left my house at 4:30am Thursday morning to put 2 solid days of work in before the tournament. It’s always good when the drive contains no surprises and we made it to the ramp on the east side of the lake a little after sunrise. This ramp can be unusable in big winds but we were going to have no problem with that the next couple days. There was no real practice plan other than to head one direction on Thursday and another on Friday. A combination of checking things we’d found in the past and looking for new stuff. Houghton Lake is very specific when it comes to smallmouth fishing and this also meant there would be a lot of time behind the wheel looking at Humminbird’s MEGA Side Imaging.

Our first quick check was what I would consider a “C” rating spot. It doesn’t get a ton of fish but it is consistent and can have some nice ones. I made about 4 casts and had one over 3.5 in the boat. We shook another one off there and quickly left. That was a good confidence boost considering I hadn’t heard much good about the fishing. Our next area was a potential place to start and it had them for sure. Decent numbers and some big ones, we were boat number 2 in this tournament because we finished in the number 1 spot on Monday Nights. It is the 2nd biggest division behind the HOTD weekend series and it was a nice reward for winning the points. It was a good feeling knowing that we had a chance to do well within the first 20 minutes of being there. We needed to expand on this area now and we pressed it pretty hard. Finding a couple new things that were absolutely worth stopping on but also not high priority. With unlimited morning bite window time and no worries for a fuel budget it would have been great to check all the places I knew about first thing that morning. However Houghton is a huge lake (MIchigan’s biggest inland lake at 20,000 plus acres), so running around willy nilly doesn’t makes time or financial sense. That meant we would be wasting a good portion of the bite window graphing around and looking for the good stuff. The other problem with Houghton Lake is that the entire 20,000 acres is hospitable to a bass with it being so shallow. They could literally be anywhere! It is also just full of bait like this small perch (pictured) so making a game plan based on baitfish activity wasn’t going to work either.

The theme for the day was graph, drop the Ultrex Quest and fish for a minute, than do it all over again. It is hard work and it is frustrating because you will do it so many times with no payoff. What makes it tough also is that the bite window ends and the fish leave the shell beds and hard spots they are feeding on. So sometimes it is impossible to tell if you have found a good one or not. That fall bite wasn’t full on either and that made it extra challenging. We mixed in some largemouth fishing and some scoping throughout the day but found nothing really solid. After day 1 it was evident we had work to do but also a good game plan for the morning.

I wanted to hit some good stuff early on day 2 and it didn’t disappoint. The first spot was one that we graphed yesterday and it was loaded. They were swimming around like sharks on it just waiting to eat anything. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to deal with this area as it would get a lot of pressure but also it could get us through one day of the event if the fish were big enough. We poked a few to find out and it just didn’t give us the confidence we needed. Sure we could catch a limit here in 5 casts but we felt that they would top out at around 16 pounds and also had potential to just give up a 13-14 pound bag. We had a place from day one that we felt had a higher ceiling for weight and still a lot of fishing to do. We landed on some good ones shortly after and this had real potential for a place to start. Especially if we found some other stuff nearby (which we did). The rest of the day became a challenge once again in the slick calm and hot conditions. We did find a couple areas with the potential for scoping in the afternoon although we only actually caught a fish at one of them.

The other thing was the largemouth, could we come up with something for them? We had no intentions of getting in the canal game. Between the potential pressure and just the likelihood that bigger less pressured fish were in the lake, it just didn’t make sense. Especially since we were likely going to get off to a good start on the brown fish. We did catch a good largemouth at the end of the day, it’s shape and weight was eye opening. If someone figured out the largemouth deal they could have some hefty weights. This fish was in a similar looking area to a largemouth we caught the day before. The grass had to have the right “thickness” when looking at it with MEGA Live 2. We also found another area with thick enough grass to flip although we never got a bite. So we at least had a few options for when things got tough after the morning flurry.

At the end of it all, we had 3 great options. All in different sections of the lake and all with pro’s and con’s. Getting off to a fast start should be no problem but we really had to hope that we would pick the right area. Lots of things to think about with it being a 2 day event and knowing that if you really burn a spot down it won’t be any good for day 2. At least it was nice to know that we would likely get what we wanted. I had plans to talk to boat number 1 in the morning just to make sure we weren’t going to the same region of the lake and wasting a good boat number. The plan was to hopefully destroy a section of the lake and then lay off if we got to 17 pounds. We knew it was going to get tough fairly early with the calm hot weather so the rest of the day would be exploring for largemouth or trying to find smallmouth with MEGA Live 2. It was going to be an exciting tournament and while I didn’t think we could compete for the win based on our practice, that we would certainly have the opportunity to do very well in this event.