Algonac throws a party for a fish

Algonac names its big summer weekend after a fish — and not even by its proper name. The Algonac Lions Pickerel Tournament and Festival fills the town’s Waterfront Park each year around the Fourth of July, and the “pickerel” everybody’s fishing for is really the walleye, the prized golden-eyed fish of the St. Clair River system. Around here the old riverman’s word for it just stuck.

It makes sense that this town would build a festival on a fish. Algonac sits right where the St. Clair River fans out toward Lake St. Clair, threaded with channels and the marshy edge of the St. Clair Flats — prime walleye water that draws anglers from all over. The fishing came first and the party grew up around it. The tournament still anchors the weekend: anglers run their boats out onto the river at dawn and weigh in their catch back at the park, chasing a winning pickerel.

But the festival long ago spilled past the dock. There’s a carnival midway, a festival parade and a separate children’s parade, live music, food booths, a run and walk, a bike race, and the kind of arts-and-crafts and raffle tables that make a small Michigan town’s downtown feel full to bursting. The Algonac Lions Club runs the whole thing, and the proceeds loop back into the community the way Lions money tends to.

It’s worth knowing the local vocabulary before you go, or you’ll be the only one at the weigh-in calling the fish by its book name. In Algonac it’s pickerel — has been for as long as anyone’s been pulling them out of the river — and once a year the whole town turns out to celebrate it, fireworks over the water and all.