Every salmon in Lake Michigan owes something to the Platte River. In the spring of 1966 the state released young coho here, a Pacific fish in a lake full of alewives, more or less to see what would happen. What happened is that they came back the next year fat and silver, and half the Midwest went out and bought a boat. The river itself is a modest thing. It slides out through the dunes at the edge of Sleeping Bear and meets the lake over a sandbar you can cross in waders.
In late September the coho gather in Platte Bay and wait for a reason to run the river, usually a hard rain or a cold night. While they wait they cruise the beach in pods, rolling and showing their backs, a long cast from dry sand. I fished it with my neighbor Walt, who grew up in Benzie County and has been coming to this beach since he was a boy. He brought two thermoses. One was coffee. The other, he said, was also coffee, in a tone that closed the subject.
The method is to wade out to your waist at first light and throw a spoon as far as you can. Walt favors orange and silver and will not discuss alternatives. The water is so clear and the sand so pale that you can watch the fish come, gray shapes sliding along the bar in twos and threes. Most of them follow the spoon to your knees, look at it, look at you, and leave. Walt says a staging coho has one thing on its mind and it is not lunch. You are not feeding it. You are annoying it into a mistake.
On roughly my hundredth cast one of them got annoyed. The spoon stopped, the rod went over, and a coho came out of the lake and cartwheeled, chrome bright with the first blush of pink along its side. It ran down the beach past three other anglers, who lifted their rods and stepped back like people letting a bus go by, and I followed, apologizing the whole way. Walt netted it in the shallows. Eight pounds, he said, and then he looked at it a little longer than a man who has seen a thousand of them needs to.
Walt landed two and lost one he described as larger. By nine the wind had turned and the pods slid out past casting range. We had breakfast in Honor, the little town up the road, where Walt told the waitress I had caught my first Platte coho. She asked how many casts. I said about a hundred. She said that was about right, and that her father was still working on his.
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