Remember way back in the day, before Kelly Slater made the wave pool that currently sits on the CT? His first idea was to make a circular pool, ostensibly a never-ending wave. But while that particular iteration of a man-made wave didn’t really come to fruition, it appears that Mother Nature has provided. Ben Gravy, on his eternal search for weird waves, went and found it. But he had to go all the way to Alaska to do so.
Gravy and the crew, which includes fellow weird-waver Blair Conklin, has been spending the last few days taking shelter from rough seas. The various coves and bays along that coastline are not exactly few and far between, but taking shelter is not exactly what they went to Alaska to do. Their captain, a man who knows the ins and outs of the Alaskan coastline, had cooked up a few ideas for the guys, and one of them in particular seemed to be a long shot. He’d seen waves breaking around a moraine — basically dir and rock left behind by a moving glacier — that created a tiny little island.
“We waited for the tide to fill in all day to see what would happen,” Gravy wrote, “and what we witnessed truly astounded us. It created a 360 degree breaking wave zone around the tiny island.”
While they weren’t able to fully round the island on a wave, they did manage to surf about 200 degrees, which is a very good attempt. After surfing it once on a rising tide, they decided they’d go back for second round when the tide was high.
“It was a truly amazing experience,” Gravy continued. “Probably the most fun I’ve had surfing all year!”
