If your experience is limited to deep water bodies of water, you have a variety of conditions to choose from.

There ARE local conditions which prevail and this is why there ARE a variety of local boat designs to best handle those conditions.

Here is a description of Lake Erie by the Canadian Coast Guard;

Mariners’ Tips

“The wind and waves come up so quickly on Lake Erie that you can go from dead calm one minute to ten foot waves within ten minutes.”

“Erie is kind of our worst case scenario for weather – everything blows up much faster here. Ontario, being much deeper, tends to be much calmer. We’ll have three to four metre waves in Lake Erie whereas in Lake Ontario they’ll only be around one. For small craft that makes a big difference.”
Boating on Lake Erie is not for the faint of heart. Prone to sudden and violent weather changes, including squalls, it is one of the most dangerous lakes in the Great Lakes system. Although the weather is fair and boating conditions are pleasant most of the time, thunderstorms can develop quickly, whipping up large waves.

Although it is larger in area than Lake Ontario, Erie is by far the shallowest Great Lake at an average depth of only 19 m. The gently rising land on either side of Lake Erie routinely channels winds along its east-northeast to west-southwest axis. These prevailing southwesterlies combine with sudden wind shifts to stir up steep waves and cross seas. Funnelling causes winds to be stronger in the east of the lake than they are in the west, but there are also short, steep waves in the western basin (west of Point Pelee) due to the shallowness of the waters and wave-current interaction. The prevailing year-round wind speed is 10-15 kt, but it exceeds 20 kt about 20 percent of the time in summer and over 50 percent of the time in winter.