Danger, ahoy!

Where would we as a culture be without Ben Gravy? The beloved New Jersey vlogger who got hisself sober then became a YouTube sensation has delighted for years. Quite possibly the biggest name in surf, Gravy recently brought his talents to Georgia where he graced the local news with his presence while dropping an absolute bombshell.

Brian Michigan, as fine a name for a local newsman as any, first detailed Gravy’s inspirational story before discussing how the movie star handsome 36-year-old made it his mission to surf each of the 50 United States. “The weirdest thing I can find is the thing that gets me excited to surf,” he gamely declared.

Michigan, asking what’s next, received an answer so ambitious, so shocking, as to upset surfing’s applecart for years to come.

Gravy now plans on surfing every country in the world.

All 195 of them.

It is unclear if he counts Palestine as its own nation so maybe 194 but still.

I would imagine pundits pointing to North Korea as one of the more difficult on the list, but I think that will be a fish in a barrel for Gravy’s brand of ultra-positivity. It might even be thought that the rugged blonde will thaw tense relations between the “hermit kingdom” and the west.

South Sudan will pose some trouble as well as Somalia proper. Afghanistan, certainly. Syria, probably. Iran, while safe, might be a tough visa. I’d encourage him to leave Yemen alone.

Which would you most look forward to conquering? Which would give you cold sweats?

Back when I was a younger man, I used to absolutely love Robert Young Pelton’s guidebook The World’s Most Dangerous Places. Snappy, informative and fun. I think it might be useful for our intrepid Benjamin Gravy as he heads out into the world.

Bon voyage.

"I started to panic..."

The old saying goes “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” but I feel it was coined in a more genteel time. Pre-cancel era. Not taking into account various modern no-nos that we now officially know are, in fact, bad publicity. Diddy business. And whilst the before now universally adored rock n roller Dave Grohl certainly doesn’t fall into the Sean “Puffy” Combs category, today has been a rough one for him.

The Foo Fighters’ frontman, married for 21 years, opened the day declaring, “I’ve recently become the father of a new baby daughter, born outside of my marriage. I plan to be a loving and supportive parent to her. I love my wife and my children, and I am doing everything I can to regain their trust and earn their forgiveness,” he continued. “We’re grateful for your consideration toward all the children involved, as we move forward together.”

Ouch.

And as various medias pounced on storylines etc. a surfing bit from a many moons ago GQ interview wherein the 55-year-old describes a near death surfing experience in Santa Cruz has gone viral.

“I borrow someone’s board—it was someone’s father’s longboard from the 60’s—and it was 14 fucking feet long with no leash, and I just got caught inside,” Grohl explains. “I lost the board up against the cliffs, and I was just caught in a set of waves that seemed to go on for 5 or 10 minutes. I started to panic, like I thought I was going to die, and I knew that if I panicked I probably would, so I kept it cool, and started swimming. That kind of sucked.”

Scary.

Back to the 55-year-old new father storyline, though, a possible silver lining? The world’s greatest surfer Kelly Slater has also just had a baby at 55-years-old and I have to think the two can get together in order to chat old fathering. It might be awkward, seeing as Slater’s son is nameless, but no more awkward than, well, “the current situation.”

Do you, in any case, have advice for Dave Grohl? I’d imagine he could use a little pep.

Cocaine and surfing.

Now, it has long been held that our surfing bubbled up onto this earth in Hawaii or some other idyllic South Pacific archipelago. Warm waters, languid rollers, happy natives enjoying the sun and the sea. A picture easy to conjure with some historical backing. James Cook, for example, sailing into those Sandwich Islands, his chronicler recording how men and women glided upon those sparkling waves.

And then came the extremely controversial book Cocaine + Surfing which claimed that this Sport of Kings sprang from the same earth that gifted us cocaine.

Peru.

Author Chas Smith, a linguist by trade, used Derrida-ian gymnastics to prove that the South American nation, with its stimulating plants and little horses, was, in fact, surfing’s ground zero.

Now, the powerful and royal British Broadcasting Corporation has thrown its hefty weight behind the wild claim. The think piece “The unlikely country that may have invented surfing” begins thusly:

Three-metre-high waves crash onto Playa El Mogote in the northern Peruvian seaside village of Huanchaco. Gazing out into the beach, a mix of locals and international tourists surf in the Pacific, but around a curve in the coastline, the arched prows of caballitos de totora line the beach, their bows pointing towards the ocean. For at least the past 3,500 years, Huanchaco’s fishermen have been using these reed crafts to surf.

Known as tup in Mochica, one of Peru’s extinct Indigenous languages, or caballitos (“little horses”) in Spanish, these ancient crafts are made with tightly tied bundles of totora reeds that grow in freshwater ponds near the coast. Their signature upturned, narrow bow both slices through and pops up over the waves. The Pacific is anything but peaceful here, and in recent years its epic swells have been drawing modern surfers from around the world.

On it goes, introducing pottery art depicting what looks like surfing years before Polynesian references, interviewing local historians and drilling down on the probability of Peruvian surf supremacy.

Or as Smith penned some six years earlier:

I look toward the heavens, toward the Author of my Fate, before bending over to grab my for-sure cracked iPhone and realize I’m standing in front of Huntington Beach’s International Surfing Museum. What are the odds? I mean, that an ‘International Surfing Museum’ exists is weird, sure, but that the dark night of my soul takes me right to it? In the window there is a black-and-white picture of some South American mestizo-looking thing, grinning broadly, riding what appears to be a strange surfboard. Written in bold font it says, ‘Surfing and Peru. 4,000 years.’

I freeze and feel the blood draining from my face. Did surfing actually start in Peru?

Didn’t cocaine?

Brilliant.

As luck would have it, Cocaine + Surfing has just been reprinted.

Purchase and enjoy here.