Comment on Walking the Lake Michigan beach — a public right, or trespassing? by Bob

The law is a little confusing on the subject. But from my understanding is, as a lake front owner, you own the land under the water that extends outward from the property. However, anyone can fish or what not on a boat. You can even swim or walk acrossed it. When I was a kid, I would generally walk the shoreline either going under or over peoples docs, but not hangout on someone’s doc or land. Now again, if it was someone property that was say a cottage and they weren’t home, had no boats on it, no harm no fowl. Again, this was as a kid. We generally never ran afoul with anyone. Less then a handful of times can I ever remember having anyone get angry that we would cross in front of their property. This may have only been once or twice.
Now the problem comes, when new people purchase lakefront property. People that didn’t grow up on a lake. They suddenly think they have all rights to the whole lake. These are the people that cry foul if your fishing on your boat near their property, or they will picnic on someone else’s lakefront.
We had one older guy that would walk his dog “along the road”. Mind you the front of a house is the side facing the lake. So the road would be on the backside of the house. He would litterly be walking his dog right next to the backside of peoples houses. Between peoples driveways and house. Clearly their was no waterway rights here. But this is the mentality of some people. We aren’t even on the lake and they will walk across our property, pick out fruit and so forth. As if we are some public park. One year parking their truck and crossing peoples property to go ice fish on a private lake. I mean I can careless if someone wants to fish on our lake. But don’t go thinking your going to mark on people personal property and then cross other peoples property t gain access to the lake either.