Holland
Lake Michigan
Surf outlook unproven
What the locals know
Written by people who ride here, with their name on it. Nothing hidden — including the rules the record disagrees with.
Everyone
True here whatever you ride.
Get told when Holland turns on
We watch the meters so you don't have to refresh them. Sign up and we'll email you when Holland lines up — and you'll get the 3-day surf outlook on every spot, not just this one.
Ride here yourself? Everything above was written by locals. Sign in and add what you know — it goes up under your name, and the record gets to check it.
The fine print
How the surf call is made, and why you should be sceptical of it
Wind at the spot builds a local wind sea; wind blowing across open water upwind of you sends swell in. We score both, every hour, from the NWS forecast — then throw away the hours that fall outside daylight, because you cannot surf what you cannot see. The window is the run of hours that comes within 20% of the day's best.
What has actually been checked: nine days where someone could tell us what the water really did. On four of those a session time was on record, and the window contained it four times out of four. The day calls landed on six of seven exactly, with one under-call.
What that is not: a validation. Almost every labelled day is a good day — seven 4s and 5s, two middling, and not one day that turned out to be junk. A model that simply called every windy day surfable would score about the same on this sample, and we would not be able to tell. Two of the four window hits also come from days that were used to calibrate it, so they are not clean tests.
We publish it anyway, labelled, because the alternative is sitting on it until it is perfect and it will never get there without days like yours. Sign in and log a session — especially a bad one. A day we called good that turned out flat is worth more to this than ten days we got right.
Spot positions and meters are assigned by a machine, so they can be wrong in ways only someone who rides here would notice.