Croton Dam and what comes out of it
Croton is the lowest of Consumers Energy's three Muskegon dams, below Rogers and Hardy, a 45.5-foot embankment finished in 1907 where the Little Muskegon joins, with a 1,209-acre pond behind it and 8,850 kilowatts of generation in front. The DNR's Trout Trails sheet for Besemer Park puts you on it: from M-37 and M-82 on the north side of Newaygo, six miles east on Croton Drive to the bridge just below the dam, a steep paved launch on the west side of the road, shore fishing on both banks with a walkway under the bridge, a barrier-free platform right below the dam, and the North Country Trail giving about three quarters of a mile of bank on public land downstream.
The gauge for this page, USGS 04121970, is on that same stretch, so its reading is the release plus almost nothing else. The Newaygo and Bridgeton gauges further down stopped reporting in April 2026, which is why they are not used here.
Pine Street, Thornapple, Henning Park, Newaygo
Kevin Feenstra, who guides this river, puts the resident browns and rainbows in the twenty miles of river below Croton Dam. On The Fly Guide Service describes the first six-plus miles below the dam as the part with meaningful public land and says the dam-to-Thornapple water holds some of the best spawning gravel, reached from the Pine Street launch, off 72nd Street and off Thornapple Road. From Thornapple to Newaygo is another six or so miles with little public frontage, so it is fished from a boat. Newaygo Riverfront Park, two blocks west of M-37 on Bridge Street, is the wading access in town; Henning Park is where Feenstra hosts Spey Fest, September 26 in 2026. Wading anglers concentrate between Newaygo and Croton while boats motor the whole tailwater, about 35 miles by DIY Fly Fishing's count.
Nine months of steelhead, one month of kings
Feenstra's calendar is the one to trust. Steelhead enter as early as late September and the fall fishing is strong by the third week of October; October through December is swung-fly season on a river with two-handed rods everywhere; fish stay through the winter, and the river does not freeze, per Betts Guide Service; the peak is late March and April on nymphs, when steelhead eat salmon fry, stoneflies and eggs; and as they drop out in May they take the swung fly again. That is nine months. Lake-run browns are most common from late September through March. King salmon arrive in August and September and peak in October at an average Feenstra gives as 12 to 13 pounds. Smallmouth run from late June to late September, and Feenstra's September 22, 2026 report had the river low, temperatures dropping into the 60s, bass feeding hard and the first migratory fish trickling in.
Most of the steelhead you touch were stocked at Pine Street: 59,911 Michigan-strain yearlings on April 30, 2025, plus 30,400 coho at the same ramp that April, with browns and Eagle Lake rainbows planted at Croton Dam, Henning Park, Newaygo and Thornapple through the year. A Grand Valley State thesis found natural steelhead recruitment in the main river limited by summer temperatures above 21 degrees Celsius even after a cool-water diffuser went in at the dam in 2008, with parr densities in Bigelow Creek 48 times higher than in the river.
Gray Drakes, Sulphurs, and the July 1 bubbler
There are no Hendricksons on the Muskegon tailwater; Matt Supinski's Gray Drake Lodge chart says so directly and points you to the Bigelow, Tamarack and Little Muskegon for them. What the tailwater has is early black stoneflies on the banks by mid February and hatching in March and April, cinnamon caddis from the second week of May, Sulphurs from the third week of May through June with the smaller dorothea in the first half of June, Gray Drakes from about the third week of May sometimes into the third week of July with spinner flights over the riffles before dusk, and Isonychia from the first week of June sporadically to September. Supinski's June 23, 2025 report is worth reading for honesty: the Gray Drake hatch that used to come in blizzards was almost gone after four years of spring drought, Sulphurs had become the mayfly of choice, Isonychia numbers were well below what they were 20 years ago, and Consumers runs the cool-water bubbler at Croton through the night from a FERC-mandated July 1 date, which makes mornings the coldest water of a summer day.
The number guides want to see
Betts Guide Service called 2,500 cfs perfect with decent wading and 8 to 10 feet of visibility in a spring report, and RiverReports puts ideal steelhead flows at 2,200 to 2,500 cfs at the Croton gauge for both wading and drift boats, fishable from 1,500 to 4,000, drift-boat only above 4,000, and says below 1,500 even boats skip some sections. This page compares the live reading to 1,500 to 2,500. For scale, the gauge's monthly means since 1995 are about 2,160 cfs in January, 2,980 in March, 3,380 in April, 2,810 in May, 1,990 in June, 1,370 in July, 1,230 in August, 1,220 in September, 1,510 in October and 1,880 in November, so the spring steelhead peak often arrives on water above the wading window and the fall run on water below it. Croton is operated as a run-of-river plant rather than a peaking one, which is why the hydrograph follows the weather rather than the clock.
Type 3 to M-120, and the one-over-20 rule
The 2026 Michigan Fishing Regulations list the Muskegon River from Croton Dam downstream to M-120 as a Type 3 trout stream under Muskegon County: you can fish it and keep fish every day of the year, brook and brown trout have a 15-inch minimum, steelhead and salmon a 10-inch one, and the limit is five with at most three trout over 15 inches. The listing adds an exception adopted for the 2024 season: up to five rainbow trout may be kept, but the daily limit may not include more than one rainbow trout 20 inches or longer. Between August 1 and November 15 the special lure rule covers the whole river up to Croton Dam in both Muskegon and Newaygo counties, which limits you to single hooks or jigs no bigger than half an inch point to shank, allows a three-eighths treble only on a plug, spoon, spinner or body bait, bans lures built mainly of lead, and counts a pegged bead as a lure. Chumming is prohibited on every listed stream. There is no dam-proximity closure at Croton in the current digest, though it is unlawful to fish inside any fish ladder or to net a fish within 100 feet of a dam.