Unreal. Photo: Ben Gravy // YouTube
A month ago, Ben Gravy made a discovery. It started off as a typical mission for the New Jersey-based YouTuber – a jaunt to Nova Scotia to film some content of his crew scoring rides on a ferry wave. However, in the process, they seem to have found the best ferry wave on Earth – a legitimately ridable barrel that looks like something produced in a wave pool.
The wave in questions is not in Lemoore, or Abu Dhabi, or wherever else the latest manufactured barrel has cropped up. It’s in Canada, and it’s created by the CAT ferry, the ninth-largest car ferry in the world, which runs routes between the Northeastern United States and Nova Scotia. The jet-driven behemoth is powered by four quadruple turbo Rolls-Royce engines that create around 12,000 horsepower each. And makes one hell of a wake.
Though Gravy and company were able to score some rides from the beast the first time around, one glimpse of a picture-perfect barrel that remained unridden had them yearning to return.
Even then, it took some doing to make that vision a reality. After a series of initial attempts, they finally got an inkling that a makeable barrel was at least possible. “Now we’re back at the ground floor and we’re like dude we can actually: 1. ride it, 2. potentially make it – in the sense that you’re riding, you get pulled back into the barrel, then the barrel lets you come out,” said Gravy. “You would probably go back into the barrel, but it’s essentially unmakeable because the wave doesn’t end.”
Then, after all that struggling, it finally happened. In one glorious moment, Gravy legitimately made a barrel that, out of context, nobody would ever believe came from a ferry. “I literally don’t know what to say except for the fact that the universe is good to me,” he said afterwards. “And the things that you can imagine inside your head – you can make them up. They can be ridiculous, unreasonable, completely out of control, and you can turn them into reality.”
“Feels like the $10,000 that I spent on research and development for this wave was worth it,” he added. “That was a $10,000 wave.”
