Just a week ago, Ben Gravy was losing his mind over the “biggest surf ever in New Jersey!” The claim brought plenty of debate to the East Coast surfing masses, with folks jumping into Gravy’s YouTube comments section to hash out important issues…because YouTube.
The question at the center of it all? Just how big was Ben’s wave of the day — an absolute bomb that swallowed him and his soft top whole?
“The waves were so big you would see one coming and by the time you paddled out to it, it’d just be over there, or over there…they would just swing crazy,” he told local news after the madness of winter storm Izzy settled.
Yes, even local Jersey news outlets, including News12 got in on the Gravy big-wave hype: “Some called it a 10-foot wave, while others thought it might have been 15 feet tall. Others thought it might have been 30 feet.” As mentioned, YoutTube is hashing it all out down to the nitty-gritty.
“Surfer for 40 years,” one says. “That is an 18-foot East Coast wave, 15-foot Cali wave, 10-foot Hawaiian. That should cover everything,” clearly missing the fact that nobody from California actually calls it “Cali” if they want to be taken seriously, and any wave by the Hawaiian scale is either two feet or six. Nothing in between, nothing bigger. Ever.
Breaking down how big a wave is or isn’t is one of surfing’s most entertaining pastimes. Gravy’s was a bomb no matter how you cut it up, and he bagged it on a soft top, nonetheless.
“I think people enjoy the discussion,” he says. “Is it the biggest? No. Cuz all the old school guys are claiming ‘Not even close. It was bigger in ’77.’ And then people who might not even know are like ‘That’s a 30-footer!’ And then all of us are like ‘Ehhhh, it’s pretty big. But we don’t really know. You can’t say.'”
And that, ladies and gentleman, is the actual mic drop on any and every debate about a single wave’s size. We don’t really know. We never do.
His final calculation, by the way? Three to four, Hawaiian. Because surfers don’t measure waves by science. We measure them by delusion.
