Ben Gravy does this for the dream. And the waves. But in this case, mostly the dream. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
Ben Gravy has surfed a lot of waves. All sorts of waves, from the river to the ocean to the pool to the ferry. From big to small and everything in between. Novelty waves, though, are his bread and butter. And is there more of a novelty wave than the one produced by a ferry?
In all of his ferry wave chases, Ben Gravy dubbed the one you see here “the best.” Well, the best New York City ferry wave, anyway. There are real waves around New York. Hell, the first million-dollar contest was held there back in 2011. And let us not forget about Montauk. But Ben isn’t all that interested in those waves — at least he wasn’t on this trip, anyway.
Now, this isn’t Ben’s first go-around with NYC. “I’ve tried my luck a few times over the years,” he said. “But I never quite caught the one. I never quite paddled into a wave that felt like a real ride. If you’re a surfer, you know what I’m saying. It’s not that the wave has to be big, but we have to feel the lift. We have to know that we’re not forcing it. The energy of the wave takes us, and we’re just along for the ride.”
A friend of mine has a saying: “If you can see it,” he says, “you can surf it.” This is generally said when we’ve been questioning whether or not a wave is surfable or not, but it applies here, too. Ben, along with a few friends, went looking — and they saw what they were looking for.
Sure, what they saw wasn’t the best wave in the world (it’s closer to the worst wave than it is to the best), but as is the case with most surf trips, the waves are the icing on a cake made up of the experience of looking for them. And cake is good, no matter how thin the icing.
