Photo: Ben Gravy // YouTube
Some surfers will do anything to avoid a lineup. Whether it’s waking up in the pre-dawn darkness, traveling to remote surf breaks, or going out in hostile conditions, crowd-haters will find a way. Recently, YouTuber and freesurfer Ben Gravy took that ethos to the extreme, by chartering a private plane to hunt waves on a remote island.
“It’s one of those trips where you’re not sure if it’s ever gonna happen,” said Gravy at the top of the video. “You hope it happens, but you don’t put any energy into it, because it’s that fickle. It’s that much of a chance and just might not go down.” From there, Gravy and company chucked their boards into a frighteningly small plane and headed “into the abyss to find perfection,” as he quite eloquently put it.
Though the journey was a unique one, it also perfectly captured the magic of going on a surf trip – the sense of adventure, uncertainty, and discovery. “It’s kind of a trip where we don’t really even know if we’re gonna make it until we’re there,” he continued, “so I’m not even going to make any claims. [The pilot] said they’ve turned around multiple times. Weather – different things that have happened to change the course of the trip. Until we’re there and we see it with our own eyes, nothing is for certain, but all I’m going to say is today there’s a chance. There’s a very solid chance.”
In the end, the destination did in fact turn out to be everything he had hoped, but the experience was a reward in and of itself. As Gravy explained, “We’re going to surf an empty wave right now, whether its waist-high or two feet, or overhead, its epic. It’s a score no matter what.”
