What’s better than a surf shack? A surf shack on wheels. Last fall we linked up with Dylan Graves during a pit stop in New York City after several months on the road chasing waves up and down the east coast for hurricane season in his Dodge Sprinter. Check out his home on the road in our latest Indoek Surf Shack.
Vans team rider Dylan Graves has been making waves ever since his grom days when he was cutting his teeth at home on the Caribbean’s “North Shore” in Isabela, Puerto Rico. Dylan spends most of his time these days in California when he’s not travelling the world on surf trips. This past fall Dylan bought a van and embarked on a two month road trip to chase hurricanes on the east coast – a trip that was unfortunately timed with one of the east coast’s worst hurricane seasons to date. Despite the lack of waves, Dylan made the best of his trip and we were able to link up with him in Brooklyn to check out his surf shack on wheels.
My name is Larry and I’m from Phoenix, Arizona. No, it’s Dylan Graves and I’m from Puerto Rico; and I have a van. I drive in my van and surf.
I’ve always wanted a van. I’ve always just kinda wanted to go wherever I wanted to go and do whatever I want to do. So it’s the vehicle for that. I got it three and half months ago in California off Craigslist. Me and Nolan Hall were looking at a bunch of different vans. He’s has a van – he’s a fellow van owner – and he was trying to help me out. We found this van and I bought it. It’s a 2008 Dodge 2500 Sprinter Van with a V6 engine.
When I was buying the van I didn’t know I would be coming to the east coast yet. This just kind of happened. Once I got the van I was like ‘well, shit, might as well drive over and go try to spend hurricane season to get some waves’. I pitched an idea to Surfing Magazine and they we’re psyched so we just kind of rolled with it and charged over. Got my buddy Dave [Malcolm] to jump in and we drove across and we’ve just been trying to film stuff and surf and do whatever.
It was me and Dave the whole time pretty much and we had different photographers and surfers fly out and meet us along the way and we linked up with a bunch of local guys. We met up with Sterling Spencer in Pensacola and then we drove over to New Smyrna beach and met up with Evan Geiselman. Then we went and surfed Typhoon Lagoon with Evan, Cory Lopez, CJ Hobgood, Kelly Slater and Matt Kechele. Then we charged north. We came to New York and picked up Dylan Goodall. We we’re trying to recruit Balaram [Stack] too, but he hurt his knee so we just grabbed Dylan and went back down south to the Outer Banks. There we met up with Brett Barley, Michael Dumphey and Philip Gould. Then we went back down to Florida and had Corey Wilson with us. After that we pretty much went straight from Florida to NY with a little stop in North Carolina.
Yeah I pretty much sleep in the van every night on this trip. We’d park it in front of our friends’ houses so we’d have access to bathrooms and whatnot and couches for overflow. I was sleeping in the van most of the time by myself and then sometimes if we didn’t have a friend to stay with or we were trying to make it somewhere fast, we’d all sleep in the van on the side of the road. The van has three beds.
We’ve been racking up the miles. On this east coast trip about 7,300. We’ve been on the road for 42 days.
Yesterday [my girlfriend] Batman and I went to the Museum of Natural History. Then we checked out Central Park and drank a bottle of wine. After we had a beer in Times Square. And then we ate Russian food for dinner – some good beat soup. And then we went bowling. I bowled a 53. Batman beat me. She bowled a 72. She was on her game and I was sloppy.
We’re going to go to Canada after New York. We’re just kind of waiting to see what happens with swells first. Hopefully we get one more before we head off. We’re basically just going to stay around the Northeast and hope something pops up and then go surf.
/ Photography & Interview by Drew Innis
A New Englander through and through, Drew grew up in Connecticut / New Hampshire and got over educated in Boston. He also lived on a beach in Southern California for some years. Film, photography, music and literature monopolize his time these days. Drew lives in Brooklyn, NY, eats too many cheeseburgers at the Commodore and hopes to carry on simply one day on a big piece of land by the sea without the computer or YouTube.
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