Ben Gravy was out there. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
If you’re a New Jersey surfer, your shoulders are tired. A powerful Nor’easter hammered the East Coast, whipping up waves, howling winds, and driving rain. Ben Gravy was, as you’d expect, out there.
“It’s not often we get to see 18ft swell come across our buoys here in New Jersey,” Gravy wrote. “So when this does happen we hope to take full advantage of it and squeeze the most tube time out of a Nor’Easter swell like this as we possibly can.”
New Jersey surfers — and all cold weather East Coast surfers, for that matter — are a hardy bunch. It’s not easy to score there, but for those willing to brave the conditions that bring solid waves and capable enough to surf them, it was pretty all-time.
The buoys were reading 18 feet at 11 seconds on the day in question. It was an ENE swell, so Gravy knew there was a lot of potential. Where to make the most of that potential, though, was the problem.
“You never know where that swell’s filtering into,” he said. “You don’t know if it’s actually going to hit the beach, but 18-foot is crazy.”
As it turned out, “crazy” was an apt descriptor. But crazy is as crazy does, as the saying goes, and Ben Gravy got his fill of cold, East Coast wild waves.
