Winter Surfing in Cook Inlet, Alaska

Winter Surfing in Cook Inlet, Alaska

Photograph by Scott Dickerson

"I would say that surfing up here is not very popular," says Homer, Alaska, local Gart Curtis, seen here rushing back to the truck, with his friend Mike in the distance, after a winter surf session 30 minutes outside of town.
"The conditions are fickle. Weeks can go by without waves. It's rare that
the number of guys in the water exceeds single digits—and we know each other."
Curtis and his friends were navigating large, broken up pieces of ice formed by packed snow on the shore that gets soaked, refrozen, and then broken by the waves and tide. "They are a bit tricky, but it is faster to go along on top of them than to slog and weave through the heavy snow in between," Curtis recalls.
Gearing up to surf in Alaska's biting cold is critical. "You can still feel the cold through the wetsuit, but luckily it's warmer in the water than on the beach. I'm wearing a 6/5/4 wetsuit, with 7mm booties and mitts. I'm also wearing a thermal rashguard and neoprene trunks," Curtis says. "Some guys use battery-powered, heated tops, but I don't have one. And a couple of the guys I surf with put vaseline on their faces to block the wind on the really cold windy days … I might try that sometime."
"Hunting for breaks is a big part of the fun," Curtis says. "Even finding a new sand bar a few hundred yards from a known spot, or a spot suddenly working at a different tide than what worked last season—that's a thrill."
Getting the Shot
“It was just above zero degrees, windy, snowing, and pretty dark outside,” says photographer and surfer Scott Dickerson. “There was no practical way that I could have photographed from the water given the conditions. The current was going much faster than I could swim, and there were large chunks of ice floating through the surf that would have been even more dangerous to me, considering my lack of mobility swimming with the camera.”
The surfers drove along the Alaskan coast, looking for waves that could be surfed at Cook Inlet. While watching his friends attempt to surf, Dickerson fought the extreme weather on the beach. “The beach was a sloped sheet of ice that made it incredibly difficult to get out of the water because it required you to scramble uphill over wet ice between the surging waves,” recalls Dickerson. “I had to be careful to keep the camera lens protected, while also having to run through thigh-deep snow to keep up with Mike and Gart as they drifted down the beach in the strong current.”
Dickerson photographed with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II and a EF24-70mm, f/2.8L lens.