Friends-turned-business partners share ‘good vibes only’ through Wakes2U
These three amigos, Ryan Mosley (left), Bryce Murphy, and Eric Cauble, grew up together shredding wakes for fun on Lake LBJ. Now, they do it for a living with Wakes2U. Staff photo by Dakota Morrissiey
Bryce Murphy, Ryan Mosley, and Eric Cauble grew up shredding wakes on Lake LBJ. Now, as adults and small-business owners, they’re still at it.
The three native sons of the Highland Lakes embrace their hometown paradise and share their passion for extreme watersports with anyone willing to come along for the ride.
“I think everybody looks for an escape from their ‘everyday,’ but for us, living here is like a blessing,” Murphy said. “We wake up every day and think, ‘Dude, this is so sick.’”
They’re still young, all in their mid-20s, but they each have over a decade of experience running boats, exploring LBJ, and riding wakes with anything they could get their hands on. They’ve spun all of that into a business, Wakes2U, which allows them to do what they love for a living.
They pass their ample knowledge on to customers looking to dabble in pastimes like wakeboarding and wakesurfing, but the business is really just an extension of the trio’s hardcore yet laid-back lake lifestyle.
“It’s kind of hard to talk about our life on the water without the company surrounding it because it’s not even really work; it’s just our opportunity to get on the water,” Murphy said. “We would have loved to have gotten instruction back in the day and have a guy come out on our boat and teach us to do cool stuff, so we just decided to become those guys.”
The friends got their start in their early teens taking Murphy’s dad’s boat out on LBJ, always following one rule: Don’t go past the 2900 bridge. The iconic bridge acts as a dividing line between the Llano River and the Colorado River, which combine farther downstream to become Lake LBJ.
They spent weekends and summers cruising around their small kingdom on the lake and learning the ropes of tubing, wakeboarding, wakesurfing, bodysurfing, and anything else you could do in a wake.
Murphy boiled it down into simple terms.
“We thought, ‘Girls like to watch guys do flips behind boats, so let’s learn some stuff,’” he said.
The three amigos spent a ton of time together on the water, but they didn’t exactly grow up as neighbors.
Mosley lived in Lakeway, attending Lake Travis High School. Cauble is a full-blooded Marble Falls Mustang. Murphy spent his first two years of high school at Lake Travis and his last two at Marble Falls, becoming the link between his friends. Lake LBJ was the ultimate link between them all.
“We’re just one big happy family out on the water,” Murphy said. “These guys are like my brothers. We don’t consider ourselves friends; we are family.”
As the boys got older, they gained wider access to water and were able to hone their skills. According to Murphy, Lake LBJ wasn’t as crowded as it is now, even a few years ago.
“We used to be able to go out on the lake and never see a soul,” he said. “Now, there aren’t many days you’re going to go out on the water and never see anyone.”
They also grew up playing sports together, mainly football and baseball, but when high school ended, so did the sports. For about a year after graduation, they wondered what they would do next, never giving up on finding a way to be on the lake as much as possible.
Their journey kicked off in 2018 when a Jet Ski plowed into their old boat, leaving them without a ride on the water. They took a leap of faith and bought a fully loaded Tigé with the intent of renting it out to help make the payments.
That initial investment quickly spiraled into a full-time business of teaching people to ride wakes and tour the lake.
“We just thought, ‘How can we be out here every day?’” Murphy said. “We think we’re pretty cool, we think we’re pretty fun, and I thought people would enjoy hanging out with us and letting us show them what we know and love out here.”
Now, six years later, they have three boats, a company car, and a storefront in Marble Falls. They spend the warm months of the year doing what they love on full blast.
“You can literally find something you love to do and make a career out of it,” Murphy said. “We have doctors and lawyers and big-wig businessmen that are like, ‘Dude, I wish I had your job.’”
The young men managed to turn a recreational pastime into something that pays the bills, but that doesn’t mean they’ve sold out.
“I could say it all happened by accident, and, obviously, it didn’t,” Murphy said. “We put in a lot of effort and hard work, but it was just built off of our passion. The fact that we get to live this and experience it every day is unreal. We are super grateful.”
Their passion and positivity make their way of life possible, and that’s summed up perfectly in their three-word motto: Good vibes only.