The dam is coming out, but not this year
In-river construction began July 1, 2026 to remove four low-head dams between the Bridge Street and Fulton Street bridges, the first phase of the Grand Rapids WhiteWater restoration, under a $14.5 million contract the City Commission awarded the Taplin Group on February 24, with completion expected by the end of 2027 and work confined to roughly July through mid October each year to protect spawning and to keep sea lamprey below the Sixth Street Dam. Ah-Nab-Awen Park on the west bank is the construction zone and is closed. The Sixth Street Dam itself is not touched by that phase. Its removal, and its replacement with a barrier built to stop lamprey while passing native fish, is the upper reach project from about Ann Street to just above Bridge Street; the Army Corps is writing an environmental impact statement, the Great Lakes Fishery Commission is leading the barrier work, and the city's Mike Staal told Michigan Public the study alone would take about two years with design after that. Nobody expects upper reach construction before 2028 at the earliest. Until then, the nine-foot dam and the 1974 fish ladder, a Joseph Kinnebrew sculpture that doubles as a ladder, are still where the fish stack up.
Fish Ladder Park, the wall and the Sixth Street Bridge
Experience Grand Rapids' steelhead guide puts the two accesses simply: Fish Ladder Park on the west bank and the Sixth Street Bridge on the east side, an 1886 iron span on the National Register, with the east-bank concrete flood wall the place to stand with a long-handled net. Guide Tom Werkman of Werkman Outfitters in Ada, quoted in the same publication's beginner's guide, names the dam and the wall for spring steelhead and says summer on the Grand is walleye, smallmouth and pike. Muskellunge caught below Sixth Street have a 46-inch minimum in Kent and Ottawa counties. The 2024 Master Angler list for the river, per Experience GR, included a 36.5-inch steelhead, a 36-inch pike, a 30.5-inch brown, a 30-inch walleye and a 40.12-inch flathead, which is a fair summary of what swims through downtown.
Kings in late August, a March crest for steelhead
Bob Gwizdz's Great Lakes Angler piece has guide Ric Heller's rule for the spring: when the first big snowmelt raises the river and it crests and starts to fall, the fishing is best, and one such day produced 22 steelhead and four walleye from his boat. Experience GR gives fishable steelhead numbers in March through May and October through December, average fish of six to seven pounds with some to 10 and 12, and the honest caveat that the ladder lets fish through, so they can be there one day and gone the next. DIY Fly Fishing's calendar: kings from late August, coho a few weeks behind, fall steelhead from late September or early October peaking in November, spring steelhead from early March dropping back by late April or early May, Skamania from late May, lake-run browns peaking in October and lake trout in early November. The Lake Michigan committee minutes for October 9, 2024 recorded salmon in the Grand's ladders but a run stalled on low water, with summer-run steelhead and the first fall fish arriving. The DNR's Jim Dexter estimated about 100,000 smolts leaving the river each year between stocked and wild fish. The stocking database shows no plants at Sixth Street; the 2026 steelhead went in at Lyons in Ionia County, 32,099 yearlings on April 27 and 28, with 189,198 coho at the Grand Haven city marina and 19,800 browns at the Coast Guard station, and a 150,139 Chinook net-pen plant at the marina in May 2025.
Lowell to Lansing: the smallmouth river
DIY Fly Fishing calls the Grand between Lansing and Grand Rapids the best smallmouth water and singles out the 12 miles from Charlotte Highway to Thompson Field for fish of 12 to 17 inches, with the river below Grand Rapids to Grand Haven a warm-water fishery for pike, largemouth and panfish. The Flat River mouth at Lowell fishes for smallmouth and pike in summer by Werkman's account. The DNR's September 2, 2026 weekly report had the Grand in Ionia County producing smallmouth, walleye and panfish, and it stocked walleye fry by the hundreds of thousands in April 2026 at West River Drive, Knapp Street and Lowell in Kent County and at the Portland Dam, Charlotte Highway and M-66 in Ionia. Walleye run 15 inches and five fish from the last Saturday in April to March 15 on Lower Peninsula inland water; smallmouth 14 inches and five from the Saturday before Memorial Day, with catch-and-immediate-release bass legal all year.
The Grand Rapids gauge sits below the dam
USGS 04119000 reads on 4,900 square miles roughly nine tenths of a mile downstream of the Sixth Street Bridge, so it sees the dam's outflow plus the downtown reach; the Eastmanville gauge near the mouth was not used because its record starts in 2010. No guide publishes a flow range for the Grand, so the 2,000 to 4,000 cfs band here is the gauge's record back to 1901: monthly means of about 4,040 cfs in January, 4,590 in February, 7,580 in March, 7,260 in April, 5,190 in May, 3,650 in June, 2,350 in July, 1,870 in August, 2,000 in September, 2,540 in October, 3,070 in November and 3,530 in December. The fall runs happen inside the band; the spring peak Heller waits for is a crest above it, which is why the March number is about the wall and the boat, not the wader. Low water stalls the fall run, as the 2024 committee minutes noted.
An unlisted river: 8-inch trout, five salmon, no dam closure
The Grand River mainstem does not appear in the Kent, Ottawa or Ionia county tables of the 2026 Michigan Fishing Regulations, so it is governed by the digest's rule for streams not classified by type: open to trout fishing all year with an 8-inch minimum size limit, 7 inches for brook trout, five fish with no more than three 15 inches or longer, except that up to five Chinook or coho 15 inches or longer may be kept within that limit, artificial lures and natural bait both legal. There is no one-rainbow rule on the Grand and it is not on the August-to-November single-hook list; the Rogue River from the Rockford Dam to its mouth carries a five-rainbow, one-over-20-inches exception of its own. The only closure at Sixth Street is the statewide one: no fishing anywhere in a fish ladder, and no netting a fish within 100 feet of a dam except to land a hooked one. Down at Grand Haven, from the pierhead to the US-31 bridge, November is single unweighted hook only, half an inch or less from point to shank. Chumming is prohibited on classified trout streams.