Ben Gravy had already seen what a ferry could do. What he had not seen was a ferry wake that looked like a wave pool barrel.
The New Jersey surfer and YouTuber has spent years searching for waves that most surfers would never think to surf.
River waves, tidal bores, boat wakes, and other unusual forms of moving water have become part of his surfing world.
We could very well say he is the master and guru of all weird and unexpected waves.
But the wave he found in Nova Scotia pushed the idea of ferry surfing into a different category. The field of tube-riding boat-generated wakes.
It was not simply another wave created by a passing boat.
At its best, it was a long, fast, and hollow wave that produced barrels Gravy described as reaching six feet.
And getting one was far from easy. The story began with a ferry. Yes, as it usually starts every Ben Gravy story.
A wave hiding behind The CAT
Gravy and his crew traveled from the northeastern United States to Nova Scotia to chase a wave generated by The CAT, the high-speed ferry that connects Bar Harbor, Maine, with Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.
The ferry crosses the Gulf of Maine in about three and a half hours.
Most passengers would see an enormous wake from the deck; something to put their eyes on to kill time.
But Gravy rarely takes the ferry. He just thinks about it as something that can generate highly appealing waves.
The talented content creator had already surfed one behind his local ferry in New Jersey.
"I just saw a bomb off the back of my local ferry in New Jersey. And I surfed one wave, and I got addicted," Gravy explains in his YouTube video.
That one ride eventually led him to start looking for bigger and better versions of the same phenomenon.
The Nova Scotia wave had already caught his attention earlier in the summer. Gravy and his crew had actually made an initial attempt but had not quite figured it out.
So they came back.
"We're back for round two," Gravy says at the beginning of the September mission.
The goal was no longer simply to find a ferry wake. They already knew the wave existed. Now they wanted to understand it.
The first look was the giveaway
Once The CAT was underway, Gravy and the crew began watching the wake from the ferry.
The scale of the vessel immediately became apparent.
The crew learned that the ship is powered by four large engines, each producing roughly 12,000 horsepower, with jet drives rather than conventional propellers.
From the water, all of that machinery translates into an enormous amount of moving water.
Gravy quickly realized that they were looking at something much more interesting than a typical boat wake.
"What's pretty amazing about being up here is if you look off the back, you can see future bombs," he said. "These will be waves one day."
Then the shape of the wake began to reveal itself.
The crew watched as sections that initially appeared too shallow or disorganized changed shape farther along the line.
"Look, that's too shallow," Gravy says. "But now watch. Watch as this dips out. Look, it's going to be really good."
A few moments later, they had their first major breakthrough.
"So we basically just found a left and a right out of a channel wave at the same exact time," he says.
The crew compared one section to a miniature Teahupoo.
"It was like four-foot Chopes," Gravy says. "Just kept going."
The important discovery was that the ferry was not simply creating a moving lump of water.
Its wake was interacting with the local underwater contours and producing something that behaved much more like a conventional surfer wave.
The problem was figuring out how to ride it.
A wave faster than they thought
The first attempts quickly showed that seeing the wave and riding the wave were two very different things.
After one session, Gravy summed up what they had learned.
"We made the most progress that we've made on this wave yet," he says.
But the biggest discovery was not its size.
"It is as fast as we thought. It's faster, actually."
That meant the jet-ski driver was just as important as the surfer.
Gravy specifically praised Travis Beckmann, who had joined the mission and was responsible for positioning the ski.
"Backman's a hell of a jet ski driver," Gravy says. "He's making it happen."
The crew had to learn where the surfer needed to be, when to accelerate, how close the ski could get to the breaking wave, and how the constantly moving ferry wake interacted with the bottom.
The timing was particularly difficult because the wave was not a normal swell arriving at a beach.
The source of the energy was moving, and the wave itself continued to change as it traveled.
The crew therefore had only a limited opportunity every time the ferry passed.
As Gravy later describes it, they would wake up, prepare for the next run, surf one wave, and then wait for hours before getting another opportunity.
"It feels like Groundhog Day," he says.
"You wake up every day with a 7 a.m. alarm, and all you have to do is get ready and go surf one wave and then wait eight, 10 hours for the next wave."
But each attempt was teaching them something.
From riding the wave to making the barrel
The breakthrough came when the crew realized that the problem was not necessarily getting onto the wave.
It was getting through it.
By this point, Gravy had already managed longer rides. His goal had changed.
"Yesterday, I got the long one, the one we've been looking for on the glider," he explained. "And now we're going for the critical one. We're going for the barrel."
He described the next stage of their understanding in unusually precise terms.
"Now we're back at the ground floor, and we're like, dude, we can actually one, ride it, two, potentially make it."
But even that came with a catch.
The wave was so long and unusual that making the barrel did not necessarily mean simply disappearing behind the curtain and emerging on the shoulder.
"You're riding, you get pulled back into the barrel, then the barrel lets you come out, and you can make it," Gravy explains.
"You would probably go back into the barrel, but it's essentially unmakeable because the wave doesn't end."
That was the problem they had to solve.
And by the final day of the trip, they believed they were close.
Conditions finally lined up
The crew had learned that the wave was extremely sensitive to conditions.
They needed the right tide. They needed light winds. They needed the ferry to produce the wake at the right speed and position.
They also needed to be in the correct place when the wave reached the section they wanted to surf.
Gravy compared the final day's conditions with an earlier session that had produced an unusually good left.
"We have light winds and the closest conditions that we've had to that wave today," he says.
The confidence level had changed dramatically.
"As of last week, I would have paid $1,000 cash if you told me that I was going to get the wave that I got," Gravy says. "But now it's like we're at a different level."
Then the ferry arrived. And the crew went to work.
The ride
Gravy's successful wave begins with a mistake. He jumps off the ski and nose-dives. That could have ended the attempt.
Instead, Beckmann reacts immediately.
"I jumped off the ski and nose-dived, and he picked me back up and put me on in the perfect spot," Gravy later explains.
The positioning was finally right.
Gravy gets into the wave, accelerates down the line, and disappears into the barrel. Then he comes out.
His reaction says almost everything about what had just happened.
"Dude, Travis just got me the best ferry wave of my life."
Then the realization hits him.
"I just got a barrel and made it out."
The crew erupts.
"What the f*** are we talking about?"
"What the f*** just happened?"
"Not real."
"100% not reality."
The wave keeps running.
"It kept going," someone says.
For a crew that had spent days trying to work out whether the barrel was even makeable, the sight was difficult to comprehend.
Gravy could barely put the experience into words.
"I literally don't know what to say except for the fact that the universe is good to me."
A $10,000 wave
The successful ride also put a price on the discovery.
Gravy says he had spent about $10,000 on the research and development required to figure out the wave.
After finally getting the barrel, he decided it had been money well spent.
"Feels like the $10,000 that I spent on research and development for this wave was worth it," he says.
Then he gives the wave its unofficial price tag.
"That was a $10,000 wave."
He also compared what he had just surfed with one of the world's most famous artificial waves.
"Did it not look like Lemoore?" Gravy asks. "It looked like the Kelly Slater wave pool."
The comparison is telling.
The remarkable part of the Canadian ferry wave was not simply that it was big. It was that the wake, combined with the right underwater contours and conditions, could briefly produce a remarkably organized and hollow wave.
The "only" problem for the crew was that they had to learn how to find it.
The successful ride was also about the people who made the mission possible.
He singles out Beckmann, whom he has known for more than 25 years.
"I'm so happy that he was the guy that came on the trip that put me into that wave," Gravy says.
Ferry-wave surfing is a team sport. The surfer cannot simply paddle into the wave and wait for the right section.
The ferry creates the energy, the underwater contours shape it, the timing determines where it breaks, and the jet-ski driver has to put the surfer in position.
One small mistake can end the attempt, and Gravy knows that better than anyone after the trip.
"One minuscule human mistake is what ruined it for me," he says after one of the earlier attempts.
Gravy's final reflection on the mission was characteristically bigger than the wave itself.
"The things that you can imagine inside your head, you can make them up. They can be ridiculous, unreasonable, completely out of control, and you can turn them into reality."
For a surfer who became obsessed with ferry wakes after seeing one bomb behind his local New Jersey ferry, the six-foot barrel in Nova Scotia was the result of taking that idea to its logical extreme.
The wave was there. The hard part was figuring out how to ride it.
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