A perfect Detroit Lakes Labor Day includes swimming, fishing, and a board game

Avatar photoGregory Moyer·
Community Gossip
··17 min read
DETROIT LAKES, Minn. — September 8, 2026 (Minnesota Nice News)

The dog got to the end of the dock on Labor Day weekend, looked at the water, and made the call without consulting anybody. That is how our Saturday started at the family cabin near Detroit Lakes, and the rest of the day followed the same general plan.

She swam a lazy loop out and back, and out and back. When inside, in normal fashion, whether we are at Itasca or our home in Cass Lake, Ginger shook off in the direction of every dry person available. Nobody has ever taught a dog to shake away from the group. It may not be possible.

The cabin belongs to my wife Jodi’s parents, Jerry and Gail Bass, who drove over from Grand Forks, North Dakota on Sunday. My nephew Theo came up from the Twin Cities with his mom Mandy on Saturday evening. Mandy is Jodi’s sister and she is a special education teacher. Theo is a dance competitor. a budding baseball player and Twins fan. Second grade just started for him. Lakes country has been an important part of this family for generations. Just across Big Floyd lake, Gail’s father Roy owned a cabin before retiring to Florida. Jodi and Gail have great memories of this lake they hope future families will enjoy for generations as well.

The best part of the weekend happened before the weekend really started. Saturday evening it was just Jodi and me at the cabin. Quiet, nothing running, nobody needing anything. I took a nap, which at the lake is not laziness but a form of preparation for participation.

Jodi drove over to the Sunlite Bar and Grill and came back with a cheeseburger and fries. Sunlite sits about three miles north of Detroit Lakes at 21001 County Highway 21. Everything is close here. They hand-patty their burgers. Mine was the Wild Burger: a beef patty, a bison patty and an elk patty, three slices of American cheese and four slices of smoky bacon. I asked them to add peanut butter, which sounds like a dare and it is not. Possibly the best cheeseburger ever.

It filled me up so completely that when the pizza and chicken nachos arrived from Zorbaz on the Lake later that night, I handed my share of the pizza to family and called it a night. The Zorbaz was excellent too, by all reports from people who still had room. The small Hawaiian is Mandy’s favorite food on this earth, which is worth mentioning because it is still too warm out for hotdish and a person has to have something.

I have been on a broth diet ever since.

About the water

Floyd Lake sits a couple of miles north of Detroit Lakes and runs 1,178 acres across two connected basins. It is a relatively shallow lake. Locals call them Big Floyd and North Floyd, though North Floyd has answered to Mud Lake for a good long while. We called it Mud Lake when hopping off the jetski when we got tangled in weeds. We called it heaven at sunset when you can not tell the sky from the water as you skid your ski across the glass like surface of the lake. There are places for that. Big Floyd is the larger and shallower of the pair, with most of its area under 15 feet of water and plants growing through much of it. There are sandbars that make lunchtime gatherings fun and a great boatside view for the 5 p.m. boat sightseeing around the edge of the lake. North Floyd is deeper and the more productive of the two. The lake bottoms out around 34 feet. Still haven’t found that spot. There is one DNR public access, on the southeast side of Big Floyd, and a channel between the basins for anybody who wants to move over.

Big Floyd Lake Facts
Basins Big Floyd & North Floyd
Surface Area 862 Acres (Big Floyd)
1,178 Acres (Both Basins)
Max Depth 25 ft (Big) / 34 ft (North)
Shoreline 5.5 mi (Big) / 2.2 mi (North)
Watershed Pelican River District
Public Access MN DNR Ramp (SE Shore)
Primary Fish Walleye, Bass, Bluegill,
Crappie, Northern Pike
AIS Watch Zebra Mussels, Pondweed
City of Detroit Lakes
County Becker County Seat
Population ~10,000 (Year-Round)
Summer Peak 13,000+ Residents & Tourists
Regional Lakes 400+ within 25 Miles
Local Hub Mile-Long City Beach
Recreation Detroit Mountain & Trails
Location 45 mi East of Fargo-Moorhead

The shoreline is developed most of the way around, which means steady fishing and boat traffic all summer. People work it for walleye, northern pike, bluegill, largemouth bass and black crappie. A DNR fisheries survey in June 2021 found walleye numbers stable since 1991, with sampled fish running 9.5 to 23.7 inches and averaging just under 19. A daily limit of five sunfish applies here. Zebra mussels turned up in 2018, so clean, drain and dispose is the rule every time a boat comes off the trailer. Current regulations and depth maps are on the DNR’s LakeFinder.

Fishing report

The fishing went better than expected. One largemouth came in off the same dock, hooked clean and released the same way. It was not a wall fish and nobody is claiming it was. My nephew brought in each of the fish that day. A sunny, a largemouth, and a pike. We thought the bass was around 15″ or more depending on the time of day the story was told. It was the right size for a Sunday morning when the coffee is still hot and the day has nowhere to be.

Taking a kid fishing in Minnesota

  • Minnesota residents under 16 fish without a license. Residents 16 through 89 need one. Age 90 and up are exempt.
  • Visiting families: a nonresident under 16 fishes without a license when a parent or guardian is licensed, but the child’s catch counts toward the adult’s limit. A $5 youth license gets the kid a limit of their own.
  • Showing a child under 16 how to bait, cast and unhook does not require a license for the adult doing the teaching.
  • Take a Kid Fishing Weekend lets license-age Minnesotans fish without one when they bring along a child under 16. The DNR sets the dates each year, summer and winter both.
  • Panfish are open year round. Walleye, northern and bass run on seasons that vary by water. Check the lake before you go.

Details and current-year dates: Minnesota DNR, Take a Kid Fishing.

Board Games at the cabin

Then came the hard part. There was a chess set on the table and a second grader on the other side of it. Theo is 7. He plays like somebody who has been at it a good deal longer. I do believe Grandpa Bass taught him a move or two. I did not have to explain a single play.

I won. The record should reflect that I earned it and that it was closer than the final position suggests. He set a trap in the middle of the game that I walked most of the way into before I noticed the walls. Two more years of this and the results start going the other direction. I have made my peace with that in advance.

On to Shady Hollow

From there it was out to the Shady Hollow Flea Market on County Highway 17, which is the correct next move after a morning like that. Nothing anybody needed. Several things somebody bought anyway.

The market has been running more than 50 years on three and a half acres of shaded, grassy ground south of town. Twenty-five permanent vendors sell out of small cabins on the property, many of them back season after season, and as many as 100 day vendors from around the region fill in the rest. It runs weekends from Memorial Day through Labor Day weekend, then Saturdays through September. The grounds open at 6 a.m. so vendors can set up, and anyone who wants to be a first picker is welcome to walk in at that hour. Things wind down around 3 p.m. The grill opens at 6:30 with breakfast until 10:30, the pizza shop starts at 10, and a 250-foot slip-and-slide runs supervised from 11 to 3 for $5 a day. Admission and parking are free.

Lasting memories

The neighborhood looks different than it did in June. An EF2 tornado crossed here on July 6 with 115 mph winds, and the trees along this stretch of Floyd Lake are thinner for it. We were there the next morning. In shock. Sunlit meadows were now bright against the big blue sky, a place where thick green wood’s full of wild turkey would greet you on arrival to the point. What is still standing has proven itself against the extreme Minnesota weather. Change is inevitable, with new landscaping being planted before the fall frost can creep in, new foundations for garages and additions that had been put off for decades, the docks back in, and Labor Day weekend arriving on schedule. Still after the storm, there are signs of life that pop up in nature only after a wildfire, but here you see kids and boats. New construction. Dreams of a new yard or if that new tree will live a hundred years like the others. Bigger cabins, taller cabins for sure, and still the same family atmosphere that lends itself toward an Americana Rockwell type painting, like living in a fantasy world, you are compelled to put the phones away.

Theo was ready to go home by weekend’s end and slept most of the ride back to the Cities. School starts this week. Asked what he liked best about the whole weekend, he did not say chess, or the fishing, or the flea market. He said seeing Auntie and Uncle Greg.

That is a Labor Day weekend. Grandparents from North Dakota, a nephew from the Cities, a wet dog, a fish that went back in the water for the next person to catch or eat, and a chess game against a kid who is already better than he knows.

A 1950 Plymouth Special Deluxe station wagon, the real wood-bodied one. It was parked in the grass at Shady Hollow with a for sale sign in the side window, 35k, which is the most Minnesota thing about the whole encounter for me.

Your turn

Labor Day weekend brought people home from all over. Somebody drove up from the Cities. Somebody came over from Fargo or Grand Forks. Somebody opened a cabin one last time before the docks come out.

We want those stories, the ones from the weekend just past and the ones from the weekends still coming. Who came to town? What did you all do? Who won at cards, who caught the fish, who got beat by a grandchild at something they used to be good at?

Who came to town for the holiday, and what did you all get up to?

Send us your story

Writing By: Gregory Moyer | Editing by Jodi Moyer

EDITOR’S NOTE:

SOURCES:

Floyd Lake

July 6 tornado

Fishing licenses

Sunlite Bar and Grill

Zorbaz on the Lake

Shady Hollow Flea Market

City of Detroit Lakes fact card

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