Toledo
Put-in-Bay Catawba Island
West Harbor East Harbor
Port Clinton, Ohio, is a Lake Erie boating town extraordinaire. by Damaine Vonada
Northern
Exposure
PORT CLINTON
Kelleys Island Lakeside Marblehead
Sandusky Huron
L
ocation, location, location. While that mantra rules real estate values, Great Lakes boaters apply it to coastal towns as well. Use the location gauge to assess Ohio’s coastline and it’s obvious that Port Clinton enjoys a first-rate neighborhood in Lake Erie’s Western Basin. Nature made Port Clinton a boating town. As the glaciers that created Lake Erie retreated, they left behind a long peninsula crowned by a constellation of islands whose hard limestone bedrock withstood the massive ice sheets’ enormous weight and meltwater. Today, the Marblehead Peninsula and Bass Island archipelago punctuate Ohio’s shoreline roughly halfway between Cleveland and Toledo; at the place where the peninsula merges with mainland and where the Portage River meets Lake Erie sits Port Clinton.
Geographic jackpot
Despite having just over 6,000 year-round residents, Port Clinton is Ottawa County’s only city, as well as its county seat. In land, Ottawa ranks among Ohio’s smallest counties, but because it encompasses the Marblehead Peninsula and Bass Islands, Ottawa County claims bragging rights to the most lakeshore — 94 miles — in the state. Thanks to that geographic jackpot, Port Clinton is the hatchway to a boating, fishing and vacation playground par excellence. “Around Port Clinton, people are always doing something related to boating,” says Jill Bauer of Lake Erie Shores & Islands, a destination marketing organization that covers Ottawa County. “You see countless power cruisers, charter fishing boats, trailered boats, sailboats, and even kayaks and rented pontoons on the Portage River.” Not surprisingly, marinas are everywhere, and locals often boast that Port Clinton has more docks than people. “This area has the highest concentration of marinas on Lake Erie, and they’re clustered in the protected waters of inlets,
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