On December fifteenth, 2016, Larry Cavero runs out of Lake Huron and bolts for his car. He exchanges a few quick words with the other guys and jumps in his vehicle. They’re surfing a rocky break composed of the Niagara Escarpment’s limestone; the rock shelves here, littered with trilobite, nautiloid and graptolite fossils drop off in such a way that a consistent northwest wind makes for an easily accessible wave. But the wind has shifted, so they’ll move east down the shore a couple kilometres. This is no different than the lives of surfers the world over, but Larry’s toes are freezing. He grabs a thermos, pours the remainder of his tea all over his neoprene booties and has a fleeting moment of relief. He blasts through a snowbank at the edge of the parking lot and begins driving east, passing an LCBO and the local Mac’s Convenience before reaching the next break. The escarpment rises straight up 250 metres on his right, and is striped with Ontario’s largest concentration of ski resorts; all of them blowing man-made snow to accommodate the hordes of Torontonians that flock here during the holidays. The icicles dangling from Larry’s goatee and the lack of salt in the water tell you one thing–this is Great Lakes surfing.
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As unlikely as the Great Lakes seem for a surf scene, they are, in fact surfable. And no matter how many people you tell, there will be another thousand that don’t believe you. But one look at the geography of the lakes tells you why they’re surfable; they are simply enormous. Often described as inland seas, the combination of Lake Superior, Lake Huron, Lake Erie, Lake Michigan and Lake Ontario make up the largest group of freshwater lakes on Earth. With 17,000 kilometres of shoreline the lakes contain 21 per cent of the world’s surface freshwater by volume. Stretching 1200 kilometres from the western shore of Lake Superior to the eastern shore of Lake Ontario, the lakes span from the american midwest to the eastern time zone. Each lake has its own characteristics; the shore of Lake Superior is rugged, wild and uninhabited, inspiring many of Lawren Harris’ iconic paintings. As the water flows into Lake Huron, the shoreline’s population increases slightly, but its northern shore is largely wild and undeveloped. Lake Michigan, the only lake completely surrounded by the US, has 12 million people living on its shores in cities like Chicago and Milwaukee. Then, as the water flows into Lake Erie and Ontario the population density continues to increase. Both lakes are surrounded by industrial, residential and agricultural development.
But it is their sheer largesse that makes them surfable.
“Waves are formed as a result of strong winds that are generated from low pressure systems moving through the area,” says Antonio Lennert, co-founder of Toronto’s Surf the Greats, a surf shop that also offers forecasting seminars and surf lessons. “Wind moving from one geographic area to another causes friction against the water. If we have strong winds blowing consistently from the same direction, moving water in that direction, then it creates ripples that travel over water. Those ripples start to join one another and turn into waves. The further they travel, the more they merge and the bigger the waves get. Basically, low pressure systems tend to bring strong winds and bad weather. That’s usually why it’s snowing, stormy or raining when we’re out there.”
The reason so many photos of ‘ice beards’ fill your social media feed is that cold temperatures are on
the surfer’s side as well.
“Air and water temperature also influence the size of the wave; the colder the air and water, the larger the waves, or at least the less wind we need,” he says. “The best season in Toronto tends to be late fall into the spring when the water temperature gets close to zero and the air temperature goes to negative. We don’t need a lot of wind when it gets that cold. LIke a 15 kilometre per hour wind will generate 2-3 foot waves here. And it’s easier for us to get cleaner conditions when the winds aren’t that strong.”
The breaks themselves differ greatly; there are beach breaks, shore breaks and point breaks; while reefs don’t technically exist in the great lakes, bathymetric features do create some reef breaks on the lakes. Some breaks require trespassing to access them. Some have beautiful backdrops of windswept pines and the rocky Canadian shield. Others are towered over by the steel arches of the Burlington Skyway Bridge and industrial infrastructure. The water itself can be the idyllic aquamarine blue of deep Lake Superior or the chocolate-milk brown of the shallow, muddy-bottomed Lake Erie. Each break requires weather conditions to be ‘just so’ to work and unlike ocean swells, the amount of time those conditions last is usually only a matter of hours.
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There’s no definitive history of Great Lakes surfing, the closest thing being the book, Surfing the Great Lakes by P.L. Strass that was published back in 2000. It lists an unknown G.I. that returned to Grand Haven, Michigan from Hawaii and surfed in 1945. But more than likely that G.I. was actually Dr. David H. Seibold of Grand Haven, Michigan. Many consider him the first to surf the Great Lakes, but he didn’t do so until 1955.
“When I graduated from dental school I took on the task as a one-year employee of a clinic in Hawaii that took care of indigent kids up to the sixth grade,” recalls the 90-year-old from his Grand Haven home. “I was the only haole. My buddy was in the navy out there and he wanted to take up surfing. At that time, you could pick up a navy life raft, which was balsa wood, with heavy canvas. You could pick them up for $15. We stripped the covering off and from the plywood, we built ourselves two surf boards. They were just slightly over ten feet long. They weren’t the best looking creatures, but they worked. I took it to Waikiki, and began to surf there. I did learn to surf quite well at Waikiki. I promised my wife Dotty that I would sell the board. I didn’t. I brought the surfboard back to Grand Haven where we set up our dental practise. That would be the fall of 1955 and that’s when I began surfing on Lake Michigan.”
“I remember the first waves. I was quite excited. The waves looked good. They weren’t ocean waves, but it was doable. So I gave it a try. I failed a few times trying to get up, I wasn’t quick enough at first, but I finally learned the technique. The kids followed in my footsteps; the Beatons, the Whites and Rusty Graham became the better surfers for sure.”
“I kept it up until I was in my 60s. But then I got to the point where I wasn’t quick enough to get up. I still have a surfboard. The old balsa wood board I gave to my local museum.”
While Seibold is oblivious to the Great Lakes surfing of today, he’s excited to learn about the modern-day exploits.
“Isn’t that something?” he says when he hears there is an estimated 2-3000 Great Lakes surfers now. “I think that’s just wonderful.”
In those pre-internet days scenes developed independently throughout the Great Lakes. The Grand Haven scene began to grow. Then a group began in Sheboygen, Michigan. Then Cleveland. The Wyldewood Surf Club was formed in 1965 out of Port Colbourne, Ontario and from its very beginnings was an international club with both Canadian and American members. Wyldewood Surf Club member Bob Sobering (AKA Grumpy Bob) began surfing in 1970, then picked it up again in the 90s. He recalls the old days fondly.
“I came from an era when there was no internet,” he remembers. “There used to be a telephone. You used to phone Environment Canada’s weather information line and it was out of the Hamilton airport. You’d have to sit through three minutes of it to get to the marine weather report. ‘The buoy reading from Port Colbourne; 3 feet at 4 seconds, the wind at 18 miles an hour out of the south west.’ That was a buck a minute! But you had to wait for the third minute. Then you’d go, woohoo! There’s waves on Lake Erie. Seriously. That was surf forecasting.”
“When we were doing it in the 90s, we were doing it in 3 mil wetsuits and we thought we were kings. Nowadays, you can buy 6 mil wetsuit with merino wool lining and you can can stay in the water for 3-to-4 hours. Why should an old guy be grumpy about it? Because we worked our asses off to try and figure this thing out and these new kids can just drop their gold card down on the counter and be out there in the lineup. It’s getting crowded. It’s gonna just keep getting bigger and bigger, the crowds are going to get more and more entitled, the established spots are going to get less and less accessible. Parking is going to be the biggest issue. The future is going to get more and more popular. Right now it’s on a peak. There could be something that changes it all, the battery-operated-frisbee-hula-hoop-drone could take a whole bunch of people away from it. Half the people that are doing it right now are doing it because it’s a fad.”
Grumpy Bob indeed.
But he’s right; the Great Lakes surf scene is thriving. There are more websites than ever, there are surf shops, surf competitions, beach clean ups and surf events. Localism is rearing its ugly head as guys that have been surfing breaks for 20 years are suddenly having to share their waves. And there’s even a magazine; Great Lakes Surfer’s Journal launched out of Ann Arbor, Michigan in fall of 2017.
“Anytime we had good swells we’d try to get our photos into Surfer Magazine or whatever and they’d snub us,” says editor Brian Tanis. “I did the magazine because there was just so much going on that was never covered in the mainstream surf publications. We needed a little voice of our own. It’s such a big community. Once I did the mag I realized how big it actually is. It’s growing fast. I feel like it’s growing faster in Canada.”
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One of the main deterrents of surfing the lakes is the water itself; with more than 22 cities (with populations over 100,000) lining the shores of the lakes, pollution is a huge issue.
Between industrial waste, agricultural runoff, sewage, algae blooms and invasive species like carp, zebra mussel, and the now-ubiquitous Phragmites reed, ecosystems of the Great Lakes are stressed. Even plastic pollution, typically associated with the world’s oceans, is an enormous problem in the Great Lakes, measured at more than six million bits of plastic per square kilometre. Back in 1969 Lake Erie literally caught fire because of industrial runoff. President Richard Nixon signed the Clean Water Act in 1972 and the Obama administration committed $300 million a year to the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. Of course Trump has proposed a complete budget cut to that program. On the Canadian side, many governments, organizations, groups and individuals are contributing to the restoration and protection of the Great lakes. The Canada-Ontario Agreement on Great Lakes Water Quality and Ecosystem Health is a federal and provincial agreement to support the restoration and protection of the Great Lakes. The 2012 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement is an agreement between Canada and the US to restore water quality and ecosystem health.
“There’s been a lot of improvement of sewage treatment and wastewater management in the last 30 years,” says Krystyn Tully, vice-president of Lake Ontario Waterkeeper, a charity working for swimmable, drinkable, fishable water. “It’s hard to say whether the lakes overall are getting better or worse because we have a growing population, climate change, so as we make progress in some areas, we get other issues thrown at us. It’s always changing. Escherichia coli breakouts are a common result of sewage overflow, a bacteria that can can cause gastroenteritus, urinary tract infections, neonatal meningitis, hemorrhagic colitis and a number of other illnesses.
“Lake Ontario is definitely hard hit,” she says. “It is the last in terms of water flow, so everything that is in the other Great Lakes will eventually pass into Lake Ontario. But at the same time, from a shipping point of view, it’s actually the first when ships come in from the ocean. So we’re the first to get hit with ballast water, or ship pollution. It is the most stressed. Lake Erie is the shallowest lake so in the last year, Lake Erie was flagged for being as bad as Lake Ontario because of the algae pollution that they’re experiencing. And that’s because the lake is so shallow.”
Those algae blooms in Lake Erie include the presence of cyanobacteria. Colloquially known as blue-green algae it looks like an oil slick on the surface of the water.
“It’s extremely toxic,” says Tully. “It’s a neurotoxin. Dogs are usually affected, because they’ll drink it and they can die. It can’t be treated at a water treatment plant. It’s this algae that shut down the Tuledo water supply two summers ago. It’s related to weather; the hotter the weather, the more likely you are to get the blue-green algae outbreaks. It affects all lakes across Canada, they’re finding it all across the county, but Lake Erie is the canary in the coal mine; it gets hit first and hardest. It’s something that anyone that spends time in the water should be able to spot and recognize; it looks like an oil slick, so if you see it on the water, your spidey sense goes off.”
Governmental agencies and organizations like Waterkeeper keep a close eye on the water quality in certain areas, but they can’t monitor every location on the lakes.
“People from the surfing community are volunteering with us,” says Tully. “They’re helping collect water quality samples, they’re helping monitor recreational spots, they are sharing stories and information of what they see on the water. When they see sewage they report it, which is great because they tend to go more offshore into isolated areas, and less traditional areas than where swimmers and beach goers would go. They’re also talking and advocating for cleaner water, which is really important to have more voices than just ours, explaining why it’s important to protect the Great Lakes.”
With these facts and media representation of the lakes, anyone would be scared to swim or surf in them. But Tully is quick to point out this isn’t entirely true; she swims in Lake Ontario herself.
“The main message would be that there are amazing places to swim and paddle and surf on the Great Lakes. If people are concerned about specific places they shouldn’t write off an entire lake. Water quality is like weather and it changes everyday. We should take the time to become informed about what those changes are, just the same way you would check the temperature or rainfall when you’re heading out on the water.”
- •••••
On June 7, 2011 Helene Alegre drove to the one place she believed it was possible to surf on Manitoulin Island. The two hour drive from Sudbury took her through the northern Ontario towns of Espanola and Little Current; towns that most Canadians only pass through on a cross-Canada road trip. Much like Doc Seibold 56 years before her, she rolled up to the beach wondering if it was possible. And as finally set eyes on the sandy beach, she saw exactly what she’d been hoping for; whitewater. Lots of it.
“I saw the white line and I was freaking out. My only surfboard was in Tofino. My dad had an old windsurfing board, so I brought that with me. It had the centre dagger board, so I sprayed foam into that centre slot and sort of just shaved it down. It was so ghetto,” she remembers. “I hit the water running with it and I didn’t care. The nose was really wobbly, and it wasn’t good at going straight, but it didn’t matter. I surfed on that windsurf board all day long. I was so excited. No one had surfed there before.”
Alegre had become addicted to surfing three years earlier on a trip to Tofino.
“I was doing a tour of Vancouver Island and was only supposed to spend two or three days in Tofino, but I cancelled everything,’ she recalls. “I spent two weeks basically camping on the beach. I was totally hooked. Then when I came home, I didn’t know you could surf the lakes, so I started doing surf trips whenever I could.”
For the next couple of years, she lived on a diet of macaroni and rice so she could afford to go on surf trips to places like Mexico and the Dominican Republic. Then she remembered Manitoulin.
“My dad had a fishing boat and there were days when the waves were so bad none of the boats could go out. And I thought, I wonder if you could surf those waves?”
Researching bathymetric maps of the area, she searched for elevation changes, that would make surfable waves. She watched the forecast, the wind and began exploring the shoreline of Manitoulin, looking for surf. That spot in Providence Bay seemed the most likely to work. And ever since that day, when she managed to surf on Providence Bay, Alegre has pioneered many more breaks on Manitoulin Island. She’s a staple of the Manitoulin surf scene and a part of its growing history and lore. She’s quick to admit that surfing has given her more than she ever imagined.
“It has changed my life, in every aspect,” she says. “Everyone goes through things when they’re younger right? High school is tough, kids are tough, there’s bullying and girls can be mean. Had I been able to surf growing up, I don’t even know what my life would look like today. I don’t regret anything, but since then, it’s like that big piece that was missing is no longer missing. It has changed the way I feel about the world, about myself. It has completely changed my life.”
As the Great Lakes scene continues to grow, the number of photos flooding our newsfeed will also grow; surfers climbing snowbanks, surfers with icicles on their eyelashes, surfers waxing up in minus 20. There is no end in sight for what the future of Great Lakes surfing will bring.
“It’s funny because people always see pictures of days when it’s windy, it’s cold, people are bundled up, and they always tell us, ‘you guys are crazy!’ But I think, we’d be crazy not to,” says Alegre. “You have this amazing opportunity to do something that you’re so passionate about that not a lot of people do. And let’s face it, we’re not all born in Hawaii and we can’t all live there. So life doesn’t always give you exactly what you want, but it’s up to you to make the opportunities and make what you want of it. So I have the opportunity to go do my favourite activity in one of our biggest freshwater lakes. Why wouldn’t I go?”
And when explained that well, you have to ask yourself, why not indeed. For the hardcores like Larry Cavero, a Peruvian born surfer that lived in Toronto for 17 years before realizing you could surf the Great Lakes, any day on the water is a good day; frozen toes and all.
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