If there is a Mount Rushmore of novelty waves, Ben Gravy may have just carved his face onto the cliff face.
The New Jersey surfer, who has built a career chasing everything from river bores to tanker wakes, teamed up with Jacob “Zeke” Szekely for a mission to the Pacific Northwest in search of a ferry wave they had heard rumors about for years. What they found looked less like a boat wake and more like Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch.
The wave was absurd: glassy, ruler-straight and hollow, with the biggest sets pushing toward six feet and opening into legitimate barrels. In the video, Gravy calls it “the biggest and best ferry wave” he had ever seen.
“It’s been an absolutely nuts week pulling together a mission to track down and score the biggest and best ferry wave in history,” Gravy wrote. After struggling to secure jet skis and figure out where the wake would hit the bank, everything finally aligned. “We ended up at the right place at the exact right time.”
That timing is everything with ferry surfing.
A large vessel displaces huge volumes of water as it moves. When that energy reaches shallow water and the right underwater contour, the wake can stand up, organize and peel like a conventional surf wave. Add light wind, the correct tide and a ferry moving at the proper speed, and the result can look unnervingly engineered.
“Did it not look like Lemoore? It looked like the Kelly wave pool,” Gravy said. Considering he spent a small fortune chasing this specific ferry swell, Gravy joked that the cost of the stunt was entirely worth it. “Still cheaper than the Kelly Slater wave!”
Related: This Has To Be The Most Perfect Boat Wake Ever Surfed
Gravy described the conditions as “three to five, light winds, perfect conditions,” adding, “If this spot was on Surfline, it would have gone good to epic.”
But the biggest moments went beyond “good.”
The walls stood up, threw out and produced tubes that looked suspiciously like something designed by hydrodynamic engineers rather than a passing ferry.
“This is definitely the best ferry wave I’ve ever seen,” Gravy said, “and I feel like we’re just scratching the surface.”
For a guy who has spent years surfing waves that shouldn’t exist, that is saying something.
Related: Longest Wave in North America? Surfing a Three-Mile Tidal Bore (Video)
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