Christmas wreaths line the road to the beach. Snow clings to the sand. A cold wind blows in from the north, churning up whitecaps on Lake Michigan, throwing a glaze of ice over the boulders that rise from the shore.
All of which means one thing to the men in black wetsuits: Surf’s up.
“We’ve had to walk through a few snowdrifts to get to the water,” says winter surfer Roger Coppinger, 32, of Chesteron, Ind., as he huddles in his heated van, preparing to ride the 34-degree waves.
“It’s kind of neat, too, ’cause this time of year, not everyone thinks of being in Lake Michigan.”
He pauses.
“For a reason.”
Call them crazy, the 20 or so die-hard surfers who fan out over Chicago-area beaches during the winter — their friends and co-workers certainly do. So do their spouses and children. Even the spokesman for the U.S. Coast Guard, an agency not generally known to shrink from cold weather, is taken aback.
“Whew!” says Petty Officer Scott Bronson. “That’s just painful to think about.”
But when the initial shock dies down and the name-calling subsides, what you’re left with this: It would be hard to find anyone who knows a Chicago winter better than the city’s most ardent surfers, or enjoys it more thoroughly.
And that’s no small feat.
If summer is the season that warms and indulges us, winter is a challenge, a dare, a threat to our very survival. To thrive under such conditions, you need the proper equipment, whether it’s long underwear, or waterproof boots, or a new set of snow tires, or a $300 neoprene wetsuit.
You also need the proper attitude. If you’re not naturally drawn to sub-freezing temperatures, you have to sort through the negatives and find something to like. Or at least something that makes you forget how utterly miserable you are.
Which brings us to the waves of winter.
After the relatively calm waters of summer, Chicago’s winter surfers greet the biggest waves of the year by dusting off their weather radios, scanning the buoy reports, analyzing wind and wave conditions, and driving as much as four hours, one way, for an hour of good surf.
“We all get psyched when winter comes because we know we’re going to get some waves,” says Pete “Lasagna Pete” Hanranhan, 38, of Chicago.
“We’re depressed in June and July.”
The winter surfer story typically begins in warm waters. Maybe a Chicagoan is on vacation in Florida or California when he takes his first ride; maybe she grew up summer-surfing in Maine.
Back in the Snow Belt, beginners may try their luck with the mild summer swells of lower Lake Michigan, or drive north, up the coast, in search of superior warm-weather waves.
Already, they are fighting an uphill battle. When coastal surfers refer to an ocean that is too calm for surfing, they sneer, “It’s a lake.”
But the Great Lakes surfers adapt. In the summer and the fall high season, they surf sites where man-made breakwalls “clean up” the waves, slowing and defining them.
They find surf in strange places, among them shoreline casinos and the Michigan City power plant, a favorite among Chicago-area surfers until a fence was installed, causing the surfing faithful significant inconvenience.
“Nothing stops a surfer. If they want to surf, they’ll get in there somehow,” says unofficial Lake Michigan surfing historian Bob “Aquadoc” Beaton, 55, of Grand Haven, Mich.. “They might be able to stop a terrorist, but they can’t stop a surfer.”
The more they surf, the more likely the new surfers are to meet their colleagues, pockets of a few dozen die-hards that dot the coast of the lake: the surfers of Sheboygan, Wis., and Milwaukee, Evanston, Chicago, Michigan City, Ind., Muskegon and Grand Haven in Michigan.
Maybe the newcomers surf the wave-rich “Cheddar Curtain,” on the border between Illinois and Wisconsin, or “Shooters” in Whiting, so named because the clubhouse the surfers share with a local boating club sits atop an active shooting range.
New surfers meet local legends such as “Turnip Seed,” considered by some to be the Godfather of Chicago-area surfing, and “Wino Dan,” the wineseller who surfs — and provides beverages at area surfer parties.
Along the way, there is plenty of opportunity to hear the veterans sing the praises of winter surfing. And at some point, the sub-zero surfing safari can begin to make sense.
Surfing is “my passion, my favorite thing,” says Coppinger, a married father of two who installs siding for a living. “There’s not much around here that you get the same pleasure from, so take advantage while you can.”
In this relatively serene corner of Lake Michigan, that means surfing in winter, which is legal, according to the Coast Guard but “not recommended” due to the threat of hypothermia.
In one particularly unsettling entry at the lakesurf.com Web site, which provides a forum for local surfers, a Chicago man writes that, half an hour after a recent ride on the waves, “my face started swelling like a balloon and my cheeks became somewhat hardened and bluish. This only happened after I entered a warm room. … Is petroleum jelly a way to protect against this?”
Coppinger looks a little subdued as he sits in his van at 9:30 on a Sunday morning in December. Temperatures are in the 20s at the Shooters boathouse at Whiting Park.
A harsh wind bears down from the north. The water is two degrees above freezing, and a passerby’s face blazes beet-red behind his hood and scarf.
Tall and thin, with a dark beard and a sunburned face, Coppinger is wearing a black neoprene wetsuit with a hood, gloves and booties.
Two layers of polypropylene underneath provide some additional protection, but even so, the barrier between skin and air is so thin you can see Coppinger’s ribs and shoulder blades through his suit.
The van’s balmy temperatures and Hawaiian-print seat covers lend the scene a tropical feel, but Coppinger knows what waits outside: icicles on his beard, numb fingers, water inside his suit.
The worst, he says, is the first wave that hits your unprotected skin.
“It hurts like a million needles poking’ ya in the face at once.”
At about 10 a.m., he picks up his board and heads for the refinery-lined beach, where he will join a fellow surfer, Bryan McDonald, 35, a construction worker from Oswego.
The sky is palest blue, the light almost blinding as Coppinger enters the water and paddles out through wave after glittering wave.
At the roadside, motorists stop to gawk but Coppinger keeps his eyes on the olive-green lake that splashes and tumbles before him. He wants a good wave.
When he finds one, he stands up on his board, left foot leading, and rides it 75 yards, effortlessly looping, dipping and gliding through the choppy surf.
He has found what he is looking for: “the adrenaline rush that surpasses the cold.” Some of the waves are as high as 6 feet, a surfer’s dream in these parts — and a good day even in California. “I’m really shocked,” Coppinger says, “that there’s not a load of people here yet.”
Winter surfing has been practiced sporadically on Lake Michigan since at least the late 1960s, when the only wet suits available were designed for summer.
Beaton, the surf historian, says that back in 1968, he would leave his van running with the heat on full-blast, so he could jump in after surfing for an icy 20-minute stretch.
It wasn’t until the mid-1980s, when winter wetsuits became widely available, that winter surfing caught on, he says. And, in this case, catching on is a relative term.
Today there are only about 75 to 100 winter surfers on Lake Michigan, Beaton says. Jim Hoop, co-director of the Eastern Surfing Association’s Great Lakes district, puts the number close to 50, with maybe 100 total on the Great Lakes.
All five lakes have their fans, with most surfers simply riding the waves closest to home, Hoop says. But Superior probably gets the biggest waves.
Even on (relatively) popular Lake Michigan, winter surfing is a small world, with its own heroes, among them WGN-TV weatherman Tom Skilling, whose detailed reports, viewed as overkill by some civilians, make him the toast of the winter surfer community. “He’s a god,” Coppinger says.
Surfers also watch the Weather Channel, buy weather radios and check reports of buoy activity on the lake.
“Some days I can tell if there are waves just by the smell of the wind,” a local surfer writes at lakesurf.com, an observation that Hoop greets with a certain skepticism.
“Go sniff the wind in Whiting, Indiana, and what da ya smell, ya know?” he says. “Oil refineries? Steel mills? C’mon.”
Winter weather theories tend to be complex, taking into account wind speed and direction, readings of wave height at various points in the lake, and the precise location of the proposed surfing spot. The wind-sniffer’s technical analysis of southern Lake Michigan alone fills six single-spaced pages at lakesurf.com.
But the basics are simple. In general, the stronger the wind, and the further it blows across the open water to get to you, the bigger the waves will be, according to meteorologist Allan Fisher of the National Weather Service.
In the Chicago area, winter winds tend to be the strongest, in part because polar jet streams — fast-moving upper level winds — blow cold Canadian air into our region. Winds from the north, which blow 300 miles down the lake, tend to produce the biggest waves, Fisher says.
Surfers refine such analysis further, with veterans looking for wind speeds of at least 20 miles per hour, and meeting a southwest wind in Michigan, a southeast wind in Wisconsin, and a wind from the northeast or northwest in Indiana. Hoop once drove 8 hours round-trip to surf, for an hour, in North Muskegon, Mich.
“We’re all little meteorologists,” he says.
After an hour of surfing, Coppinger retreats to the club house on top of the shooting range, hangs up his frozen wet suit to thaw and settles back to watch a Great Lakes surfing video.
One that includes a man surfing, on a river, in a snowstorm.
“Lasagna Pete” Hanranhan returns, eyebrows crusted with ice. The icicles that hang from his visor of his wetsuit slowly begin to drip as, hands on his hips, face bright red, he shrugs off questions about the cold.
“Ya gotta be layered a little bit. The weather’s not bad.”
“Hey!” says a fellow surfer, pointing at Pete’s icy visor with delight. “He’s meltin’!”
It would seem that nothing can stop a winter surfer, but that is not accurate. Achilles had his heel, Superman had Kryptonite and the winter surfers have ice. When Lake Michigan begins to freeze, sometimes as early as December, it throws big chunks of ice into the paths of the boards and surfing becomes unsafe, even by this crowd’s standards.
That’s when the “winter madness” sets in, with desperate surfers driving as much as five hours in search of the last, frigid stretches of open water. But for now, at least, the sun is bright, the water hovers a few degrees above freezing, and Chicago’s cold weather surfers can lean back in their clubhouse and dream of endless winter.
