How We Met: Dinner Lake

Dinner Lake, my second love, lies in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula about three miles over the treetops from Duck Lake. I discovered it on a side trip from the Duck Lake cottage, just a random exploration for more places to fish. I was about 24 then and feeling a little constrained just fishing one lake. I had no boat, but at the time that didn’t matter.

I just headed north on Highway 45 from Land O’Lakes, saw a plain wooden “Dinner Lake” sign at the first side road, took a right in the direction of the arrow, and followed the signs from there. The roads twisted back into the trees, first nice smooth asphalt, then much rougher asphalt, and then a skinny, bumpy gravel road for the last quarter-mile or so. The road dipped sharply down and bent around to the right, revealing the lake, a small blue jewel in a wooded hollow. Logs lay in the water on both sides of the boat ramp, and among them small bass hung motionless. I broke a piece off a twig and tossed it onto the water; a fish darted up, took it, and spat it out.

The boat ramp was on an almost circular bay, a narrow outlet giving way to the lake proper. I couldn’t see much of the lake itself, but several bare logs jutted out from the bay’s shore – great-looking cover. I hung around for a few minutes teasing the baby bass with bits of twig, then drove away, filing the spot in memory.

The next summer I bought a used blue fiberglass canoe. On a June weekend my friend Ed and I strapped it atop my 1964 Plymouth Valiant and drove north. We tented at the National Forest campground on Lac Vieux Desert and in the morning drove over to Dinner and slid the canoe in. We immediately found smallmouth bass among the logs, more than willing to smack a floating plug. As it turned out, loggy cover nearly surrounded the lake. We caught dozens of bass, about half of them above what was then the legal size of 12 inches.

I’ve returned almost every year since, with friends or alone. In time I discovered a rocky hump just off the east shore that is productive even when fish have deserted the shoreline cover. It’s a quiet lake, about 150 acres, ringed by small, well-kept cottages, most occupied just sporadically. I’ve never been able to spend an evening or weekend on the lake. In the early years there was a private campground on the east shore, but that soon closed. So it’s a lake I simply fish, once a year (with rare exceptions), almost as a matter of principle. After all, I discovered it. I don’t tell many people about it. My stock comment about it is: I’ll take you there, but I won’t just tell you where it is.

How about you? Where did your romance with your favorite lake begin? How did you two meet?