Lake Rat: From Childhood Passion to a Way of Life

Alex Brost surfed for the first time at the age of 12 off the coast of San Diego. He was immediately hooked.

A few years later he bought a surfboard and headed south—way south.

“I did a study abroad in South America and surfed up the coast from Peru to Equador,” he said. “That’s when I really fell in love with it. When I graduated from college and moved back to Minnesota I found out I could surf in Lake Superior, so I became a Lake Superior surfer.”

In 2008 Brost’s family got a boat. It didn’t take long for the water sports enthusiast to figure out he could catch a wave just about anywhere

“That’s when I got aggressively into wake surfing,” he said.

Brost now owns his own freshwater surfboard manufacturing company. Idol Surfboards custom creates wake boards, kite boards and boards designed for the Great Lakes. Brost added another board to his arsenal this summer when he discovered paddle boarding on—where else—Lake Minnetonka.

“I tried paddle boarding for the first time this summer just because people want me to build them boards,” Brost said. “I thought just floating around on flat water would be kind of boring, but I loved it. It’s a blast.”

Business has been booming since Idol Surfboard’s product launch at last year’s World Wake Surfing Championships, which were on the Mississippi River near downtown Minneapolis.

“It’s been blowing up in a huge way,” Brost said. “The thing I didn’t anticipate was the demand for the standup paddleboards. They have become extremely popular, so right now I’m kind of moving in that direction.”