You've heard me say before that I've always been a warm-water surfer, born in Australia and growing up in places like Hawaii and Southern California. But I just have to tip my hat again to my surfing buddies here in Minnesota. They've been getting some nice attention lately. Turns out the New York Times showed up recently at one of their favorite breaks up on the North Shore, and produced this story: Hanging 10 (Degrees) on Icy Lake Superior.
(Photo by T. C. Worley for The New York Times.)
My buddy Bob Tema is quoted in the story. Here's one of my favorite shots of him surfing that same break, Stoney Point, at an earlier time.
(Photo by Brain Stabinger.)
And here's a great winter shot he took of fellow surfer Quinn Carmichael.
The New York Times story was soon noticed by my buddy Jim Moriarty, Executive Director of the Surfrider Foundation, which resulted in him writing a great post called Are You Core? on his "Oceans Waves Beaches" blog, read by a worldwide community of surfers. (Thanks, Jim!)
Speaking of Surfrider, our local chapter is building a lot of steam lately (so to speak!), and we got some further play this past week — actually on two Surfrider Foundation blogs, with this great piece: Shaping Boards at 13 Below Zero. It features photos of my good friend and fellow MN-Superior Chapter organizer, Stefan Ronchetti, in his board shaping room/garage in Richfield, Minnesota. (Photos by Jim Perry, our amazing fellow organizer, who's a cardiologist. Like me, he's not a native Minnesotan, but a lifelong surfer all over the world. Stefan's from the Iron Range and is a financial analyst at US Bank, and also a worldwide traveler — now surfing on Oahu's North Shore.) And this post also made it onto Surfrider's Save Trestles blog. (That's one of Surfrider's major initiatives, to save a world-class surfing break in Orange County, not far from my second home in San Clemente. Stop the Toll Road!)
Pretty damn cool, all this attention for us Surfrider members and lovers of surfing back here in freezing-cold Minnesota! It's been one of the coldest Januarys in a long, long time, actually. Bob Tema told me a few days ago that the big lake is pretty well frozen over, so "no surfing for a while." (Surprisingly, that doesn't happen all that much on Lake Superior.)
One last piece of news. Speaking of our budding MN-Superior Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation, I recently entered us in a local competition for nonprofits, to try to win a free web site. (We're so new, we don't yet have one.) 
The competition is called the Overnight Website Challenge, and ten Minnesota nonprofits will be selected (from about 50 entries) to have some amazingly talented volunteer teams of web developers and designers build them a web site in a marathon session held all day and night on February 28, complete with massive amounts of Red Bull and other goodies. In the linked post above, I describe it as "24 hours of pure nerd energy"… 🙂
All lovers of surfing are attracted to the environmental mission of the Surfrider Foundation. If you love oceans, waves, and beaches…and Minnesota's wonderful, lakes, rivers, and shorelines…and believe these resources are worth protecting and preserving, please add a testimonial to our entry page and help our chapter win a free web site! Together, we can have fun and make a difference, too.
So, early Saturday morning, I pointed the Passat wagon north for Duluth — board strapped on top. [That was for looks only — I’m a warm water surfer only! 🙂 …and just in case someone wanted to try my vintage 6-ft singlefin stick.] I’d been praying for both good surf and good weather for a couple of days, really hoping the event could get a big turnout. Sadly, neither happened — well, not much in the way of surf, anyway. The weather? It was downright horrible. But nothing stops these guys, so I didn’t let it get to me, either! Actually it started out sunny as I left the Twin Cities, and the forecast there was for 75 F. 
But I knew a nasty low system was just to the north of us, and rain was in the forecast for Duluth — a 70% chance. The forecast high in Duluth had been trending down for a few days and was now only 59 F. Well, it never even came close to that! My car thermometer was at 46 when I pulled into Duluth, and I doubt it got much over 50 before I left. But it was fun, anyway, and I’m really glad I went. I wanted to meet these guys, shoot some pix, and blog about the event, which is officially called the 
It was held at Park Point beach park, a very cool place out on a long, thin sandy penisula stretching straight south from the Canal Park bridge, lined with beach houses and, yes, even some new condo developments cropping up. The road dead-ends at a small airport, and the beach park is just before that. It has a gorgeous, wide sandy beach, lined with birch and pine forest, and lots of park area, with barbeques, and a big log-cabin type public beach building with concessions inside. 
But the weather and surfing conditions were hardly ideal! With temps in the mid-40s, and winds straight onshore from the East at 15 mph+, the wind chill had to be 30 F. Fog was blowing in onto the beach, and I didn’t even realize for a while that it was fogging my lens pretty badly! My exposed hands were freezing — I needed gloves! Very soon after I arrived, I had to ditch the shorts and Rainbows for long pants, socks and shoes, a hooded sweat and jacket — just to survive the hour or so at water’s edge shooting. 
The surfers, however, had all the right equipment (6-mil wet suits) and seemed comfortable in the 45-degree water — where hood, gloves, and booties are mandatory, or you will go numb, guaranteed!
The sport of surfing owes this man a lot, this pioneering waterman from the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s. The big hardcover biography published on him a few years ago is a classic in many surfers’ libraries. And I was stoked to see Greg honoring the memory of this great man with a fundraising effort at the Coldwater Surf Fest. He even had some cool Tom Blake t-shirts made up, and I just had to have one…
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