The complete story of the time a monster truck drove across the Currituck Sound

In 1994, someone asked if Dennis Anderson could bring Grave Digger to a July 4th celebration on the Outer Banks. Dennis said he could drive it there. Over the water. The rest is history.

Grave Digger driving across the Currituck Sound on July 4, 1994.

At precisely 10:28 a.m on July 4, 1994, Dennis Anderson drove up to the Poplar Branch Landing boat ramp in Currituck County to attempt something that hadn’t been tried before or since. With a rev of the engine, he drove Grave Digger—a monster truck with five-and-a-half-foot-tall tires—down into the water. It began to float.

Thus began a seven hour journey across the Currituck Sound. It was a legendary voyage that was thrown together on a whim, and it’s somehow never been properly memorialized in the 30 years since. But yes, to celebrate Independence Day, a world-famous monster truck once swam its way across seven miles of open water, inspired a flotilla of Outer Banks fishermen and tourists to tag along, almost got stuck, had to pull off an oil change in the middle of the sound, and rolled up on the other side to a hero’s welcome.

To get the real story behind the greatest North Carolina stunt that most people have never heard of, I talked to Anderson, Grave Digger’s creator and the man behind the wheel on that day. This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

---

RABBIT HOLE: How did this come about?

DENNIS ANDERSON, DRIVER/OWNER OF GRAVE DIGGER: We were talking with someone from the county. I think his name might have been Larry. He was talking about something at the Whalehead Club in Corolla where they were gonna have vendors all set up [for July 4th]. He said it'd be cool to have a truck over there. I said, Yeah, I can get it over there. I can drive it right across the Currituck Sound. He said, Drive it across the sound? Are you joking? I said, No, it'll actually float. And really, I was joking with him, but he goes, God, that would be awesome. So then we just kind of brainstormed it from that point.

RABBIT HOLE: I obviously don't understand the physics of driving a monster truck like you do. How do you know it’s gonna float? Or that it’s not gonna tip over?

ANDERSON: Well, we really didn't know it would float until I was in Puerto Rico one time, and I just backed it in a lagoon, and it was floating around. But it will tip over. If you were to run up on a sand bar with two wheels on one side and, say, the other side was 10 feet deep, it would push the top of those tires down. It's kind of like taking a beach ball or a volleyball and pushing it down in the water. It wants to flip out from underneath you. Well, that's what that truck would do. We have turned one upside down in the water. We ran into a drop off and the wheels went down. The truck floated upside down.

RABBIT HOLE: How quickly did this all come about?

ANDERSON: It was like 10 days. Two days after I talked with the guy from the county, I hadn't even gotten started. Then reality started setting in and I was like, oh my God. This is gonna be a lot, man. It's a big chore. Plus, what if I get out there and this thing sinks or I lose one of my trucks in the Currituck Sound? That might not be good.

So we started making the swim truck. At the time I had eight people maintaining a team of six monster trucks at my shop over in Poplar Branch [a few miles from the Outer Banks]. I pulled off four guys off and told them what we were doing. And they're like, oh my God, you gotta be kidding me. I'm like, nope, we're gonna make it happen. So we made a mess. It looked like a plane crash in the shop.

Basically, I took one of my competition trucks that had a steel body. It was one of the original 1950 Chevy panel trucks. I took it off of a competition chassis and I had this other little mud truck-type chassis that was built different. I had a set of axles underneath of it that were a little cheaper than my competition axles. Nobody looking at it would know the difference. Also, we had a different motor, because the Grave Digger competition truck had a motor in the back. Well, I put the motor in the front and then I put a brand new floorboard in it with carpet and seats in the back so I could ride people with me. I put KC lights on it with a big, old school longboard on it just to be funny.

RABBIT HOLE: Was there concern? Did people think you’re gonna sink, or that you were gonna mess with wildlife?

ANDERSON: Yeah, it was all of that. The marine fishery people and the Coast Guard were watching us. They were talking about us tearing up the grass, or messing with spawning beds for fish, or oil leaking out. So we put in brand new seals. We put this waterproof, I don't know, helicopter grease or something that was environmentally safe. We packed our gear cases with that. We didn't want a film of oil coming out of anything that was submerged in the water because they were there checking us.

RABBIT HOLE: So on July 4th, 1994, you put in. What was that like? I have this image of some guy that's going out there to put his boat in to go fishing or something like that, and he’s looking over and there's a monster truck coming down the ramp ahead of him.

ANDERSON: That's exactly how it was. I wanted to use the boat ramp at first and then the marine fishery people came over and told me not to drive it on the boat ramp because I was gonna destroy it, which wasn't true. At first they said you can't do it because it’s not a boat. They made me get boat numbers on it. It was a registered vessel. It had to have a throw ring, a horn, a whistle, and everything that a boat has to have.

Grave Digger near the Poplar Branch Landing boat ramp, about to drive into the Currituck Sound.

So anyway, I ended up going off of somebody's property right by my mom and dad's house and drove gradually down into the sound. I knew the waters. I knew there was no sheer hard drop off other than through the narrows. That's probably the deepest part of the sound over there and it's 30-some feet deep. We could have capsized it over there.

We did a live remote [with the local radio station WCXL]. They broadcast live play-by-play from the back of the truck. People had to guess how long it was gonna take me to cross the sound. And I honestly figured that I would get there in about 2.5 or 3 hours. We went kind of catty-corner from Popular Branch Landing to the Whalehead Club mansion over by the Currituck Lighthouse.

There were a lot of people coming by in boats that were startled. They didn't know what was happening, because the only way you would hear about it was from word of mouth or from the radio. I just remember people coming by in a boat and circling back around and looking like, what the hell is that? It’s a 1950 Chevy panel truck with monster truck tires on it paddling across the Currituck Sound.

Grave Digger in the Currituck Sound, which is only 5 to 12 feet deep in most places. The truck floated, and didn’t have much contact with the bottom.

I got a couple of miles offshore and started losing oil pressure. The motor started clicking. We pulled the dip stick out. The crank case was full of gas. So we changed the oil as the truck is floating in the water.

RABBIT HOLE: Why did you have to change the oil? What issue were you trying to fix?

ANDERSON: It was because of something we didn't catch at the shop because we were in such a big hurry. We’d take a motor out of a pickup truck and put it in into this monster truck at the last minute because the regular motor had a cracked head and a blown head gasket that would cause it to run hot. We couldn't make the journey with it. You could only run it about 15 minutes and then the thing was steaming all the water out of the radiator. So that's why we switched the motor.

We should have put fresh oil in [the new motor] to start out. But the oil had been diluted with gasoline because of carburetor was overflowing with gas, which got into the crank case. The oil was really thin, which will make the motor start knocking and kicking. It would have seized up because of lack of lubrication.

Anyway, I'm on a shoal, so the water is just about chest deep, but the truck is still floating. And I had one of my workers from the shop there. I said, whatever you do, do not drop the oil plug. But he's kind of a guy that was always fumbling tools and stuff. So he screws that plug out. We had a five gallon bucket to catch the oil, but the plug went overboard.

It falls down and it goes and hits the bottom. Plus, we don't have oil on the truck to change it back. So I had a boat run someone back to the shore, get dropped off, get in a pickup, run to the shop, and bring me five quarts of oil. But we don't have an old plug. There was a local crab boat that was running back and forth with me. So I said, Ricky, give me that mop right there. I had a big pocket knife on me, and I whittled down the mop handle into a wooden plug and stuck it in that oil pan. I screwed it in, and once we put oil in it, it kind of soaked up. We finally got it all going again. Oh my God, man. What a relief.

Dennis Anderson behind the wheel of Grave Digger as it undergoes engine trouble in the Currituck Sound.

RABBIT HOLE: But you’re still not going very fast.

ANDERSON: It was just taking so long because of the current and the way the wind was blowing. Plus, the thing wouldn't run more than like a mile an hour.

The tires were actually a little over halfway submerged into the water. The only propulsion that you had was the cleat on the tire, which was only about two inches tall. So if you spun it real fast, it would make whitewater, but it wouldn't go faster. It didn't make any difference if I paddled the tires at 1,500 RPM or 5,000 RPM.

So we had to basically run it at a high idle. It was like if your car was moving along in a parking lot or something at 15 miles an hour. But if you put it in the water, it slowed down to a mile-and-a-half an hour. I was thinking, God, man, this is taking so long. Everybody's gonna get tired of waiting. There's not gonna be anybody there. So I said, well, I'm gonna go in between some islands and run on some shoals in shallow water and try to make up time. So I got between Mossy Island and Goat Island. It wasn’t really a short cut. It was kind of a long cut. But I thought if I could get on the bottom, I could have gone 5 or 10 miles an hour.

Well, we end up getting into the marshy, mucky bottom and the truck actually gets stuck. Everybody else that was in the truck was like, oh my God, what are we gonna do now? So I just put the thing in reverse and I start sawing the steering wheel back and forth. And they said, man, we're not doing anything. I said, yes we are, we're kicking all the mud out, and then it’ll float. We started moving, but I had to fight that thing for a good 45 minutes to get it out. After that, I stayed in deep water to keep it floating.

Grave Digger, approaching shore.

We get cruising along, and more boats were coming around. There were almost 60 out there at one point. Everybody was partying and having fun. I was just trying to keep a clear head and good composure on what I was doing. So I really wasn't having fun. We had an aluminum gearbox that whined so loud. It’s like riding on a bulldozer with all the gears grinding. So it was not really that pleasant, but you stick your head out the window and it was breezing and people waving and all that. We were just showboating.

I got probably about half-a-mile offshore, and I looked at the bank, and it was covered in people. I was like, oh my God man, there's still a big, huge crowd here. We crawled up out of the water and we got all the seaweed hanging on the axles. Everybody kinda cheered us on and then we just had a big celebration for the rest of the night. Shot off fireworks. All that good stuff.

Some 15,000 people at the Whalehead Club in Corolla greeted Grave Digger as it came ashore at 5:34 p.m. on July 4, 1994.

RABBIT HOLE: Have you ever thought about doing this again?

ANDERSON: We were going to do it again. My son Adam was just a little kid back then when we did it in 1994. A few years ago, we were gonna have a swim truck challenge with the Diesel Brothers from out of Salt Lake City. They were on the Discovery Channel. Adam was going to build a swim truck. And then I was going to take the original swim truck, and we were all going to go across the Currituck Sound to see who could get to the other side first. Adam wanted to break my record for speed and distance because he wanted to go through the sound, go down Lighthouse Road, then he wanted to go into the ocean and swim back to Kill Devil Hills. The Discovery Channel was gonna be involved, but the scheduling didn’t work.

I think we need to do it again. But my kids need to do it now. Maybe in 20 years, I'll be in a wheelchair, watching the grandkids do it.

The original 1994 swim truck is still on display at Digger’s Dungeon, just off of Highway 158 in Poplar Branch. Special thanks to Sam Walker, and to the Anderson family for providing the photos for this story.