Gavin Fregona surfer originally from South Africa.

An article and photographs in the Torontoist - "For Lake Ontario Surfers, Winter is No Obstacle"

Winter in Toronto has its proponents and its detractors—and then there are the surfers, whose relationship with the season falls into a category all its own.

“You gotta be careful. I mean, you can get hypothermia pretty quick,” said Gavin Fregona, a long-time boarder, originally from South Africa, who discovered three years ago what area wave riders have known for decades: Lake Ontario is surfable, year-round.

Yes, the water gets extremely chilly over the course of the winter months, but as long as its phase of matter is still essentially liquid, surfers can be found enjoying swells kicked up by the high winds associated with cold weather.

“Sometimes they get up to seven, eight feet—probably closer to January, when the storms come through,” Fregona told us. We were speaking with him over the phone, from the relative comfort of a downtown apartment. It’s generally acknowledged that the lake’s surf is higher in winter than in summer, but even so it seemed possible that he was exaggerating.

Last Thursday, we drove to a spot along the Scarborough lakeshore whose exact location we promised not to reveal. Our contacts were concerned that wide publicity would cause the area to become crowded with inexperienced surfers. Cold-weather surfing on Lake Ontario can be dangerous, and so it makes a certain amount of sense to create obstacles for first-timers, though how many people would be enticed by the prospect of submerging themselves in water for several hours on a freezing-cold day remains anyone’s guess.

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