Lake Erie Gale (day 4)

As we had poor colour on our drives up north yesterday, we thought we give the area to the south a go for today's trip. After a brief stop to pick up Luc, Mike's son, we started up the escarpment and started looking for spots of colour. It was not long before we realized that this area wasn’t any better.

We continued driving south trying various side roads hoping for a bit of colour. We did spot small patches but they were generally around homes or encumbered by power lines. So we kept driving and before long we realized we were getting close to Lake Erie. We were only a few kilometers away from a small residential area named Lowbanks. Mike had often heard of the area growing up as we were also close to his childhood home, but he had never been there. So we thought we would check out the area and hope we would find some waves in the high winds.

We reached the narrow road that runs along the shore and we immediately saw waves breaking over the breakwaters. With the high winds it was quite spectacular. We parked and took a little while to enjoy the high winds and gather photos of the surf. We drove east along the road to a small park where we met a chap who was getting ready to do some wind surfing. We decided to park and walk to the beach to gather a few more photos. There we felt the full impact of the wind, it was incredibly strong, blowing us over and spitting sand and water into the air. We did manage a number of shots but holding the telephoto lens steady was virtually impossible. We then slowly followed along the beach to where the windsurfers were. On rounding the point we immediately entered a wind shadow and there we stayed to watch two chaps out on the water. They were having a terrible time trying to get into position. After many tries one of them finally got up and had a few second run before he fell again. As we were starting to get cold, we returned to the car and set off of the nearest town for lunch.