- [Producer] Now what you're gonna say is, what are we calling this?

"Ian Planchon Surf film take six," okay?

So say, "Ian Planchon Surf film take six."

- So wait, let me- Don't start yet.

So Ian-what?

- Planchon.

You can just say, "Surf film take six."

- Okay.

- Go for it.

- Surf film take six.

- It's amazing, it's like a mini ocean, but it's really not.

- I don't wanna say it confuses people, but they hear, "Oh, it's a lake" and they expect it to be a lake like every other lake, where a boat wake is the biggest wave you're gonna see on the lake.

It's a lake, yes, but... - When I first saw it, I really didn't understand or know that it existed like it does, that there's that huge body of fresh water up there that's 350 miles long, 150 miles wide.

That's a big body of water.

- Lake Superior, it's the largest lake in the world by surface area, holds 10% of the Earth's fresh water.

You could empty the other four Great Lakes into it and still have room for another two Lake Eries.

So it's a very, very big lake.

- There's something about Superior, it's in its name, that's hard to beat.

- It is magical and it's something that isn't lost on me.

- Yeah, it's been a common theme in the life of the entire city.

The city wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the lake.

- It's very spiritual for me.

It energizes me.

- It's part of the soul of the region.

- I think it's...

I mean, it's hard to describe, like... - So I always explain it literally as like a little ocean that is fresh water.

(upbeat, fun music) (music fades out) (muffled streaming of water) - Well, this is my thing that I do.

(wax grinding on surf board) (man whoops excitedly in the distance) Whoo!

(man whooping) That was Brett.

Surfing is the thing that centers me.

Surfing is the thing that takes me back in time.

Surfing is the thing that reminds me that I still have some kid in me.

- It's calming in a way.

Yeah, there's chaos with waves and other people and you get wrecked sometimes and held underwater, but I don't know if I've ever done anything, for me anyway, as relaxing as being out there doing that.

- What does surfing mean to me?

It means, it's like my church somewhat.

If I couldn't surf anymore, I would at least be out there asking them to push me in a wave.

(Vonnie chuckles) - I dunno, I think most surfers would say it's kind of their zen area or they just, they get in their zone and they're not thinking about anything else.

They're not thinking about their to-do list or whatever, they're just out there in the quiet, catching their waves with their buddies.

You get in a wetsuit, you take your board out, and you catch waves in the blizzard, in the snow, through the ice, and it's awesome.

A lot of the activities and a lot of the hobbies in Minnesota are based around the lakes.

I mean, it's the land of 10,000 lakes.

So anything from your paddle boarding or your canoeing or whatever people do.

I think that probably everyone's on the lake in the summer all the time.

So I think as a Minnesotan, the lake is just part of your life.

I don't know, I can't imagine living in Minnesota without lakes.

I think when you tell someone you surf on Lake Superior, the word I get the most is "crazy" or "insane."

Which it is to an extent.

I mean, I think it's a pretty hidden idea still outside of Minnesota and especially even outside of Duluth.

I think a lot of people in Duluth know because they see the surfboards around, they've seen the people on the lake, but even you come down here to Minneapolis and hardly anyone has heard of it.

So I imagine outside of the state of Minnesota, people are like, "What?"

(lighthearted music) (music fades out) - When I was a kid, ABC used to have Wide World Sports on Saturday morning, and I saw it as a 5-year-old and they had surfing on it.

In my mind at the time I was like, "That's what I'm gonna do."

And then middle school, I went down to Mexico and got to try it really for the first time.

And then after that, college.

Spent too much tuition money on trips to Central America.

Then after that, lived in Japan for a bit over three years and surfed all the time over there.

And when I came back here it was just, it was gonna happen.

(waves crashing) - See this one coming in?

Ooh, pretty waves.

I'm originally from Southern California and I grew up in Anaheim and I lived a block from Disneyland and we watched the fireworks go off every night at nine o'clock.

I was 14 when I got my first job at the grocery store so I could buy a surfboard.

I came up here and went to technical school when my parents moved up here and built a vacation home.

It was just shocking, you know?

Amazing to find out that you can surf on the lake, that the lake is that big, that there's waves big enough and they last long enough.

- We lived an hour and a half from the surf spot that we love to go to, so we have that time going up and back to talk.

And it's just he and I in the car, you know?

And it's our date, so to speak.

- It took me four years to talk Vonnie into getting married.

She wasn't quite sure that surfing was for her.

- [Vonnie] Sometimes we'll be fortunate enough that we can both take off on the same wave and go down the line together.

- [Erik] I love seeing Vonnie learn how to ride and learn that she can do it too.

I love seeing her get rides.

The other day when it was so cold, and she won't scream while she's around the other guys, she's gonna be tough, but once she gets back to the car, she's covered with ice, she's, "What's the matter?"

Oh, she's just cold, oh, okay.

Okay, just, you'll warm up.

(Erik chuckles) Anyways.

- Before anything else gets cold, my fingers get cold.

- Lake Superior, even in the middle of the summer, is cold.

We've been out there in negative temperatures, -10.

I don't know what the wind chill would be, but that's when you get those really good ice ups that you see people with the beards, they're like down to here with ice, frozen eyelashes, things like that.

- The individualness of surfing on Lake Superior is learning your own limitations of how much cold you can take.

- You've gotta get a pretty thick wetsuit.

I do like a 6/5/4, so that's millimeters.

You've got booties, you've got gloves, you've got the full mask or head thing that comes up.

And then on the really cold days when it's negative, if you wanna be hardcore, just this part of your face is showing and so you put Vaseline on there so you don't freeze your face.

And then you gotta get your board, your leash, you've gotta get a vehicle to get up there.

'Cause it's always in a blizzard.

Every time the waves comes in, it's always a storm.

And you bring a thermos with hot water so you can thaw out your zipper to get your zipper undone at the end of the session.

You can put a tarp down in your car and then sit on that and blast the heat until you thaw out.

(Amy chuckles) I mean, you figure out ways to make it work.

- Surfing on Lake Superior is so dangerous or else it wouldn't be fun, you know?

All of the different variables that are so different than the ocean.

It looks a lot like an ocean wave in spots, but it's so much more deadly, the fresh water is, 'cause of, well, the chemical difference.

We've talked about before how the fresh water drowns you just right away, instantly.

Salt water, you can pump it outta your lungs, people survive maybe eight, 10 minutes after going into the water, but fresh water, you're done right away.

So we gotta be really careful, don't take a mouthful of water and breathe it in 'cause you're gonna be in trouble in the fresh water.

- You can get crashed into the rocks and people break boards there all the time.

So you really have to know what you're doing.

I mean, it's not really a sport for beginner beginners, it's not you're optimal learning place.

- My first experience surfing in Lake Superior was, I was foolish, okay?

I wore my 3/2 wetsuit with a 3/2 shorty suit over top and I didn't have a hood on, I didn't have gloves on, I had booties on, but I was set up for surfing in California and I figured I could handle it 'cause it's May and we used to go jump in the lake and go swimming in May, you know?

So anyways, it was a radical ice cream headache.

I got hammered three waves under, and that was my first experience in Lake Superior.

I learned my lesson.

(exciting music) ♪ I came from the mud ♪ ♪ There's dirt on my hands ♪ ♪ Strong like a tree ♪ ♪ There's roots where I stand ♪ ♪ Oh, I've been running from the law ♪ ♪ Hope they won't shoot me down soon ♪ (exciting music) ♪ Pacing on a sleepless night ♪ ♪ Try to catch me howling at the moon ♪ (exciting music) ♪ Try to catch me howling at the moon ♪ (exciting music) ♪ Try to catch me howling at the moon ♪ (exciting music) ♪ Try to catch me howling at the moon ♪ (exciting music) ♪ When it rains it pours ♪ ♪ Water's up to my chin ♪ ♪ Won't stop fighting ♪ ♪ To the very end ♪ ♪ Many men try to reach it ♪ ♪ Many men have failed ♪ ♪ Well, if you wanna get to heaven ♪ ♪ You gotta raise a little hell ♪ ♪ And I've been running from the law ♪ ♪ Hope they won't shoot me down soon ♪ (exciting music) ♪ Pacing on a sleepless night ♪ (music swelling) ♪ Howling at the moon ♪ ♪ Will you find me?

♪ (waves crashing gently) - So you have to be vigilant with watching the weather.

It's unlike the ocean, where you get five, six days in a row of surf and open ocean storms that create swell for the coasts.

Here, you have to know when it's gonna happen and yeah, make the time to get up there.

- Lots of folks are curious about Lake Superior, right?

Maybe like I was when I first saw it, I really didn't understand or know that it existed like it does, that there was that huge body of fresh water up there that's 350 miles long, 150 miles wide.

That's a big body of water.

And then to find out it has waves?

- It's a lake, yes, but it's more like an ocean than a lake.

- Waves are generated by the wind.

And in the ocean you just have a whole lot more room to generate those waves.

So there's a concept called fetch, which any decent surfer will tell you about.

- With the wave period, the rough estimate is of wave period, you're right between trough to trough or crest to crest is eight seconds.

Then multiply by three and that's roughly how fast the wave is moving.

It's nice in the summertime and the fall.

Not in the winter 'cause they pull the buoys out, but there's a buoy way, way north, northeast even still of Isle Royale, and so you can see what the height wave period is out there.

Because sometimes at the far north buoy it'll be six second wave period and the wave height will be five feet, and the next one will be an eight second wave period and the wave is nine foot.

And once it gets in closer to us, it's 12 foot and 10 seconds.

So it's just kind of cool to watch all that.

- And the idea is that the longer the distance that the wind blows over the water, the larger the waves will get.

We have mostly shorter period waves in Lake Superior 'cause there just isn't enough room for those waves to form.

The surfers here, when the wind is out of the southwest, they're not bothering getting their wetsuits on.

When a big NorEaster blows in, then they're getting suited up because that wind has been blowing from the Slate Islands up in the northern corner of Lake Superior all the way here, generating enormous, still relatively short period, but relatively tall waves.

The storm that took down the Edmund Fitzgerald, those were 25 foot waves.

(waves crashing) Tides don't have anything to do with wave generation.

- [Interviewer] Okay, good to know!

I had no idea.

- It's okay, it's okay!

I have a PhD in oceanography, I was like, "Ah!"

(interviewer chuckling) I did my undergraduate degrees in physics and math.

I did my PhD at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in physical oceanography, basically applying the laws of physics to studying the oceans.

And I'm now here, using the same oceanographic rules and techniques and equipment to study a very large lake.

- At the Large Lakes Observatory here in Duluth, we have a very diverse group of geologists and physicists and mathematicians, biologists, chemists all thinking about the lake and trying to think of it from a very fundamental standpoint.

- Well, Large Lakes Observatory at UMD is unlike any other institution I know of.

We're here today on board our research vessel, the Blue Heron.

- I've been on a lot of boats in my graduate work and in my career before I came here.

This one's my favorite.

(Dr. Minor chuckles) - The mission of LLO is to study the large lakes of earth.

And that's important because these large lakes are tremendously important reservoirs of fresh water.

Five lakes on the planet contain more than half of earth's surficial, that is surface-accessible fresh water.

Five lakes.

And people sometimes talk about water as the most precious substance on earth, and so what does it mean that that most precious substance on earth is actually located in such a small number of environments, like the one we're on today?

We have our first year graduate students who are taking our course in limnology, and they're using the Blue Heron to collect samples and data for their projects for their coursework.

- Even in a lake like Superior that's blue all the time, there are just so many forms of life out there to discover.

- I mean, the climate change aspect definitely worries me.

Ocean acidification.

I would say what I'm most interested in is the nitrogen cycle.

I think it's very fascinating, it's very complex, and I think that's sort of my niche that I'm most interested in, so that's what I'm looking at today, is nitrogen isotopes.

- When you up your refrigerator, it's four degrees Celsius or around maybe 38 degrees Fahrenheit.

And that's what the lake is below the surface year round is the same temperature as a refrigerator.

As the lake is getting warmer, we're getting more cyanobacteria building up, and that's actually causing blooms.

So part of my lab is trying to study from a genome standpoint, so the DNA standpoint, so that we can have a fingerprint of this organism at this time point and see how it changes over time, and making sure that it's not going toxic, right?

'Cause that really is what we don't want, is it to start producing toxins and then polluting our drinking water and things like that.

- The ecosystem is heavily dependent on the temperature of the lake.

And as we turn that knob, the ecosystem is unbelievably complicated.

- We're seeing changes in ice cover, which change how the ecosystems work, because in the winter, the ice acts as a platform that ice algae can attach to and also helps to stratify the lake and changes how the lake exchanges heat with the atmosphere.

And so by removing that, we're seriously changing the sort of overall plumbing of how the lake works.

- There's a little species called diaferia floating around there.

I'm working on a project with the EPA with my research advisor, and she kind of opened my eyes to the world of sediment and it seems really cool!

(gentle music) - We're still not very good at measuring microplastics, it's a hard analytical challenge, but we're trying our best to get better at it so that we can tell the toxicologists what levels are appropriate to mimic what's going on in the natural environment, 'cause we don't have that knowledge yet.

- There's so many little things that we just don't know about, right?

Mainly because we can't get out year round, the conditions in the wintertime preclude us from getting out there, unless we have enough ice where we can actually walk out next to the fishermen that are out there braving it and actually sample the lake in the wintertime.

And so I think that's one of the other big things, is that for lakes like say Erie or Huron or even Michigan, we have a lot more information about these lakes mainly because we have more access to 'em.

And so Lake Superior has just always been sort of this lake up there that we like to study but we don't like to study at the same time because it's really hard to study.

(Dr. Sheik chuckles) - We are still asking a lot of really basic questions about these lakes because there really hasn't been as much support with regards to resources, by which I mean money, put into understanding the basic properties and behavior of the Great Lakes.

- Huh, that's fascinating.

- Which is a little, I still find a little surprising and sometimes frustrating, but at the same time, it means that there are still some really interesting basic questions.

I'm not working on the fifth decimal point of something, right?

I'm looking at really fundamental behavior, and, in a lot of cases, doing it for the first time.

- So on a practical level, the number one reason people come to Duluth is to see the lake.

The lake really defines us.

- Yeah, no, it always amazes me.

So we live in town, everybody in Duluth has a view of the lake, right?

'Cause it's built on this steep hill.

And it amazes me that I can look out my living room window and watch ocean-going vessels.

Like, "Yeah, I live in the Midwest, but there's a boat that's just getting here from Algeria or something like that."

Sort of amazing.

- One of my favorite things in the morning in the middle of January is coming into work, coming down off the hill, and seeing the sea smoke rising up and you have some ships that are still docked out there waiting to come in, coming into the port, and it's just one of the most beautiful things that you could ever see.

The city wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the lake.

- It's so amazing when you look at historic photos that really aren't from that long ago in Duluth's history where the Canal Park Waterfront District that is now just this bustling major, major hub for visitor activity and locals as well, and at the time it was a junkyard and there were scrapped cars stacked five and six deep touching the water.

They went all the way down the shoreline and they lined the entire area.

And it's just to think that that was the 1970s.

We're not talking 100 years ago that we really didn't know what we had in Lake Superior.

- Duluth definitely went through a pretty difficult time when it came to a lot of the industry closing down.

- It was the early 1990s and Duluth looked a lot different back then.

We had gone through an incredible downsizing as far as population.

We lost an Air Force base, which was about 20,000 residents moving out literally in a very short period of time.

- There's a billboard that said, "The last person out, turn the lights out" as you were leaving Duluth, yep.

So things have definitely changed quite substantially in the last few years.

- And now we see what it means when you turn and pivot and face your lake and your beautiful shoreline, and new businesses were developed and it just spurred this whole explosion of activity.

- When we were looking at opening up a brewery.

when I was in Minneapolis I was looking at basically water chemistry from around all of Minnesota and parts of Wisconsin.

One thing that I realized is that the water here in Duluth is unbelievably soft.

And so there aren't a lot of minerals in it, it's basically a blank slate that you can start with to recreate different styles of water from around the world.

And so I had brewed here in the past and had kind of realized that at that point in time how lucky I was brewing with this water.

And so it was one of the major, major reasons that we decided to move back to Duluth and start a brewery here.

Basically we can recreate different styles of water from around the world by just adding minerals.

That's one of the major reasons we decided to move here.

And Lake Superior has everything to do with that.

(heartwarming music) (lighthearted vocalizing) ♪ Mountains towering again in your mind ♪ ♪ Aren't they the hardest ones to climb?

♪ ♪ Darlin', look how far we've come ♪ ♪ Simply by taking it one step at a time ♪ ♪ Oh, I want you to know ♪ ♪ You're not in this on your own ♪ ♪ Oh, because, darlin' ♪ ♪ I would never let you go ♪ ♪ Oh, and I'm willing to lose ♪ ♪ Anything if I have you ♪ ♪ Darlin', no matter what it takes ♪ ♪ We'll make it through ♪ ♪ No matter what it takes ♪ ♪ We'll make it ♪ (heartwarming music) - I think one thing is how the lake brings so many different parts of a community or a city together.

It's not just about tourism, it's not just about shipping and industry, it's not just about the economy, it's how it is so interconnected.

- We're very lucky here, and so I think it's definitely something that we need to look at protecting.

We can't abuse it.

We just need to respect it for what it is, which is 10% of the world's fresh water.

And so I think we have a definite duty to try to protect it as well as we can.

We are a company that uses a lot of water, and so that's something that we always look at, trying to minimize the amount of water that we use and the type of effluent that we put out and all that stuff, and it's something that we're always working on.

So I think it's something that we definitely need to look at protecting and you have to figure out that balance between use and protection.

- I think we are only at the beginning, not anywhere near the middle or the end.

So when you look ahead and you hear about climate refugees where people are really compelled to consider living in a location that they maybe never even heard of or it wasn't on their radar by any means but it's now their top priority, I think we will continue to see that, I would say in the next five years especially, really, really grow and expand.

- I think it's fascinating that there are going to be those sorts of migration pressures.

The Great Lakes have more water than we know what to do with over the last couple years, and the Southwest is in the midst of the largest drought in the last century.

I actually recently heard from two people, they actually reached out to us at Large Lakes and said, "We've moved here from the San Francisco Bay Area because we have determined that Duluth is a climate refuge."

I think you are gonna see a lot of climate driven migration due primarily to sea level rise.

But there'll be plenty of other driving factors for that sort of thing.

And yeah, Duluth, we have an abundance of fresh water.

We're very lucky here, blessed even, that we have an abundant fresh water resource.

Duluth is not likely to run out of drinking water anytime soon, but that's not to say we don't need to protect it.

It's a renewable resource in the sense that it doesn't go away, it doesn't typically stop being water.

The amount of water on the surface of the planet is not gonna change appreciably, but we can do things to it that makes it still water but not useful to us, right?

And so, you know the saying, "If you add a a teaspoon of wine to a gallon of sewage, you have sewage.

If you add a teaspoon of sewage to a gallon of wine, you have sewage," right?

So we have to be very careful in the sense that it's not something that we can easily, there's no substitute for it.

We can't decide to use something else instead.

And it's very easy to make it not useful for what we need to use it for.

- Global climate change becomes a problem at the local level and that's what we're experiencing here on Lake Superior.

- What we're seeing is summer water temperatures in Lake Superior on the order of three to four degrees Fahrenheit higher than they were 40 years ago, which doesn't sound like a whole lot, but it's one of the fastest warming lakes in the world.

- Lake Superior is warming faster than most lakes on earth despite its big size and despite being four degrees C throughout most of the year.

And so stuff like that is frightening.

- Lake Superior acts in some sense as a model system for a lot of the larger water bodies, the oceans in the world, for example, because it's residence sign, while very long, is about 200 years, while in the ocean it's thousands of years.

And it's also of the scale that we can actually get across it and one boat can measure a lot of places across the lake.

And so we can see things happening here sooner sometimes than in some of the larger bodies of water in terms of what's happening with CO2 interchange with the atmosphere, what's happening with potential acidification issues, what's happening in terms of ecosystem issues.

It's an interesting model that's big enough to be applicable in terms of a lot of the physics to larger water bodies, but small enough to be sampleable, if that makes sense.

- Canary in the coal mine was an expression that I use frequently.

- Because climate change happens on these big timescales and big regional scales, there's very little that we can do in the grand scheme of things right now.

We can always do things like drive less, use less energy, conserve, that will help mitigate that in the future.

But if we're thinking about today, "What can I do to stop that?"

it's kind of this driving train and it's gonna take a while for it to slow down, just in general.

- I like to say, for the kind of work we do, we're writing the user's manual as we're fixing the thing.

- In the right direction, I would say the first step is to try not to use what you don't need.

So carpool if you can.

Be careful about when you're using fossil fuels.

If you're using plastics, don't use single use plastics, use plastics that you can reuse a lot.

Just try to be mindful that everything that we do takes resources and to use those resources wisely.

(calm instrumental music) - Well, I was born in Minneapolis, adopted at six months old, so been here in Two Harbors since I've been six months old.

I grew up right by Betty's Pies area.

I used to play all along the beach and not even realize that that was "Lake Superior, wow!"

I kind of took it for granted, I guess, being that I just grew up there.

Got into music right outta high school or in high school and that kinda led me into the partying days and stuff and a lot of pit parties back here.

Anyway, long story short, I spent a long time in the small town working in the factory and going to the bar for about 30 years.

Drinking and driving, DUIs.

I have four of 'em in my career since I was 16.

I got one right away, and that was way back 1986, one in '92, and then I went to '98, and then it was 2011.

Big stretches in between the last ones because I wasn't drinking and driving very often.

This last one was kind of a, I don't even know what happened, it just ended up being, I needed to have this happen otherwise I wouldn't be where I'm at now.

- [Producer] You kinda hit rock bottom, essentially.

- Yeah, I hit rock bottom.

I was getting drunk three times a day.

Going to the bar in the morning, getting drunk and going home, taking a nap, going back out, going back home.

And walking back and forth 'cause I'm close here.

But yeah, that was one Sunday or something, I'm like, "I gotta drive to Duluth and get some beer or something."

And I don't even know what I was doing, and that wasn't too smart.

Had to go to treatment and had to do my stuff and I had an ankle bracelet during that time of trouble.

So I got to go walk my dog around and get out of the house for a half hour in the morning, half hour at night, and then I grabbed a camera, started going around the point and capturing some stuff.

(compelling music) So that walking the dog during that time, it kind of started something, I think.

And it got to be where I wanted to create a challenge for myself each day of finding a different point of view.

People started wanting some prints, friends and that, and they're like, "Hey, can I buy a print?"

And I'm like, "Wait a minute."

I started asking other friends, "Is this even good enough?"

You know, I can't believe it.

And they're like, "Yeah, sell it," you know?

"You're just as good as anyone else up here."

I had pretty good encouragement.

And I don't think I was at that time because there's a lot of good photographers on the North Shore.

That's one of the things that really drove me into the water, is I didn't see anyone else in there.

And I was able to, I got 39,000 some square miles of Lake Superior to my own almost.

And it's almost like, I don't know, I'm all alone out there.

Sometimes I wish there was other people with me.

But then when I do see someone, I'm fine all alone.

(Christian chuckles) Oh wait, I gotta go agate picking.

There's one right there.

(water splashing) Super shallow.

(water splashing) (relaxed music) I'd say that the photography probably saved my life.

I don't know for sure if I would've got back into trouble and stuff, if I would've took up something else or didn't find this.

It's probably guaranteed 'cause I was bored, and I'm not bored anymore.

I got plenty to do and then some.

'Cause the subject is always brand new.

I can go back to the same spot and get a different point of view every single time.

Even the next minute.

A wave is never gonna be the same and the water's always changing.

You can probably go on a calm day and get the same shots, but the the reflections, the sky, nothing's ever the same.

I'm still looking for the best shot that I can get.

There's some in here that I like and that I could call my best shot, but I don't think I found the best shot yet.

And I just wanna go out and see what happens.

It's fun because there's more and more people following along now, and they like the waves and they love Lake Superior and it's more motivation for me to keep doing what I'm doing.

It's a circle and it's not all about money.

I need the money to keep getting waves, but that's about it.

I wanna be able to keep making waves.

Or making wave pictures.

(Christian chuckles) So right there above "Life is Swell," that's "Framed in Fall."

And that's probably my favorite just because I've been trying to get that lighthouse centered in the curl of a wave, and that one's perfect, especially 'cause all the camera settings were perfect to get the perfect print and we can print that as big as we want.

I had it over on the wall here when I first got it, and the studio wasn't even open, but I'd come out here before I went to bed and the door's not open, all lights were on, I'd just sit in here and look at it before I go to bed.

And I could feel it, and it felt good.

I got that warm feeling in my stomach.

So it does something for me, and apparently it does something for other people, too.

They've explained it like that.

This called "Filtered" right here is the same kind of deal, where the sun's coming up on the right side on the horizon and beating right through that wave that's being formed.

But what's kind of cool is it was just Valentine's Day, so see that little heart there?

There's a heart there, and there's another hear down right here, they say.

(Christian chuckles) People tell me what's in the waves instead of me telling them.

Since 2011 to now 2020, I've grown up a lot.

I mean, my head's been clear and I've been learning.

I missed a lot of time there.

But it's getting better.

(relaxed music fading out) - Left post.

- Cross bar.

- Left post.

- Cross bar.

- Ooh!

- I got cross bar!

- From the time he was little, he's been in the water.

Both his mom and I have put him in.

We started in the Saint Croix River, just playing, that's it.

And then on the Saint Croix, they've got all these, I don't wanna say yachts, that's a little big, but big enough boats where they create enough of a wake that when it hits the little sandbars on the beach, it creates a surfable wave for somebody little like that.

And so from a year old, two years old, I would just put 'em on a little board and push 'em in.

- Right after this, I go and paddle?

- Yeah, where this one is breaking here, you wade over here, time it, then go out and paddle out that way so that you're not riding the peak.

Keep going, buddy, keep going.

Kick, kick, kick, kick.

- [Producer] So, tell me about Surfing Lake Superior.

- It's really fun and sort of dangerous at the same time, and I like danger.

People don't really know that you can surf in Minnesota, so it's awesome that it's like we have that lake to ourselves.

There's not a lot of people we see.

- [Producer] What else do you do for fun?

- Play hockey, scooter, watch videos, play "Fortnite."

Video games, a lot.

- Now, the fun part for me too is the day, the most recent time I took him out there was not huge for me by any stretch, but it was big for him.

And to see him, as dumb as it sounds, to wipe out and just get his ass kicked right?

Sit on the shore, watch a bit, regroup, and then come back out again, it was a cool thing to witness 'Cause I mean, that's really a lot of what it is too, it's the stories that come out of the day.

'Cause you guys have seen surfing.

If you've got, say, 10 hours of film surfing, people in the water, 35 minutes is actually people riding the wave.

The rest is people sitting out there bobbing, talking, hanging out, and the stories and everything that go on as a result or after the fact.

(inspiring music) - Oh, I was so jazzed.

So jazzed to see Caspian out there with his dad.

Holy smokes.

The stoke that Caspian has, that Stefan has shared with him, obviously Caspian's been around his dad talking about the surfing a lot, you know?

And that's where you get it from.

You inherit it from somebody, your parents, your friends, your cousins, somebody like that.

And Caspian's got the stoke.

And I was really impressed to see Caspian paddle out there with his dad on the boogie board and get some waves, and his eyes were just like saucers, big, you know?

And then I talked to him afterwards, and you see that enjoyment that he got.

Yeah, he's hooked.

You know?

He's hooked.

(Erik chuckling) (inspiring music) It's always good to meet those younger guys, whether they're 18 or 10 years old when you're establishing family, establishing a village is what the surf scene is here.

(inspiring music) (music fades) - I love driving from the top of our hill and coming over that cusp, and you just see the lake unfold in this beautiful panoramic vista of color.

And it has so many moods.

It's about the many personalities that the lake has, and it just never gets old.

- [Interviewer] I love that.

That's the moodiness of it.

- It is!

- Very moody.

- She is moody!

Oh hi, little loons!

Yeah, it truly is about the experiences, and it could just be, watching someone paddleboard fascinates me.

Seeing people kayaking, seeing the ships, seeing people just appreciate it makes me happy.

- You asked a minute ago about what I love about being out here and about the lake, and I think it's a really important thing, how deeply people care about and are concerned about this environment.

It's part of the soul of the region.

We need to take special care to be sure this resource is available for the next generation and the generation after that.

- [Dr. Sheik] As climate's changing around the globe, fresh water sources are key and they're vital.

You look at any civilization, they've always had a water source, right?

Because it's such a fundamental necessity for everyday life.

- My ancestors actually lived on the edge of Lake Superior.

My grandmother was Fond du Lac before they labeled them Fond du Lac Native Americans.

And when I'm in the water and feeling that energy of the water and catching that ride, it's like I can reach out and touch my ancestry somewhat.

It's very spiritual for me.

It energizes me, it recenters my soul somewhat to do the surfing and feel that connection, feel that joy of being in the water, overcoming the challenge of the cold whether it's the snow or sleet or rain, or beautiful blue skies I love.

It's captured my heart and a part of me that I feel...

I feel such a connection.

We all give off a natural energy.

Everything, everything living does.

And water is living.

And to be able to get out there and connect with this vast amount of water and feel that power... - [Erik] I think all of us feel some sort of a rejuvenation with it, you know?

There's some sort of a life-giving factor to it, you know?

Well, as it's been said before, we're so much water.

It's getting into that liquid that, (sighs), back to normal.

(Erik chuckles) (gentle heartfelt music) (melodic instrumental music) (music fading out)