Nahhhh….I’m good.
Every community of surfers around the planet has some aspect of the local experience they take extreme pride in. It’s one of the things that bonds people who see each other in the same lineups and compete with one another for the same waves, over and over and over — a shared experience that’s unique to surfing that specific place.
A couple months back I visited Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and Frankfort, Michigan, for the premieres of our Hometown Hype films there. These are two All-American, Midwest towns sitting on opposite sides of Lake Michigan, where everybody seems to know everybody and the suburban lakeside neighborhoods are so beautiful they look like they belong in a ’80s horror film. Each town sits a solid distance away from the other. Either a couple hours on a ferry across the lake or, in my case, a seven-hour overnight drive down and around it. Still, they share a lake, and in the case of each individual visit, I couldn’t help but pick out the one thing that appears to be the pride and joy of their unique surfing experience: it’s fricking cold and they love that. They laugh about it. They take pride in their ability to not just surf in it, but to be excited about surfing in it.
Yes, it’s cold in a lot of places. But Great Lakes cold is different from high-elevation cold or New-York-City-in-a-snowstorm cold or…you get the picture. The wind whips on the Great Lakes, and it stings on the Great Lakes, and it starts to hurt your soul a little bit. Ten degrees feels like negative-whatever degrees, six millimeters of neoprene be damned.
The final boss of cold surfing on the Great Lakes is the slushy wave. And I imagine if you’re a Great Lakes surfer it’s a bucket list to have at least one session among them. Tik Tok stars @theskeltonbros have come across slushy waves more than once over the years and documented those sessions on their Youtube channel. It looks like they hunted some slushee waves again last week and came out with ice-beard trophies to show for their efforts.
@theskeltonbros Surfing Ohio slushies with the boys. #surfthegreats #greatlakessurfing #lakeerie #theskeltonbrothers ♬ Upbeat LoFi Hip Hop – sviridpavlov
