Dylan Graves And The Slab That Raised Him

Dylan Graves is our favorite novelty merchant. 

The guy has spent a significant portion of his adult life travelling to surf waves that most people wouldn’t compute as rideable, and he conveys the experiences with terrific candor.

Great Lakes windswell, tidal bores, backwash wedges, and questionable lumps of water requiring diagrams and unique risk assessment.

But before Weird Waves, before YouTube became his primary outlet, and before chasing hydrological curiosities became a viable occupation, there was a kid just trying to get barrelled near home. 

His new film, above, is about that place.

“This wave shaped me,” Dylan writes. “It shaped the surfers who came before me, and now it’s shaping a new generation of Puerto Rican chargers.”

The film follows one obliging swell that produced three straight days of surf, bringing several generations of Puerto Rican surfers into the same lineup. Mauro Diaz, Otto Flores, Carlo Cabrero, Manny Valentin, Seba Llompart, Christian Rivera and others share the edit with a younger crew including Mia Calderon and Sage Katz, plus visitors Mason Ho and Robbie Rickard.

There’s plenty of surfing in it, obviously, but the waves are only half the point.

When we spoke to Dylan and filmmaker Dave Malcolm about Weird Waves back in 2019, Dylan’s curiosity about the ecosystems around waves was already obvious. Rather than using travel purely as a vehicle for finding better surf, the series was becoming a way of documenting people who had built entire little surfing cultures around unlikely pieces of moving water. This time, Dylan dissects the ecosystem that shaped him. 

This wave has beaten the shit out of him for decades, and the film depicts a compression of the generational timeline. 

The surfers Dylan once admired are still there, while he sits between them and the younger Puerto Rican crew beginning the same sort of sharp and shallow education.

“I got to watch the guys who inspired me and the young crew coming up surf it side by side,” Dylan writes, “and I knew I wanted to do something special with the footage and photos.”

The video also accompanies a piece Dylan wrote for the latest issue of The Surfer’s Journal, extending the same story into print. Which feels appropriate for a surfer who recently described his YouTube work to us as an extension of the old magazine trip.

“Writing an article, but with footage,” was how Dylan put it.

This one happens to be about the place where he learned the language.

Hit play above.