Boating Anchor Bay: The Shallow End of Lake St. Clair Is the Best End

Anchor Bay gets dismissed as too shallow to bother with. I think that's backwards. The top of Lake St. Clair is where the lake earns its reputation: protected water, sandbars where half of southeast Michigan rafts up on summer weekends, and the doorway to one of the most remarkable stretches of water in the Great Lakes. You just have to respect the chart, because the depth finder up here will humble anyone who doesn't.

What Anchor Bay is

Anchor Bay is the northeast corner of Lake St. Clair, the pocket of water framed by Harrison Township on the west and the St. Clair River delta on the east. The Harrison Township side is one of the densest boating corridors in Michigan: the Clinton River mouth, marina after marina, and Lake St. Clair Metropark anchoring the shoreline. If your boat lives anywhere on the west side of the bay, you're in the middle of it all before your engines are warm.

The defining fact of the bay is depth, or the lack of it. Lake St. Clair is a shallow lake to begin with, and Anchor Bay is the shallow part of the shallow lake. Outside the marked channels you're often in single digits, and in plenty of spots less than that. This is not a place to freelance a shortcut. Run the channels, keep the chartplotter honest, and don't trust the boat ahead of you to know something you don't. He might just draw less water.

That same shallowness is the appeal. It's why the sandbar culture exists here, why the water warms early, and why an afternoon on the hook in the bay is about as easy as anchoring gets. If your anchoring routine could use tightening before you join a raft-up, I broke the whole sequence down in my article on setting anchor without drifting.

The delta: where the bay gets interesting

The east side of Anchor Bay runs into the St. Clair Flats, the delta where the St. Clair River fans out into the lake around Harsens Island. The Michigan DNR describes the Flats as the largest freshwater delta in the United States, and running it feels like nowhere else on the Great Lakes: marsh, channels, cottages on stilts, and freighters sliding through the middle of all of it.

The delta splits into multiple channels. The one that matters for commercial traffic is the South Channel, which carries the deep-draft vessels with a 27-foot minimum depth. That means you will share it with thousand-footers. Give them the room the law and common sense both require, and remember that a loaded freighter in a confined channel pushes a lot of water in front of it and pulls a lot behind it.

Algonac and the North Channel

Run the North Channel out of the bay and you land at Algonac, the little river town that gave the world Chris-Craft. It's a fitting piece of geography: the town that built the classic American runabout sits right where the St. Clair River meets the lake, watching a hundred years of boats go by. From Algonac you can work north up the river toward Port Huron and Lake Huron beyond, a run I covered in my St. Clair River piece.

This is also the stretch where trip planning starts to matter more than horsepower. Current, freighter traffic, and fuel stops all factor into a run up the river, and the boaters who plan each leg for time and distance have a much better day than the ones who wing it.

Running the bay like a local

A few things I'd tell any owner new to this corner of the lake:

• Buy the current chart and actually look at it. The bay punishes assumptions more than any water nearby.

• Pick your weather. Shallow water builds a short, uncomfortable chop quickly when the wind gets onto it. The bay is friendly right up until it isn't.

• Learn the channels before you need them at dusk. Coming home from the delta with the sun down and the markers hard to spot is not the time for your first lap.

I run this water regularly on deliveries and coaching days between the lake and Lake Huron. If your boat lives on Anchor Bay and you want a day of coaching on your own water, or you've got a boat that needs to be moved through it, that's a quick call.