Impossible to resist.

In the third season of Vans’ Weird Waves series, which is hosted by the Puerto Rican Dylan Graves, we detour into the fundamentally complex world of tanker surfing in Texas, where the wakes of these giant vessels are chased down, wrangled and driven hard into the dirty water.

The almost-forty-year-old Graves, a favourite of BeachGrit,  acts out the drama for our entertainment; his look, the hair falling to his shoulders, the very good but still accessible surfing, the vivacity, creates the cumulative effect of us all longing to be alongside Dylan Graves, chasing tankers.

The skipper of the boat charter which delivers Graves to these waves describes the kick from tanker surfing as similar to crack cocaine.

Totally addictive, totally fucked, I think.

Bring it on fur-ass!

As the undisputed face of novelty wave riding, one can imagine Ben Gravy fuming over not getting the gig for Vans’ delightfully kooky Weird Wave series.

Instead, we get Dylan Graves.

Fair dos: he is a Vans team rider after all, plus he has that kind of late 80s SST records era look – a little bit Minutemen, a little bit Hüsker Dü – that Vans can’t resist mining for all it’s worth.

Not to mention that DIY, pseudo slap-dash zine style aesthetic.

This first episode of the third series is all about night surfing. The absolute highlight: bio-luminescent glowstick waves at Oceanside – Dylan and some buddies carving iridescent lines into tumbling florescent froth.

Blue waves. Blue moons.

Later on, for a split second, a tube lit up from the inside, an ice white curtain against a jet-black backdrop. All very mystical, otherworldly, or “fully sick,” as Dylan puts it.

Have you ever done any night surfing? I have not, at least not intentionally.

"You can almost assume what you think you know about him,” Mason says of Tom Curren, “but don’t even think you know.”

Tom Curren is an almost sixty-year-old three-time world surfing champion with eyes as blue as robin’s eggs whose abilities on guitar are as unorthodox as his manner of living.

Curren hails from Santa Babs on  the central Californian coast and is the son of an evangelist Christian mammy. He rebelled early, enjoying pre-mixed cocktails, when ten, daily marijuana, from the age of thirteen and was married at eighteen. 

Mason Ho, you know from his daily North Shore films, is thirty-two and fond of delivering rough loads.

In this sixteen-minute film by Joe Alani, the pair, along with a pretty blonde T-Girl, make music and garrotte the waves around San Francisco with ropes of come.

Essential.