Gregory Harrison, who plays Gregory Chase on General Hospital, has had a long and varied acting career in Hollywood. He’s not only gone figuratively swimming with “sharks” (hey, show biz can be tough!), but also literally with the real ones. Or rather, he’s surfed with sharks. The actor recently talked about his love of surfing at a fan gathering that Soap Hub attended.
Gregory Harrison and TV son Josh Swickard took part in a Coastal Entertainment event where the TV father and son chatted about a variety of topics, including their love of travel. Swickard says he hopes to do some more traveling after the arrival of his and wife Lauren Swickard’s second child.
“I’ve always wanted to hike with gorillas in Rwanda,” Swickard shared with fans about his desire to travel to Africa. “There’s a lodge called TAASA Lodge Tanzania that I really want to go to, and also to the Maldives in Australia.”
Harrison was all set to travel about two and a half years ago, but the pandemic shutdown hit the pause button on his vacation plans. “I’ve traveled so much in my life,” said the actor who plays Gregory Chase, who enjoys his passion for surfing. “I’ve surfed in [nearly] everywhere in the world except Greenland and Antarctica. I know coastlines all over the world.”
Harrison had planned to go to Machu Picchu, Peru, for a four-day hike to celebrate a milestone birthday a few years ago. “Unfortunately,” he says, “everything got shut down, and I never went. I’m dying to do it. As soon as I get an opportunity, I’ll be climbing up 17,000 feet.”
Harrison says when he surfs, he prefers “right-handed waves” and that the best place to surf in the world, he feels, is Jeffrey’s Bay in South Africa. “I’ve surfed there three different times, and I’ve made 10 trips to Australia and have surfed all over that continent,” the actor shares.
Swickard queried his TV father if he’d ever encountered while surfing “the man in the gray suit’ AKA a shark! While Harrison moved his family (wife Randi Oakes, who starred on CHiPs and their four children) to Oregon to live away from Hollywood, he says that he has encountered sharks while out on the water.
“I’ve surfed in big waves, cold weather, year-round, and around lots of sharks,” he says. “I saw a guy get hit [by a shark] about 50 feet north of me. Fortunately, [the shark] only bit his board and cut his leash [that tethered him to his surfboard], and he was dragged away before the leash broke. He didn’t get bloodied up. We all got out of the water fast.
“Now that there are drones, we see sharks all the time around us [now],” Harrison says. “I know they’ve always been around us. but they’re out there. We don’t see them unless they come up to the surface, but we can see them from way up high.”
“That’s so cool,” Swickard says about his TV dad’s passion for surfing. “I wish I could do that.”
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