Leland, MI and the salmon

September 25, 2023

We left Traverse City early in the morning and took a beautiful cruise around the western peninsula and down the West Coast of Michigan to Leland. We were assigned an endcap slip at Leland, our favorite kind of slip and docking was a cinch. We spent the day exploring Fishtown and Leeland, which doesn't take all that long. We had dinner at the Cove Restaurant, mostly watching salmon jump the damn. Later, we had Lake House and Bandit over for sunset drinks on the fly bridge. We watched them depart the next day and essentially had the marina to ourselves. We explored the towns more completely and had breakfast at Trishes' Dishes, then hunkered down for two days of unsettled weather and high winds.

We had the marina basically to ourselves.

Leland, Michigan is an interesting little coastal town. The most memorable part is a small inlet where a lake empties into Lake Michigan through a short river and a neighborhood called Fishtown. This was apparently a hub for commercial fishing in the past century with fisherman shacks and facilities for storing and selling fish. The area still retains a few older small homes, but the industrial fishing has been replaced by tourism. There are several good restaurants here and a short but cool downtown street with multiple shops. While we were here, the salmon were running, and we watched them, jumping over small dams in the Fishtown area while eating dinner. Once again, it is really late in the season and the marina is basically abandoned with little activity. Essentially, there were more salmon than tourists. Even the car-bound tourists are only showing up on weekends.