The Last Place You'd Check

While filming for his “Weird Waves” video series, Dylan Graves goes on a seemingly ill-advised mission to hunt quality barrels along the shores of Lake Superior

- Ashtyn Douglas

Last April, Puerto Rican surfer Dylan Graves hopped on a plane to chase down a swell that was predicted to be 10- to 13-feet at 7 seconds. For a veteran storm chaser like Graves, you’d think that means he set offfor a thumping East Coast sandbar or a reef-fringed Caribbean isle able to handle sizeable swell. Instead, Graves’ flight was heading to Minnesota—the shores of Lake Superior, to be exact—over a thousand miles away from the ocean.

For the past couple years, Graves has been sniffing out the weirdest waves on planet earth for his video series “Weird Waves”—including those that exist in rivers or lakes. “I always thought it sounded crazy to fly to the middle of the States and find good waves there,” says Graves. “On paper, that idea sounded really interesting.” So when local lake whisperer Burton Hathaway rang up Graves and told him the mother of all lake swells was about to slam the shores of Lake Superior thanks to Winter Storm Xantos, Graves grabbed his boards and the warmest wetsuit he could find and jumped on a plane.