If anybody is going to set themselves up with a ridiculous daily to-do list in surfing it’s Ben Gravy. The man once set a life goal of surfing in all 50 states and actually managed to accomplish the life-consuming goal. In a similar wheelhouse — minus just a few miles on the road — was Gravy’s most recent bucket list task in his own home state. With a commitment to having “feet in the sand” by 5:30 in the morning, he set out to surf every single beach town in the state of New Jersey. In one day. That adds up to a total of 43 different locations in the Garden State, according to Gravy’s research.
Gravy started out on the southern end of the state where Cape May touches Delaware Bay with his final destination coming up in Sandy Hook. If you were to make that state-long drive in a single shot that’d constitute around two hours covering 125 miles. With a grand total of 14 hours and 20 minutes of daylight and 43 stops, he was left with an average of 20 minutes to surf in each town. But even then you’d have to account for drive time, so he really had minimal time to get in the water at each spot and actually catch a wave. Pray there were no lulls.
So, with a healthy breakfast of Wawa donuts and no coffee, the crew hit the road before sunrise with a full quiver of soft-tops in the van.
“This is a tall order. Pretty much an impossible mission,” he said before stop number one.
Were the waves actually good on game day? It didn’t really matter, to be honest. Because Gravy got on a single-wave program from the start, running into the water in trunks and getting right out with one under his belt. It was a run and gun that actually pulled off a seemingly impossible task, including a quick dip and a cameo from Rob Kelly early in the morning.
“Every single beach town from Cape May to Sandy Hook was driven to, ran down to, paddled out and surfed in about 15 hours,” he said.
