Mini J-Bay? If you’re a glass half-full kinda guy, sure. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
Ben Gravy was recently in Hawaii. It’s an annual trip that he takes — and one that you should too, if you can swing it — on his lifelong hunt for waves. The problem with going to Hawaii, however, is that in order to go there for vacation, you need to leave there to go back home. And home is not as good as Hawaii, at least when it comes to waves. But vacations have to come to an end, so Ben Gravy had to go home to New Jersey, a place not exactly traveled to for its waves.
But wait! There are, in fact, waves in New Jersey. Cold waves, yes. But good waves? Yes, as well. “Stoked to get a Mini J-Bay (south swell) here in New Jersey right in my backyard,” Gravy wrote. “It’s been a weird hurricane season and winter storm season for waves around these parts.”
Things in surfing don’t always go according to plan. If the forecast says it’ll be a certain size, the forecast will be wrong. Most of them are little more than an indicator of what the conditions will really be like, but an indicator is better than nothing. So when Ben awoke to forecast that looked really, really good, he was cautiously optimistic. And he was right to be.
When the arrived, it was bad. Blown out wind slop hammered the freezing New Jersey coastline. But as the sun rose (behind the clouds), things cleaned up. It cleaned up enough that Ben Gravy called it a “mini J-Bay.” Which might be a bit hyperbolic, but hey, if you showed up at your local spot and found waves like these with no one out, you’d be stoked.
Afterwards, they headed to Surf Expo in Florida and wandered around for awhile. Not as fun as surfing, but interesting nonetheless, if you’re into that sort of thing.
