The 530-foot pier into Anchor Bay

The long boardwalk at the end of Jefferson Avenue in Chesterfield Township walks you 530 feet straight out over the water. That’s the fishing pier at Brandenburg Park, reaching into Anchor Bay — the shallow, weedy, northern corner of Lake St. Clair where the Clinton River and a tangle of canals empty out. Anchor Bay is famous among anglers for being thick with fish: walleye, perch, bluegill, and the bass that pull anglers out here at dawn. The pier lets you get a line well past the cattails without owning a boat.

The rest of the park has quietly become one of the township’s busiest gathering spots on the lakeshore. There’s a splash pad for kids, an inclusive playground with swings built so a wheelchair can roll right on, sand volleyball and pickleball courts, a paved walking path along the water, and a soft-shore kayak launch for slipping a boat into the bay without scraping it down a ramp. On a summer evening the picnic shelters fill with the smell of charcoal and the parking lot stays busy until the light goes.

Anchor Bay is the kind of water that rewards people who slow down. It’s too shallow and grassy for the big sailboats that crowd the open lake, which is exactly why the herons stalk the shoreline and the ice fishermen build whole shanty villages out on it come January. From the end of that pier you’re standing over one of the most productive little corners of Lake St. Clair, with the low Chesterfield shoreline behind you and a lot of open sky and slow water out front.