MOUNTAIN LIFE - Blue Mountains | Fall 2017

FALL 2017 ML BLUE 49 words :: Colin Field Most people willing to get into the Great Lakes for a couple of waves in mid-winter are males. Not surprisingly. But there are a few females also up for it. Helene Alegre is one of those women. She’s one of the originals. And yeah we all think the Great Lakes surfing types are nuts: suiting up in 5-9mm neoprene, jumping off ice-shelves into the water and risking serious brainfreeze all in the name of surf. But don’t call Alegre insane; she’ll make you feel like the idiot. “It’s funny because people always see pictures of days when it’s windy, it’s cold, people are bundled up, and they always tell us, ‘you guys are crazy!’ But I think, we’d be crazy not to,” she says. “You have this amazing opportunity to do something that you’re so passionate about that not a lot of people do. And let’s face it, we’re not all born in Hawaii and we can’t all live there. So life doesn’t always give you exactly what you want, but it’s up to you to make the opportunities and make what you want of it. So I have the opportunity to go do my favourite activity in one of our biggest lakes. Why wouldn’t I go?” For Alegre, seeing lemons only equals lemonade. Her beginning in the surf world is a similar story. Born and raised in Sudbury, she always wanted to surf. She spent a lot of time on Manitoulin Island. “My dad had a windsurfing board and I would always beg him to drive the boat and pull me behind on this big surfboard,” she recalls. “I would paddle around on it.” “In university I went to BC because I wanted to learn to surf and Tofino was the only place I knew you could do it at the time. This was nine years ago. I was doing a tour of Vancouver Island and was only supposed to spend two or three days in Tofino, but I cancelled everything. I spent two weeks basically camping on the beach. I was totally hooked. Then when I came home, I didn’t know you could surf the lakes, so I started doing surf trips whenever I could.” For the next couple of years, she lived on a diet of macaroni and cheese and rice so she could afford to go on surf trips to places like Mexico and the Dominican Republic. Then she remembered Manitoulin. “My dad had a fishing boat and there were days when the waves were so bad none of the boats could go out. And I thought, ‘I wonder if you could surf those waves?’ I started looking at bathymetric maps of the area and tried to figure out where there were elevation changes that could make a surfable wave. I just started driving out there, checking the forecasts and the wind and next thing you know I started surfing there. There was no one surfing out there. I would have a friend that would come with me. She would tag along for the adventure.” That was seven years ago. Before Helene realized there were other people surfing on the Lakes. Before she’d found the virtual community Freshcoast (freshcoastsurf.net). “Freshcoast is like a Facebook for surfers on the Lakes,” she THE FRESH COAST SURFING HELENE ALEGRE ON DISCOVERING GREAT LAKES SURFING & THE CHALLENGE OF FINDING OTHER WOMEN TO SURF WITH COURTESY HELENE ALEGRE