The One August Weekend Mullett Lake Isn't Really a Lake

For fifty-one weekends a year, Mullett Lake behaves like Michigan's fourth-largest inland lake is supposed to behave. Pontoons drift the west shore, sturgeon anglers work the deeper holes, campers at Aloha watch the sun drop over 17,000 acres of open water. Then the second full weekend in August arrives and the lake stops being a lake. It becomes the long middle stretch of an 87-mile racecourse that starts and ends in Indian River, and the geography of that course decides which coves stay quiet and which ones do not.

This year the shift lands on August 8 and 9. The Top O' Michigan Outboard Racing Club is running its 78th Marathon Nationals, and if you own a place on Mullett, the useful thing is not to know that the race exists. The useful thing is to know exactly where it goes, when it passes, and what the rest of the month looks like once the pit boats leave.

Saturday: the long lap through Topinabee

Saturday is the day Mullett takes the hardest pounding. The course starts at Devoe Beach in Indian River, dips into Burt Lake for a half-mile turn buoy, then runs the full length of the Indian River into Mullett to a checkpoint at Topinabee, right in front of Breaker's Bar. From there the boats hug the west shore up to the Cheboygan River, run the river to just past the Lincoln Street Bridge, and retrace the whole thing back. Roughly 45 miles.

The consequence for residents is spatial, not just temporal. If your dock is on the west shore between Topinabee and the north outlet, you will hear and see the field twice on Saturday. If you are on the east shore closer to Aloha, you will get the noise as a distant hum and the wakes as a rolling reminder rather than a direct hit.

Sunday: a different course, a lighter Mullett day

Sunday's course is about 42 miles and sends the field the other direction. Racers cross Burt Lake to a check point near the high banks, thread the Crooked River down to the locks at Alanson, run Crooked Lake to a buoy in Conway, then reverse back through Burt and up the Indian River to a turnaround inside Mullett before finishing at Devoe Beach. Mullett gets one visit rather than a full-length grind, and the west shore mostly sits it out.

That asymmetry is worth understanding if you rent out a cottage or host guests. A Saturday-arrival Topinabee weekend is a very different weekend than a Sunday-arrival Aloha weekend, and the race is the reason.

What actually happens at Breaker's

The Topinabee checkpoint is the closest thing Mullett has to a stadium. Boats slow through the buoy, engines wind back up, and the shore in front of Breaker's Bar becomes a viewing gallery. Camp Kurz, a few miles down, serves as the marathon's unofficial staging area, with racers coming in from as far as Ecuador in past years and the commodore of the club, Indian River local Tom Fairbairn, walking the pits.

If you have never watched the race from the water side, the shallow answer is Topinabee. The longer answer is that TOMORC every year asks for volunteer patrol boats along the course, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. rain or shine, to tow racers who break down. That is a way to see the whole field from inside the tape rather than from a lawn chair.

The rest of August, once the boats are gone

By Monday morning the buoys come out and the lake returns to itself. That is the practical window most residents plan around, because the on-water dining and shore stops are usable in a way the race weekend does not really allow.

• Breaker's Bar, Topinabee, doubles as the Saturday checkpoint and a normal lakeside evening the rest of the summer.
• Hack-Ma-Tack Inn, on the Cheboygan River side, has been running since the early 1900s and is the closest thing to a fine-dining anchor on the north end.
• Pier M33 on the Cheboygan River picks up the boat-in crowd coming off Mullett's north outlet.
• Douglas Lake Bar & Steakhouse sits just off the lake to the west, a common overflow dinner when the closer places are full.
• Vivio's and Christopher's Cafe in Indian River handle the south-end lunches for anyone running the Inland Waterway from the Mullett side.

That list is short by design. Mullett is not Petoskey. The scarcity of on-water dining is part of why the lake reads calm compared to Charlevoix or Walloon on an August Saturday, and it is why a dock on the west shore actually functions as your primary restaurant patio for most of the season.

Aloha, the weed line, and the ramp calendar

Aloha State Park sits on the northeast shore and does something no other public access on Mullett does: it puts your boat in a protected basin you can leave for the duration of your stay. On a north-wind day when the open lake is running whitecaps, that inlet is one of the only launches where loading a trailer stays civil.

The tradeoff is that the inlet water looks pretty gross by midsummer, green and filmy, but you are completely protected from crosswinds.

The seasonal detail worth internalizing is the weed calendar. Early June the ramp is clean. By late July the inlet is choked, and you spend as much time pulling vegetation off the bunks as loading. If you keep a boat trailered rather than in a slip, that is your window: launch and pull before mid-July, or plan on the weed rake as part of the routine.

The 70-mile North Eastern State Trail runs along the park and the eastern shoreline on the old Detroit and Mackinac Railway grade. It is the quiet counterweight to the race weekend. When the outboards leave, the trail is where the lake reads its most residential, and it is one of the few places you can put in a long walk or ride without leaving the water in your peripheral vision.

Reading your own shoreline

The point of mapping any of this is not race trivia. It is that Mullett has more internal geography than the median price of a lakefront lot suggests. Topinabee and the west shore are the loud side on race weekend and the closest to a village on ordinary weekends. The Aloha side is the quieter shore with the more protected launch, the trail access, and the weed problem. The south basin near the Indian River mouth is start-finish traffic both days and the fastest path to Devoe Beach for anyone who wants to watch the pits.

If you already own here, the calendar is doing you a favor. It sorts your shoreline by use. A cottage that feels perfect on July 20 and unbearable on August 8 is telling you something about how you actually use the water. A cottage that reads the same both weekends is telling you something too. Either way, the second full weekend in August is the one date on the Mullett calendar that stress-tests the lake for you.

Whether you are thinking about how your own stretch of Mullett performs across a season, or watching how the market values the loud side versus the quiet side, Genna Hill is happy to walk the shoreline with you. Let's Connect.