Au Sable River — Below Foote Dam
Current Conditions
Live Flow Conditions
Public Access Points
Regulations on This Water
Type 3 from Foote Dam to Lake Huron — and Type 3's famous 15-inch minimum is a trout rule, not a blanket one.
Read from the printed 2026 Michigan Fishing Regulations digest and verified 17 September 2026. Regulations change and reach boundaries are what matter — check the current digest before you fish, and see how the Michigan Type and Gear Restricted systems work.
Salmon & Steelhead on the Au Sable (lower)
Run status is rebuilt twice a day from the live gauge and the DNR's own run windows. The windows are typical timing, not a forecast — what actually moves fish is water temperature and a rise, and the run tracker carries both for every river at once.
A Lake Huron run, and Huron’s chinook fishery is a fraction of what it once was — expect fewer fish than the Lake Michigan side.
The Au Sable’s fall steelhead run is the reason to fish the lower river.
More: the salmon run tracker for where every river stands today, and steelhead rivers for whose fish these are and what you may keep.
River History & Character
This is not the Au Sable most anglers picture. Sixty river miles below the Holy Water at Grayling, past six Consumers Energy dams, the Au Sable finishes as a Lake Huron tailwater: eight miles of big water from Foote Dam to the mouth at Oscoda, carrying steelhead, chinook and coho rather than a Hex hatch. Foote is the lowest dam and the hard stop — DNR's own Natural River Plan says flatly that fish migration upstream is restricted by it — so everything that enters the river from the lake ends up in that eight-mile stretch. DNR research describes the fishery as one that has sustained a robust steelhead run for many years and is thought to be maintained in large part by stocked fish, with the Pine River tributary a minor source of natural reproduction.