Not what you’d expect to find when looking for a ferry wave. Photo: Ben Gravy // YouTube
When you’re out hunting for novelty waves, sometimes you get more than you bargained for. That’s what happened when Ben Gravy and his compatriate Will Boothby sought to ride a ferry wave, only to end up carrying out a full-on rescue of a sailboat crew.
The drama went down in Gravy’s home state of New Jersey, where he, Boothby and Jacob Szekely were filming the latest in a long line of ferry wave videos from the influencer. They’d already captured enough footage for the edit, and, with a storm on the horizon, Ben and Will were about ready to call it a day.
That’s when, out of the corner of his eye, Gravy saw a sailboat. It was clearly not supposed to be where it was, but at first he thought that it had simply broken off from its moorings. With bad weather that was only getting worse, they almost left the craft be to get back to shelter. “Mind you, we’re going through two- to three-foot wind chop, full breaking waves in the Raritan Bay. Sixty mph wind right in our face,” he explained.
Still, the pair felt compelled to investigate, and it was a good thing they did. They arrived on the scene to find absolute chaos: a sailboat being buffeted by rough seas as passengers were literally being thrown overboard. “Imagine pulling up to that sailboat and just being like, ‘Oh my god, these people are going to die,'” continued Gravy. They snapped into action, but things immediately began to go awry. Gravy and Will attempted to tow the boat with a rope they had onboard, but were stymied in their first few attempts. Still, they persisted.
Perhaps the funniest part of the encounter, though, was the fact that Gravy and company briefly considered putting the rescue on pause in order to catch the ferry wave again. “There was actually one point when the [ferry] boat was coming in and me and Will looked at each other and we were like, ‘We got to go get the wave,’ And we actually said to the people on the sailboat, ‘We’ll be right back.’ But we immediately turned around and decided that that was probably a bad idea and we should help these people.”
Luckily, at that point the wayward boaters had freed themselves from the sandbar they had become stuck on and thus were in relative safety. However, a new threat emerged soon after: the hurricane-force winds and waves were now pushing them towards danger.
“It was so intense and the waves were rocking and our boats were smashing together and I like almost lost my fingers trying to tie them off to the Jet Ski,” described Gravy. “Thankfully, eventually we got them tied off and we were able to pull them in before they went and just got washed into the other bulkhead. Me and Will were saying like if we didn’t pull them in, they would have had to make a decision like it’s either us or the sailboat. And they would have had to ditch the sailboat and then hopefully would have made it to the beach after that.”
It was a stroke of luck, or kismet, that Gravy and Boothby were around to rescue the boaters. However, it’s an experience Gravy says he’s not looking to replicate. “Hopefully I don’t have to save anyone else on a sailboat anytime soon, but I’m happy that me and Will were there to do our duty as watermen and save those people,” concluded Gravy.
