New Jersey teaches you to make the most of it. Photo: Ben Gravy // YouTube
Every surfer has at least little bit of a masochist in them. Even the most consistent breaks still force their locals to answer to the fickle whims of nature – and the lesser waves we ride require the endurance of near-constant pain and frustration just to score a ride.
Nobody knows that better than Ben Gravy. The king of the novelty wave has become an expert in spinning straw into gold, and he learned that skill in a land where inconsistent surf breeds a unique brand of delusionaly optimistic surfer: New Jersey.
Gravy’s latest video serves as both a celebration of his home state, and an unofficial history of his own career. In it, Ben travels up and down the Garden State coastline, showing off both the mercurial nature of East Coast surf breaks and the reason why they still manage to inspire such devotion.
“Part of the Jersey surfing lifestyle is, in fact, getting denied by your favorite spot,” explains Gravy at one point. “But there’s always something else. Always.”
And at the end of the day, that’s all you need.
“We had the day of all days,” he summed up in the end of the video. “Yes, maybe we didn’t get the best waves ever in New Jersey, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to share an epic day, give you the feeling, give you the lifestyle. We got a novelty wave. We had a high performance session. We had a soft top session. And we made it happen. A beautiful summer day on the Jersey Shore.”
