Is Surfing Hip?

Lisa Andersen Surfs Better Than You

Killer Cute

Kelly Slater is Just Warming Up

Rebel for Hire

I Believe I Can Fly

A Monster in Half Moon Bay

Mark Foo's Last Ride

Open Throttle

Laird Means Lord

Tahitian Scream

A Webcam for Every Wave

Last Call for Print Media

Taylor Steele Likes it Rough

Searching for the Perfect Phrase

Hollywood Tries Again

Thirty is the New Twenty

Andy Irons' Poetic Fury

The Beast and Beyond

A Dance with the Past

Foam is Dead, Long Live Foam

Nature Gets a Makeover

Surf in a Box

The End of History

The Ride of Your Life

Build the latest high-tech surfboard and you end up with . . . a surfboard. A piece of equipment. Engineered surf is a different story. That humans can alter, improve, and even create the animating force of surfing itself is an idea that has put hardcore surfing futurists into a state of swoon for over 50 years.

By the late 1990s, hundreds of projects for enhanced or artificial surf had been carefully drafted, dozens of scale models made, and a handful of projects were built. None of the really elaborate works had come into being, though. Funding, liability, and environmental concerns, thorny surf-based morality questions—something or another stood in the way, and the breakthrough project was always been just around the corner.

From the beginning, human-crafted waves have separated into two categories. The fully artificial self-contained environment—usually a wavepool—is one. The other involves working with what’s already there; you add or remove or otherwise reconfigure elements along the shoreline to improve an existing break or to create one outright. Civil engineers, hired for industrial-grade harbor and beachfront projects, have been doing this inadvertently for decades. True, a few breaks have been destroyed—surfing environmentalists long waved the bloody flag of Killer Dana, a beautiful headland-fronted Orange County point wave buried in 1967 underneath the new Dana Point Harbor. But on balance, coastal engineering projects have more often broken in the surfer’s favor. Sandbars and channels take shape next to piers. Hot rebound peaks form next to jetties. Waves peel into reef passes that were dynamited open for boat traffic. Sebastian Inlet, Ala Moana, Bay of Plenty, Santa Cruz Harbor, Duranbah—some of the world’s finest breaks are engineering byproducts.

Conversely, nearly all of the dozen or so completed projects actually 

 to produce surfing waves on the coast have underperformed. Work on Pratte’s Reef, the best-known American effort—paid for with settlement money won by Surfrider Foundation against a Los Angeles-area Chevron oil refinery—began in late 2000. Two hundred geotextile sandbags, each weighing thirteen tons, were crane-dropped into position off an urbanized strip of Los Angeles County beach called El Segundo. The results were embarrassing. Larger waves broke out past the sandbags; medium-sized waves warbled slightly as they passed by; smaller waves didn’t respond to the sandbags at all. In less than a year, Pratte's Reef was deemed a failure: the reef didn’t cover enough acreage; the bags were too far inshore and not stacked high enough. Adding insult to injury, the cloth material began to tear and sand leaked out. None of the few hundred thousand wave-riders living within an hour’s drive of Pratte’s Reef considered it a surf break. In 2008, after $850,000 in literally sunken costs, the bags were removed.

A bigger and better-designed sandbag reef was installed in 2000 at a place called Narrowneck on Queensland’s Gold Coast. Initially, this one was a qualified success. Wave quality improved but was hardly rendered perfect, and again there were problems with the bags falling apart. In 2019, a surfing website called Swellnet.com reported that Narrowneck was a "misshapen and ineffective reef."

It was more or less the same at New Zealand’s Mount Reef, and a place called Cable Station, near Perth. High expectations followed by mixed or disappointing results, followed by finger-pointing.

Meanwhile, back in southern Queensland, world pro tour CEO Wayne Bartholomew helped convince state government officials to take the sand from a rivermouth dredging project, pipe it around nearby Tweed Head, and aim it downcoast. This was risky. Breaks that would be affected included Kirra Point—already known as one of the world's best waves. But the project went forward, and by 2001 an enormous tract of fine-grain rivermouth sand had filled into the designated two-mile zone, creating an absurdly long wave that the Australian surf press immediately named “Superbank.” A world pro tour contest was held there, and 

 magazine named it one of the ten best waves in the world.

On the other hand, as feared, Kirra was and three other popular breaks were either compromised or erased. Furthermore, the Superbank crowd ranged from thick to impenetrable. As Australian surf journalist Tim Baker noted, “Superbank is capable of producing mile-long rides, multiple ten-second barrels, and the kind of peak surfing experience fantasies are made of. Except it’s almost impossible to go more than fifty feet without being dropped in on.” As many as 800 people have been counted in the lineup. By 2007, most of the top Gold Coast surfers—including Mick Fanning, Joel Parkinson, and even Wayne Bartholomew—were campaigning to redirect the piped-in sand, allow Superbank to wash away, and do what was necessary to restore Kirra.

If nothing else, the Superbank experiment proved that sand placement alone—not artificial reefs—could be used to great wave-crafting effect. The mistake, as a lot of local surfers viewed it, was in using the technology on a piece of coast that, in terms of surfable waves, needed no adjusting.

The postmortems on projects designed to make waves were almost all gloomy. Fingers were pointed, blame was cast. Designers often pointed out that the finished project ended up smaller than originally planned, and in at least one case builders were accused of incorrectly positioning segments of reef. Funding always came up short. Mount Reef cost $1.2 million, for example—about one-tenth the budget for rebuilding Huntington Pier in the early '90s.

The deeper truth, though, was that the science and theory behind all the projects were no longer looking all that solid. “It’s like anything else in nature,” Surfrider Foundation environmental director Chad Nelson said in 2006. “You start manipulating it, and you don’t know exactly what the end result will be. After you’ve taken the science as far as it can go—it’s still just a structure out there. It might work in some places. It might not work in others.” Surfrider eventually turned against the idea of altering the coast to produce surfing waves. While all those piers, jetties, and harbors had accidentally created a lot of primo surf, coastal development in general remained a huge environmental despoiler. If surfers were in the business of coastal engineering, Surfrider reasoned, correctly, that weakened their own moral argument when opposing non-surf-related projects.

Meanwhile, there were potential liability issues, especially in America. “Someone, eventually, is going to faceplant hard on a reef built by the state,” 

 magazine’s environmental editor Marcus Sanders wrote in 2002, “and then go looking for a big fat court-ordered payoff.”

None of these real or potential setbacks were enough to put off the true believers, many of whom attended one or more of the Artificial Surfing Reef Symposium events, held five times between 1997 and 2006. It was hard to come out of one of these cheerful semi-scholarly confabs, with their earnest keynote speakers, presentations, and panel discussions, and not be at least a temporary convert to the idea that designed surf could be a force for good. Yes, there are environmental concerns and liability issues. But humankind’s coastal tinkering—mostly by accident, occasionally by design—has resulted in a huge net gain for surfers.

Further, once in place, what’s changed is unseen. Surfers don’t think about the provenance of their reefs and sandbars, including the engineered ones. The fundamentals for evaluating a good break are no different at Superbank or Ala Moana than they are at Jeffreys or Padang, or any other naturally-occurring break. If the surf is good and you're in the thick of it, picking off wave after wave, distinctions will not be made if thanks are due to God, Buddha, or the Army Corps of Engineers. Take what you can and be happy.

Pratte's Reef was made up 200 geotextile sandbags, each weighing 12 tons. Wave warbled slightly as they passed by. Then the bags tore open and sand leaked out. It was a monumental failure.

Chapter: 8

The Ride of Your Life

Nature Gets a Makeover

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