Every surf trip, there’s the possibility of getting skunked. But those odds rise exponentially when what you’re chasing isn’t just a few good waves at a known location. Like, for example, when Ben Gravy invited Blair Conklin out to Alaska’s Kenai Fjords. The objective wasn’t scoring a good swell. It was to be at the right place at the right time and hope they’d be in position to swing into a wave formed by a calving glacier. Oddly specific, right?
Making the trek from Orange County, where Blair lives and surfs, to Alaska for an opportunity that may or may not come to fruition is a big gamble. And unsurprisingly, Blair almost went home empty handed. He’d spent more than two days without scoring the glacier wave he’d come out for and the boat was set to turn around and call it quits.
“Just when I had given up on my pursuit to ride a glacier wave we witnessed the largest calving event we had seen in the two-and-a-half days we had spent there,” he says.
The resulting wave wasn’t the typical ride you come back to the beach freaking out over but it was plenty for Blair. Head-to-toe in neoprene, he jumped up and down on the beach, slapped some high-fives, and did exactly what we all do after a great ride, recounting every single detail like it all happened in slow motion. As if the excitement at that point wasn’t entertaining enough, Blair’s face when another part of the glacier starts calving is probably the truest single moment of joy you’ll see from a surf trip. So he grabs his boards and gets right back into the water for another one.
“Definitely the most bizarre wave I’ve ever caught. That’s a special thing to capture,” he says. “Nature truly is just the most powerful thing in life. When it serves something up to you like that…that’s just something special. That one’s gonna be with me for the rest of my life.”
While calving glaciers are common and natural, he also pointed out that the process is impacted by climate change, some of which we can work to try to slow down.
“Other glaciers in the region have receded up to three to six miles in the past 100 years,” he says. “The idea of anthropogenic change in an area so remote is something I struggle with accepting after not seeing another human or boat after a week on the water.”
