The wind is tearing up the beach at Grand Haven State Park in early November, and Jack Bayse stands in his black wetsuit, holding his surfboard, his hair still wet from being in the 40 degree water.
“My lips are kind of cold right now; it’s hard to talk,” he tells me as I approach with my microphone.
Bayse had been in the water, catching waves with his friend Jack Ellis. It was Ellis’ first time surfing.
“I was able to body surf one,” Ellis tells me. “But I wasn’t able to stand up. The current is way gnarlier than I would have expected. Like my arms were cooked in like 20 minutes. I was way out of breath and just smoked.”
Ellis was more of a snowboard guy, he tells me. But Bayse bugged him enough that he decided to give surfing a try.
Bayse originally learned to surf in Florida, near Cocoa Beach. He moved to Grand Haven, on Michigan’s west coast, about six years ago.
“What’d you think when people first mentioned that you could surf out here?” I ask him.
“I thought they were kind of stupid honestly,” he says. “It looked really bad, and I thought no way they’re having fun out there.”
For years living in West Michigan, I’ve thought the same thing. And this is what I’d come to find out: How does anyone have fun surfing in Lake Michigan?
But it wasn’t enough to just ask.
I decided the best way to find out was to try it myself.
Big fetch
One of the first challenges was finding the right day for waves.
Waves on Lake Michigan can be fickle creatures, surfers told me. For non-surfers, it’s a bit of a wonder how there are waves at all.
“So what we’re looking for is the most amount of fetch possible,” says surfer Ella Skrocki, who meets me on a snowy day by the Frankfort pier.
Skrocki tells me she caught her first wave when she was five years old. Now she helps run the family surf shop in Empire, Sleeping Bear Surf & Kayak, where she also gives surfing lessons.
“So here at the Frankfort pier for instance, we have a couple hundred miles between here and Chicago for wind to push up from the south to drive energy here to the Frankfort pier,” she says, explaining wave formation. “So the stronger, more sustained wind out of the same direction, allowing the most amount of fetch — the most distance that the wind can travel across the water — that’s the key, that’s the ticket.”
Because Lake Michigan waves are limited by the amount of fetch available, different parts of the lake can have very different waves at the same time. Up north, near Frankfort and Empire, surfers want the wave to be coming more from the southwest, because it has more fetch — more distance — to gather up its strength. On the southern half of the lake, at Grand Haven, or South Haven, surfers look for a wave from the northwest.
There are other factors as well, including water temperature and air temperature.
Traditionally, the best time for surfing the Great Lakes has been in the fall, when big storms push from the west, bringing high winds before the lakes get too icy.
With climate change bringing more severe weather at times to our state, I wondered if surfers have been seeing bigger waves.
But Skrocki tells me she’s seen the opposite.
“We’ve had a pretty wide decrease in the amount of surfable days here on the lakes,” she says. “I’ve seen the changes, but I don’t really understand why or how.”
Scientists, it seems, are also struggling to understand how climate change might be affecting lake patterns. Part of the problem is reliable wave data for Lake Michigan doesn’t go back far enough to establish strong statistical trends.
One scientist who’s tried to understand this is Cary Troy, an engineering professor at Purdue University. Troy studies the physical processes of Lake Michigan to try to understand how waves affect the shoreline.
Troy oversaw the dissertation of one of his graduate students, Nicholas Olsen, in 2019, which looked at long term trends in wave size on Lake Michigan.
“We threw a lot of different statistical tests at the wave time series that we were able to generate,” Troy says. “And we could not see a definitive increase or decrease in the waves.”
The thing is, he says, there are big changes year to year in wave size. But when you zoom out and look at all the wave data that’s available, it’s hard to see a significant trend that’s been happening on top of that yearly variation.
This doesn’t necessarily mean Skrocki’s experience of wave trends is wrong.
Troy says one thing to keep in mind is that his lab’s research just looked at wave heights measured from buoys. Skrocki is looking at waves breaking on the beach, and that may not be just a function of the wave size. It can be the shape of the coast or the sand moving around below the waves on the beach. It’s possible something has changed there.
The other thing, Troy says, is the study he oversaw really only looked at two points in the lake. The data that are available are limited. And waves are going to hit different parts of the lake differently, depending on wind direction.
One thing he’s sure of is the climate is changing, and the lakes are changing. It’s just, scientists like him have not yet pinned down all of the actual implications of that — and whether waves are a part of it.
“Yeah, no, I definitely don’t think it’s a dead end,” Troy says. “I think it’s still a very interesting question that should be pursued.”
Getting the gear
Scientific questions aside, my next problem would be finding surfing gear. I reached out to a few surfers, and found a few willing to help.
Mark Hoeksema tracked down a wetsuit and a pair of water boots for me to borrow. And he connected me to Ken Smith, owner of No Coast Surfboards and Repairs, who said he’d lend me a board.
After checking the weather, we pick a day to meet at Grand Haven State Park. Michigan Public’s Director of Digital Audiences, Jodi Westrick, meets us to gather videos and pictures. The three of us huddle in Hoeksema’s van, out of the wind, to wait for Ken Smith.
That’s when we spot the two surfers from before, Jack Bayse and Jack Ellis, jumping off the pier into the choppy waves.
“Little hard cores,” Hoeksema says. “I remember when I was that age and I was just stoked out of my mind and I would just go no matter what. Now I’m like ehhhhhh.”
Hoeksema grew up in Muskegon and learned to surf there. Or really, he learned to surf watching VHS tapes of surfers, he says.
After that, he moved to California; he worked at a surfing magazine for a while, and he tapped into the larger surfing community.
And it taught him the difference — what makes Lake Michigan surfing special.
“When you get great waves here, you so much appreciate it,” he says. “Surfing in California you get a great day every — you know, a day or two a week you get a good day. A couple days a month, you get a great day.”
“So Lake Michigan surfing is surfing crappy waves every day so that you can enjoy the good waves that you get once a year?” I ask.
“I think so,” he says. “That’s pretty much it, yeah, definitely.”
We hop out of the van, talk to Bayse and Ellis for a bit, then find Ken Smith, who pulls a board from his hatchback for me to use.
He’s originally from South Africa, but out of all the people I meet, he’s the one who everyone said would surf even the crappiest of days.
“My basic theory is you can only get better at what you do by doing the worst,” Smith tells me. “So by surfing junky, what we call a pile day, it just improves you for when there’s good surf out there. You know the conditions, you know the sand bars, you know where to sit.”
Though the wind continues to howl along the beach, it’s blowing straight onto the shore from the west. Not the best wind direction for wave creation at Grand Haven. Hoeksema tells me the best days are when the wind switches direction right as the swell arrives onshore. The waves push in toward the beach, and the wind pushes on the face of them, standing them up a little taller right before they crash.
This day is the opposite. As soon as a wave begins to reach its peak, it gets flattened from behind by the strong wind. Looking out from the beach, I see layers of foamy whitecaps, one after the other. It does not look pleasant.
Having fun
It’s just about time for me to get in the water. But here, it’s probably a good idea to mention safety. Every year, many people drown in the Great Lakes. One of the reasons why: so many people underestimate the strength of the waves and the currents we have here.
I’ve never surfed on Lake Michigan, but I spent part of my childhood on the west coast, swimming in the Pacific Ocean. In high school and college, I surfed in Florida, where I lived at the time. And though I haven’t surfed in Grand Haven before, I know this beach well, and have been in the water countless times.
I’m also planning to go in the water with two experienced surfers, Mark Hoeksema and Ken Smith. I’ll stay in shallow water, never past where my feet can touch. And I’ll stay far away from the pier, so I won’t be smashed against it.
It’s early November; the water is close to 40 degrees.
There’s a shock at first when the cold water hits the wetsuit. But within a couple minutes, the wetsuit does its job and I’m relatively warm.
I walk out from the beach, and start looking for a wave.
Mostly, I don’t see anything. Ken Smith and Mark Hoeksema start out a little deeper. I see them catch a wave or two. I push my board into a few choppy whitecaps and catch a ride.
I try to stand up, and immediately fall over, multiple times.
After a bit of this, I walk back to the beach and catch up with my colleague Jodi Westrick, who’s still on the beach, getting sand blown in her face.
“I’m just flopping around out there,” I say.
“I don’t know, looks like you’re having fun,” she says back.
“It’s very fun,” I admit. “I’m having fun. I’m not surfing, but I’m having fun. “
I go back out and keep trying. And keep failing. Eventually, after about an hour, my feet get cold and that’s pretty much when I call it quits.
I’m exhausted, I can’t feel my feet, and I didn’t actually surf.
But I loved it.
“Surfing anywhere is like dancing with Mother Nature in the most intimate way, right?” says Ella Skrocki when I meet her a few weeks later on the snowy beach in Frankfort. “You have these big, beautiful masses of water that are literally carrying you. And I think it’s so elevated here on the Great Lakes because we’re surfing freshwater.”
I’d felt what it’s like to ride a wave years ago, but I still haven’t felt it in Lake Michigan.
Skrocki tells me it’s different. It’s like a gift.
“You know, to think we get such beautiful formations here on a lake that is widely considered as inferior to its ocean counterparts is, like, unbelievably special,” she says. “And it almost feels, like, unreal when you’re doing it. So the act of riding a wave just feels like this very incredible spiritual connection. You feel really weightless. And it’s like the most present I think that I’ve ever experienced, for sure.”
Skrocki learned to surf from her parents, who moved the family to Empire from lower Michigan and opened up Sleeping Bear Surf & Kayak when she was a child. She’s carrying on the legacy of her mother Beryl, a legend in the local community, who passed away a few years ago.
“And she was also so in love with this lake,” Skrocki says. “She was an environmental advocate. And I think her legacy is so rooted in joy and it’s rooted in stewardship. And this, like, idea of passing forward what you love in hopes that they might love the beautiful gift that is Lake Michigan, and the Great Lakes.”
And that’s what surfing is for her.
A way to experience the gift that is Lake Michigan.
Even on those days when the waves are terrible.
“I think probably my favorite days surfing here in the Great Lakes are like right in June, when we get our first swell of the season and everyone comes out here to the Frankfort pier,” she says. “And everyone’s like ‘This is the best ever!’ And you look at the water and it’s like knee-high, wind chop. But everyone’s just excited for this opportunity to play. And I think that’s just what’s really special about this culture of freshwater adventure here.”
This is the answer I’d been looking for. When the water is cold, the waves are messy and the wind is howling, this is why people want to surf.
Even when the waves aren’t the best. Even when it’s freezing, even if you’re like me and you can’t even stand up on the board, if you can have that adventure, you go for it.
Edited by Rebecca Williams, Vincent Duffy and Jodi Westrick. Special thanks to Randi Kest and Mike King.
Support for the production of this podcast was made possible by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, as part of its Great Lakes News Collaborative.
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Beyond the Shore is a production of Michigan Public. You can find all of our podcasts at michiganpublic.org/podcasts.
