Surfing on the Great Lakes has its own culture

Looking for the home of Michigan surfboard maker Loukas Bethea in downtown Traverse City, I thought I had gotten his address wrong. I looked around--was I on the right street? In the right neighborhood? Are those hanging baskets of petunias? This can't be it. 

Where I had expected a warehouse, shed or some other breed of humble creation station, I had instead found a Victorian-style home with tremendous windows and elaborate landscaping. I checked my phone--yup, I was in the right place. 

As Bethea met me at the door, he had the undeniable aura of a surfer--his language was relaxed and informal, and his passion for surfing and handcrafting surfboards was communicated through hand gestures and enthusiastic anecdotes. The words "stoked" and "sick" get thrown around a lot. 

He offered me pizza as I sat down next to him and Rod Robertson, another dynamic surfing personality living in the Traverse City area, who is a surf instructor at Sleeping Bear Surf and Kayak in Empire. The home, come to find out, was Bethea's parents--he lives with them in the summer while making boards, and travels to China in the fall to teach English. A Traverse City workshop shed serves as the headquarters for his business, FRESH Surfboards Great Lakes.

Robertson winters in quintessential surf destinations like Puerto Rico or Costa Rica, where he "chases the tourists" and continues surf instruction. 

With this in mind, it's a little more obvious why Bethea and Robertson chose northwest Michigan, where they both grew up, to pursue a life supported by the obscure world of Great Lakes surfing. Every summer, they invariably return to northern Michigan, unable to completely detach from their freshwater roots. They aren't able to give a definitive reason for their annual migration--but it's home, and when home has eight-foot swells, it's okay to gravitate back. 

"Getting waves in all these exotic locations is awesome and the water is super warm, but I think getting waves at home with your close friends is hard to beat," says Bethea, who has surfed in Mexico, the British Virgin Islands and countless other places. "There's just something about surfing freshwater, and surfing at home too."

Other elements of surfing in Michigan and the Great Lakes make it alluring to even those familiar with the appeal of ocean waves. As anyone who is deeply familiar with the Great Lakes knows, the waves here are the result of wind cells, meaning there is often a storm associated with waves worth surfing. In the ocean, Robertson says, the waves originate from ground swells--the result of a far-off storm rarely seen when waves are at their best. 

"Storm (wind) cells produce waves that are closer together and when they're closer together, they don't quite have the same amount of power as they would otherwise," Robertson says. "In Hawaii a typical distance between waves--called a period--is 20 seconds, which is good for Hawaii. In Lake Michigan, if we're lucky, it's six seconds. Eight seconds is epic."

Then, of course, there's the difference in buoyancy between salt and freshwater. But there's another arguable distinction between salt and freshwater, both Bethea and Robertson attest; the culture of surfing on the big lakes. Bethea says while it may not be universally true, he has found freshwater surfers to be profoundly less "aggro" (aggressive) than places in California, Hawaii and other surf destinations. 

"The surf culture in Michigan and probably throughout all of the Great Lakes is positive," Bethea says. "(In a lot of surfing destinations), it's hardcore localism and they don't want you in the water, but here, it's not like that. Instead of pushing people away, we're on our phones like 'Hey hey, it's going to be so sick tomorrow, do you want to go?'"

Jason Schneider, a Marquette resident who only three years ago began surfing on Lake Superior, agreed that because there aren't a ton of people chasing waves in the Upper Peninsula, there's also a lot less aggressive, localist behavior. 

"There really aren't that many of us out here so when you see someone else out, you're just stoked to be out with other people," Schneider says. "But you really have to be committed to surf up here because so much of it is through the fall and winter.

"The local surfers have a lot of respect for each other because we know what we're going through to be out here."

Where Lake Superior surfers may be few and far between, Robertson said there could be upwards of 40 surfers in Lake Michigan near Empire or Frankfort on an "epic" day. However, those days--defined by swells that are eight feet or higher, like when Hurricane Sandy blew through the Great Lakes with 10-12 foot swells--come only two to three times a year. 

"It went from you, like, trying to find buddies to go to the beach and surf, to where you'd just show up and there'd be tons of people out there already," Robertson says, noting 2009 was around the time the Michigan surf population started growing substantially. "And maybe that has something to do with Facebook and stuff, I don't know, but all of a sudden everybody knew that Frankfort was a good place to surf. There'd be like 30-50 surfers in the water on a big day."

Despite the growth of surfing in the Great Lakes, it’s still an intrinsically masochistic hobby that includes a combination of cold air, colder water and rain, sleet, or snow. Surfing in such environments is borderline confusing for some not familiar with the Midwest surf scene -- both Bethea and Robertson say they've had the Coast Guard called on them because people thought they were trying to kill themselves during particularly cold surf sessions on Lake Michigan. 

"When you say you surf in the Midwest or in the Great Lakes, people just look at you blankly," says Schneider. "There are some people that don't take it seriously. But anyone that does some research can realize that we get some pretty crazy stuff here. Still, most people are like 'What, there's surfing there? Really?'

"But I don't think there is a handicap--I don't think there is a group of people that look at us like 'that doesn't really count.'"

For the people who do chase waves in fresh water rather than salt water, there is a similar energy in what they do; they still track storms religiously, talk about the wind as if its an old friend who might come back through town soon, take full advantage of epic conditions and then come home to sleep it off and meditate on the day--in most cases, much like their West-Coast peers. 

"My favorite--and this usually happens in the fall in September or October--is in the evening when you'll see the leaves starting to blow around and the trees starting to move and that's when your heart starts to pump," Bethea says, excitement building. "And then in the middle of the night you'll hear the tree branches banging on the roof of the house and you're just like 'Oh my God, it's going to be so good in the morning!" And of course you can't sleep." 

That feeling might be especially appropriate in Michigan, where those epic days only happen twice a year and therefore must be taken advantage of. 

"In Puerto Rico during the winter, you're going to have swells like two to three days straight," Robertson says. "So you can go surf for a couple hours, go eat breakfast, take a nap, maybe go back and get a second or even third session in in a day and you can do that for like three days in a row. 

"Here, if you have eight hours of waves, then you're in the water for eight straight hours just pushing yourself until you can't even keep going."

And the term for how one feels after an eight-hour surf marathon? 

"You get surf hangovers really easily here...where you’re just laying there watching TV in the fetal position (after a long day of surfing)," Robertson says.

And it's not just the surf hangovers--because the biggest waves tend to come in the worst possible weather, surfing on the big lakes often requires a commitment to frostbitten fingers, frozen hair and getting pounded with sleet and hail. 

"Most of the time it's 30 degrees out with 35 mph winds and it's sleeting and you just have to take it for what it is," Schneider says. "And yeah, we have to suck it up for everything it's worth--it's an intense experience, but I don't think it's any crazier than anywhere else. 

"In Lake Superior you just really have to want it."