Watch: The Extended Cut Of Dylan Graves’ Kimberly Corpse Hunter

“Don’t go anywhere near it. It’s a boat killer. Something to be avoided.”

That was the warning passed on to Dylan Graves and Anthony Walsh about a tidal rapid in remote Australia, after locals caught wind that the crew were sniffing around, potentially planning to surf it.

Complete obedience to instructions is generally a trait reserved for children, so naturally, they ignored the advice. Their subsequent YouTube upload documenting the attempt has since ticked past one million views. 

The wave, if you can call it that, had never been surfed before, for fairly obvious reasons.

It possesses the unnerving visual quality of something that should not exist in nature. The water itself appears oddly static, smooth as poured resin, not a wrinkle on its surface. Mesmerising. 

Imagine a wavepool designed in a parallel universe where the engineer was instructed to make it as unsettling as possible. Something dreamt up during a particularly unpleasant acid trip, where familiar objects retain their names but are no longer bound to physics. A wave reflected through a carnival mirror, stretched and warped until its proportions no longer make sense.

Kind of like the creature from The Substance — Margaret Qualley beauty, curdling into horror.

Or simply, something created by malicious AI.

“It was the most amount of water I’ve ever seen moving, anywhere,” says Dylan, before towing Walshy into the middle of it. 

After making the first one, Anthony comes off the back of the second, goes under, and doesn’t get a breath into his mouth for 38 seconds.

“I was fully freaking out because I didn’t see him for what felt like a couple of minutes,” says Dylan. “Not only am I not seeing him, but his board was under the entire time. There was no tombstoning board. He just disappeared without a trace. I was like, what the fuck happened? Like, is he trapped? What’s going on?” 

Eventually, the water gives him back, but only after holding him long enough to kill the average surfer several times over.

The trip ends, improbably, with everyone still breathing, and Dylan’s already talking about going back.

“As far as safety goes, I’d probably do everything differently,” he admits. “One ski was definitely not enough. I would want to have three skis. If we flipped the ski we had, we would’ve been done for. And I wouldn’t really want to be floating around out there for too long with all the big creatures swimming around. I’d definitely be even more nervous now than I was going the first time, because we didn’t really know what we were getting into. And now we’re fully aware of how nuts it is out there.” 

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Dylan says he’s still sitting on about half the footage from the first trip — the rest of it being released today. Given the first easily cracked a milly on the Tube, it’s a worthy subject to double-down on. YouTube is, by his own admission, his main source of income.

“YouTube’s my main sponsor,” he says. “What I make off each video ends up being more than I make from any one sponsor.”

A strange job description for a 40-year-old Puerto Rican from Weird Waves fame, but not exactly an unusual one anymore.

“What I’m trying to do is what we used to do on magazine trips,” he says. “Just turn it into a video. Writing an article, but with footage. Each trip still feels like that to me.”

Watch the extended cut of Dylan and Anthony’s trip into crocodile country above.