A History of SurfingOn the Great Lakes

If the origins of Great Lakes surfing were accidental, the pioneers made it intentional. In Grand Haven, Michigan, the Wyatt family became the first dynasty of freshwater surfing. Lee Wyatt and his sons began riding Lake Michigan in the early 1960s with heavy wooden longboards, no leashes, and whatever clothing they could layer against the cold. They surfed in wool sweaters. They surfed in cotton shirts that became twenty-pound anchors when waterlogged. They surfed without hoods, without gloves, without any of the neoprene technology that would eventually make cold water surfing sustainable. They surfed because the waves were there and nobody had told them they couldn’t.

The Surfaris released “Wipe Out” in 1963 and it became the unofficial anthem of every Midwest kid who’d never seen the ocean but knew, instinctively, that there was something primordial about riding a wave. The song’s manic drum solo played on every transistor radio from Chicago to Traverse City, and somewhere in between, kids were dragging boards into the lake. The counterculture movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s gave the scene its first dose of identity. Surfing wasn’t just a sport on the Great Lakes — it was a statement. It said: We don’t need your ocean. We don’t need your approval. We have our own thing.

By the early 1970s, small pockets of surfers had established themselves at breaks along both shores of Lake Michigan. Sheboygan, Wisconsin emerged as a western shore stronghold, its combination of pier breaks and consistent north-south fetch making it one of the most reliable waves in the freshwater world. On the eastern shore, Grand Haven and Muskegon attracted small but dedicated crews who surfed year-round, their sessions growing longer and more ambitious as crude wetsuit technology began filtering down from the coasts.

These pioneers shared a common trait: absolute indifference to being taken seriously. The coastal surf world treated Great Lakes surfing as a punchline when they acknowledged it at all. “You surf where?” was the standard response. But the pioneers didn’t care about validation from Huntington Beach or the North Shore. They had waves. They had community. They had something the ocean surfers didn’t — the peculiar bond that comes from choosing to do something difficult when everyone else thinks you’re insane.

The 1980s were the silent decade for Great Lakes surfing. Nationally, the shortboard revolution had transformed surfing from a countercultural pastime into an elite athletic pursuit. Boards got smaller, tricks got harder, and the bar for what counted as “real surfing” rose higher than most Midwest waves could reach. The coastal magazines stopped printing stories about anything that didn’t involve barrels or aerials. The Great Lakes scene, which had never been loud to begin with, went almost entirely underground.

But underground is not the same as extinct. A devoted core kept the faith. In Sheboygan, a crew of maybe a dozen regulars continued to paddle out through every season, their sessions invisible to anyone who wasn’t specifically looking for them. In Michigan, the same. Small groups. No cameras. No sponsors. No social media, obviously — just word of mouth and the shared understanding that when the buoys spiked and the wind shifted, you showed up.

In 1987, the movie North Shore hit theaters and gave every Great Lakes surfer a simultaneous jolt of aspiration and melancholy. Here was Rick Kane, a wave-tank champion from Arizona, earning respect at Pipeline through grit and determination. Great Lakes surfers watched it on VHS in wood-paneled basements and saw themselves in the outsider narrative. They, too, were surfers from somewhere that wasn’t supposed to produce surfers. They, too, were underestimated. The difference was that their proving ground wasn’t the North Shore of Oahu — it was the north shore of Lake Michigan, where the water was forty degrees colder and the only audience was a few seagulls.

If the ’80s were the dark ages, the ’90s and 2000s were the renaissance that nobody outside the Great Lakes region saw coming. It started quietly. The internet connected surfers who had been isolated in their respective lakeside towns for decades. For the first time, a surfer in Sheboygan could share a session report with a surfer in Grand Haven. Forums emerged. Grainy digital photos circulated. The community discovered that it was bigger than anyone had realized — that from Duluth to Cleveland, from Chicago to Buffalo, people had been surfing freshwater in secret for generations.

Then came the film that changed everything. In 2003, Dana Brown released Step Into Liquid, a documentary that traveled the world exploring surf culture in unexpected places. One of those places was the Great Lakes. For audiences who had only ever associated surfing with tropical coastlines, the footage was revelatory: surfers in full hoods and gloves, riding clean, head-high waves against a backdrop of industrial piers and grey November skies. Brown treated Great Lakes surfing not as a novelty but as a legitimate expression of the same elemental drive that pushed people into waves everywhere. “The ocean doesn’t have a monopoly on stoke,” the film seemed to say. The Great Lakes surf community finally had proof on celluloid.

The momentum built. Third Coast Surf Shop opened its doors — one of the first retail spaces dedicated exclusively to Great Lakes surfing. It wasn’t just a shop; it was a clubhouse, a community center, a physical manifestation of the idea that freshwater surfing deserved its own infrastructure. On Michigan’s coast, Vince Deur emerged as one of the scene’s most visible ambassadors, his photography and advocacy bringing attention to the eastern shore’s powerful autumn swells. The documentary Unsalted: A Great Lakes Experience premiered and gave the scene its own feature-length story, further cementing freshwater surfing as a real, documented, living culture.

And then there was Screaming Tuna. If Third Coast was the handshake, Screaming Tuna was the middle finger — in the best possible way. Part brand, part crew, part attitude, Screaming Tuna embodied the raw, unpolished, DIY spirit that had defined Great Lakes surfing from the beginning. They weren’t trying to be Billabong or Quiksilver. They weren’t trying to look like California. They were aggressively, unapologetically freshwater. Their graphics were loud. Their events were chaotic. Their aesthetic said: We surf in a lake and we think that’s the raddest thing in the world. Screaming Tuna didn’t just participate in Great Lakes surf culture — they helped define its voice. Raw. Irreverent. Self-aware. Proud.

The influence of Screaming Tuna rippled outward through the scene in ways that are still felt today. They proved that freshwater surfing didn’t need to borrow its identity from the coasts. It could be its own thing — with its own humor, its own art, its own way of talking about waves and weather and the peculiar masochism of paddling out in January. They helped create the cultural confidence that would eventually allow the next generation of Great Lakes surf brands to emerge without apology.

The 2010s were the decade that Great Lakes surfing went from underground curiosity to recognized subculture. Social media was the accelerant. Instagram feeds filled with images that stopped people mid-scroll: a surfer silhouetted against a Lake Superior sunrise, ice-encrusted beards backlit by winter light, clean barrels peeling off concrete piers with the Milwaukee skyline behind them. These weren’t novelty posts — they were genuinely stunning, and they spread like wildfire. For the first time, the outside world wasn’t laughing at Great Lakes surfing. They were jealous of it.

The Great Lakes Surfing Association formalized what had been a loose network of local crews into something with structure. Events multiplied — the Unsalted Surf Film Fest, demo days, beach cleanups, contests that brought together surfers from all five lakes. Wetsuit technology had finally caught up with ambition: modern 5/4mm hooded suits with sealed seams and thermal linings made two-hour winter sessions survivable. What had once required insane cold tolerance now required merely above-average cold tolerance. The barrier to entry dropped, and the community swelled.

Surf forecasting transformed the game entirely. NOAA buoy data, wind models, and swell prediction tools — once the domain of meteorology nerds — became accessible through apps and websites. The old way of knowing when to surf was driving to the lake and looking at it. The new way was checking three models, cross-referencing buoy readings, and coordinating with a group chat. The spontaneity diminished, but the wave count exploded. Surfers who had been lucky to catch a dozen good sessions a year were now logging sixty, eighty, a hundred. The lake hadn’t changed. The information had.

Aliotta Haynes Jeremiah had released “Lake Shore Drive” back in 1971, but it became the unofficial anthem of a new generation of Great Lakes surfers in the 2010s — a song about the beauty and energy of the lakefront that felt like it had been written specifically for the culture that now lived there. The Chicago band probably never imagined their ode to LSD (Lake Shore Drive, not the other one) soundtracking a surf session, but music has a way of finding its people. Notable big wave sessions defined the decade. November 2015 produced waves that pushed fifteen feet at Sheboygan — Lake Michigan’s answer to Pipeline. Surfers who had spent years training in three-foot chop suddenly had the stage they’d been preparing for.

In 2016, something shifted in Milwaukee. It wasn’t that the waves got bigger or the water got warmer or the wind started blowing from a better direction. What changed was that someone decided the Great Lakes surf scene deserved a cultural headquarters — a place and a platform that would document, celebrate, and grow freshwater surfing not as a coastal knockoff but as its own fully realized culture. That someone was Lake Effect Surf.

Lake Effect wasn’t trying to be the next Hurley or Volcom transplanted to the Midwest. This was something different — a brand and platform built by the lake, for the lake. The name itself was an act of identity: “lake effect” is the meteorological phenomenon that produces the snowstorms and waves unique to the Great Lakes region. It’s the thing that makes this place different from everywhere else. By claiming it, the brand was saying: Our conditions aren’t a disadvantage. They’re our identity.

The Wiloha clothing line became the brand’s first tangible expression. “Wiloha” — a portmanteau of Wisconsin and Aloha — captured the ethos perfectly: the spirit of aloha, the warmth of surf culture, the welcoming community, but rooted in the cold reality of Wisconsin lakefronts. Wiloha wasn’t selling a fantasy of endless summer. It was selling the truth of frozen mornings and numb hands and the inexplicable joy of catching a chest-high wave on Lake Michigan in February.

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But Lake Effect was always more than clothing. The forecast tools turned weather data into surf intelligence, giving the community real-time access to conditions, predictions, and the kind of hyperlocal knowledge that used to live only in a few experienced surfers’ heads. The Storm Logs became a living archive — every rideable storm documented, analyzed, and preserved for a community that had always been terrible at recording its own history. The event programming brought surfers together in person, reminding everyone that the screen was just a window and the real community lived on the beach, in the lineup, and around the fire pit after the session.

What Lake Effect represents in the broader arc of Great Lakes surf history is professionalization without sanitization. The brand carries forward the DIY energy of Screaming Tuna, the ambassadorial work of Vince Deur, and the local pride of every crew that ever paddled out in wool sweaters — but packages it in a way that can sustain itself, grow, and invite the next generation in. It’s the difference between a campfire and a lighthouse. Both give warmth. Only one helps others find their way.

Great Lakes surf culture is built on a foundation of shared suffering, and that’s not hyperbole — it’s literally the thing that makes the community different from any other surf scene on Earth. When it’s negative ten degrees outside and you’re struggling to pull a frozen wetsuit over numb limbs in a parking lot that hasn’t been plowed, there are no posers. There are no kooks pretending to be surfers for the Instagram clout. Everyone in that parking lot has earned their place by choosing to be there when no reasonable person would be.

This creates a camaraderie that surfers who’ve only known warm water lineups can’t fully understand. Ocean surf culture has a well-documented localism problem — territorial aggression, hostile lineups, cars getting keyed in parking lots. Great Lakes surf culture has almost none of that. When you encounter another surfer at a freezing pier break at 6 AM in January, the overwhelming emotion isn’t territorial — it’s relief. Oh thank God, someone else is crazy enough to be here too.

The 4 AM alarm. The pre-dawn drive through empty highways. The thermos of coffee that’s gone by the time you hit the lake. The moment you crest the dune and see the lines stacking up in the grey dawn light and your heart rate spikes because the forecast was right, the waves are real, and for the next two hours you’re going to exist in a state of pure, freezing, joyful presence. The frozen beard that your partner photographs when you get back to the truck. The gas station breakfast sandwich that tastes like the best meal of your life because you can finally feel your fingers again.

Stacy Peralta’s documentary Riding Giants told the story of big wave surfing through the lens of outsiders who pushed boundaries when the establishment said it couldn’t be done. Great Lakes surfers relate to that narrative on a cellular level. We are, by definition, outsiders. We surf where surfing “shouldn’t” exist. We find waves where the maps say there are only lakes. We build culture where the coastal gatekeepers say there’s nothing worth building. And we do it with frozen hands and full hearts.

The future of Great Lakes surfing is being shaped by forces both natural and human. Climate change is altering weather patterns across the region in ways that are still being understood. Some models suggest more intense but less frequent storm systems, which could mean bigger swells but longer flat spells. Others point to reduced ice coverage extending the surf season deeper into winter. What’s certain is that the lake is changing, and the surfing community is learning to adapt in real time.

The community itself continues to grow. A new generation of groms is growing up in towns like Sheboygan, Milwaukee, and Grand Haven knowing something that would have been inconceivable fifty years ago: that surfing is a normal thing to do in the Midwest. These kids don’t have to explain themselves. They don’t have to defend their choice of sport. They just surf — as naturally as kids in Huntington Beach or Cocoa Beach. That normalization is perhaps the most profound change in the culture’s eighty-year history.

Technology continues to lower barriers. Better wetsuits, better forecasting, better boards shaped specifically for Great Lakes conditions. Foil boards have opened up days that were previously too small to ride. SUPs have made the flat spells productive. The quiver has expanded beyond anything the pioneers could have imagined.