What other sailors are your biggest influences and why?
I’m influenced by everybody. I love windsurfing and watch what everyone does. My biggest influences are Jason Polakow, Levi Siver, Mark Angulo, and Josh Angulo. Polakow pushes the borders of wave riding with his vertical, charging attacks on big waves. Levi was the first to bring the tricks into powerful lines on the wave. Mark invented almost all the tricks. And Josh has serious style and flow in his riding.
With his Princeton era over Graham is now free to either get a real job or follow his passion and see what happens with his windsurfing career. Right now it looks like he is trying to juggle with both options.
GE: “Windsurfing IS a real job! At the end of last year, I was upset with the windsurfing industry and I started looking for finance jobs in NYC. But after the interviews, I thought “What the hell am I doing? I don’t want to quit windsurfing!” Right now, I’m windsurfing and writing. I’m working on two books – a novel and a collection of short stories, poems, and essays. The first book is set in Guincho, it’s a novel. It’s about two guys that just finished college and they are spending the summer in Portugal before they start work. One of them is a windsurfer, so that is why they chose to go there. They end up getting in trouble with the local mafia and owing a lot of money to different people. I have spent a lot of time there, and I started imagining all the underworlds that go on there. The other book is called ‘A Sailors Almanac’ which is a bunch of short stories about travelling as a windsurfer. Some of them are about sailing and some about stories on the road. I hope to publish them one day but right now they are far away from being finished. Let’s see what happens.”
Thanks Graham.