Not bad for North Dakota. Photo: Ben Gravy // YouTube
Ben Gravy’s career has been built on finding waves in the middle of nowhere. In 2019, he completed a three-year mission to surf a wave in all 50 states. Seven years later, he went worldwide and surfed all seven seas. Recently, things have been a little quieter on the novelty wave front, as he focused on owning a business and surfing his East Coast stomping grounds. However, a recent video posted to his YouTube channel represented a return to form with a strike mission to surf North Dakota, of all places.
Unsurprisingly, surfing a wave in North Dakota has its own set of unique challenges. Above all of those is actually finding when and where it may be breaking. “This is how you get a surf forecast in North Dakota,” explained Gravy as he drove through a windswept prairie. “You have to talk to Dave Werner, NOAA scientist from Bismark, and you have to go on websites and calculate wind, lake depth, fetch distance. It’s not as easy as just going on Surfline and seeing, ‘Oh, it’s going to be three to four and clean today.’ We have to take all the, what they call, ‘raw information,’ put it together, and come up with our best estimate.”
Somehow, all that raw information actually added up to a surfable wave. More than one, in fact. And after multiple lengthy treks across middle America, Gravy emerged having renewed his claim to be the pre-eminent novelty wave hunter.
“We literally imagined that these lakes could have waves on them,” summed up a weary, but satisfied Gravy at the end of the journey. “There’s no evidence, no proof. We had friends help us try to figure out the best place to go, the best time, the best wind, the best direction, and I literally just surfed fully rippable waves in North Dakota, a point break in Montana, and a couple little nugs on Devil’s Lake in North Dakota three days ago. It’s like just one of those things where you can just imagine it and you can just make it happen.”
