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

The notion of creating or improving waves along the coast seemed to lose steam in the 2010s, as building waves from the ground up—literally—moved to the fore.

Wavepools were not a new idea. Pools featuring some kind of water-moving feature were built in Germany, England, and Hungary during the first half of the 20th century. In the summer of 1934, the 

 reported on a new Empire Swimming Pool in Wembley, measuring 200' x 60', with "surf-producing machinery." The story continued:

For surf-bathing, there is installed a special plant, the first of its kind in England, housed behind the wall at the deep end. It consists of four hydraulically operated plungers that move up and down in their chambers, and, by way of gratings, send out a wave motion to the main pool . . . building up waves which increase in size until, at the shelving shallow end, bathers may enjoy all the fun and exhilaration of surf-bathing.

Big Surf, America’s first wavepool, located on the desert outskirts of Tempe, Arizona, and powered by a three-story, 70,000-gallon rectangular cistern—the toilet tank as wave-making element—opened in 1969. Although the resulting wave was aimed more toward family recreation, there were set-aside hours for board-riding, and the sport was central to how Big Surf presented itself to the world. The waves gurgling forth from the metal grates beneath the tower were soft-breaking and not especially well-shaped, but were big enough to ride, with enough push to allow for turns and cutbacks. The straight-shot 350-mile distance between Tempe and Orange County—surf media HQ—meant that surf magazines and filmmakers could easily drive in to film and photograph the strange new break. The journey was a lark and a novelty; the visitors had a good time, but didn't take the whole experience very seriously. You rode Big Surf the wave you rode a sandhill, or jumped off the cliff at Waimea Falls. That is, you tried it, had fun, laughed, and went home hoping the waves would be good in the morning.

The wavepool push grew stronger and stranger during the 1980s and '90s. One pool opened in the middle of Pennsylvania Amish country. Another was set in Edmonton, Canada, in the middle of the world’s biggest shopping mall. Japan’s Ocean Dome—the only pool designed to make a tubing wave—was housed in what one surfer called a “

 micro-universe,” with iridescent blue water, a beach made from 600 tons of polished marble chips, various hyper-colorized tropical settings projected onto the dome’s curved walls, and a flame-belching volcano. Most of the new pools held roughly a million gallons of water; the Edmonton monster was nearly triple that. (An Olympic-sized swimming pool, for comparison, holds about 600,000 gallons.)

A few of the pools, like Big Surf, used the tank method to create waves. Most were powered by a row of diesel-fueled hydraulic plungers, which could be synchronized in different ways so as to produce different wave types; the Ocean Dome pool, for example, could throw out a longer right at the pool’s north end, then follow up with three short peak waves at the south end.

None of the new wavepools were designed primarily for stand-up surfing. They were meant to be day-trip attractions, like waterslides, and the idea was simply to put some added movement, and a bit of faux-ocean fantasy, into the pool-going experience. If surfing was allowed, it was done on spongy park-rented boards.

But because wavepool owners all want to pick up a little beach cred, and because the surf industry, as ever, was on the lookout for ways to present the sport to a larger audience, wavepool events involving some of the word’s best surfers were a fairly regular occurrence from the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s. On the outskirts of Cleveland, 

 star Peter Townend night-surfed the Wave at Geauga Lake Amusement Park. Reigning world champion Tom Carroll beat future world champion Derek Ho in the finals in the 1985 World Inland Surfing Championships, held at Wildwater Kingdom in Allentown, Pennsylvania. TV cameramen filmed Kelly Slater’s every move as he rode Disney World’s new Typhoon Lagoon in 1990. When Laird Hamilton flew in from Hawaii to christen the new Mandalay Bay Resort wavepool in Las Vegas, management proudly cranked the dial to “high,” which only sent a blanket of water sluicing up the "beach" then back down. The engines were killed, and two cabana boys waded in to fish out the lounge chairs floating in the lineup.

None of these designer-surf embarrassments, however, could deter a small but fervent number of wavepool true believers, who continued to look beyond what existed to a future where artificial waves were endless, dependable, and perfect according to whatever definition of "perfect" the pool-user desired. No lulls or flat spells. No lineup hassling. No reef cuts, polluted water, shark threat, closeout sets, or dry-run surf trips.

Furthermore, there was always just enough technological advancement to keep the idea balanced at the fuzzy edge of possibility. During the '80s and '90s, photographs and video clips would occasionally turn up showing the latest scale-model wavepool, usually housed in an industrial park warehouse, pumping out a flawless if miniature freshwater tube.

In a related development, a San Diego surfer-designer named Tom Lochtefeld created a prototype that later became the FlowRider. In essence, Lochtefeld's invention was a compact man-made river wave. A set of high-powered nozzles blasts a sheet of water onto a foiled polyurethane ramp, which kicks the water up into a standing wave, which in turn can be calibrated into an unbroken slope or a full-on cyclone-like tube. The FlowRider board is short and finless. The ride feels more like snowboarding than surfing and goes on for as long as you remain standing.

To mark the 2005 debut of Bruticus Maximus, a powerful new FlowRider machine in a San Diego surf-themed entertainment center, the owners invited a handful of pro surfers and snowboarders and turned them loose at night, beneath an overhead matrix of flashing colored floodlights, with heavy metal thundering from a PA system. Grandstand viewers roared approval and pumped their fists as Bill “Beaker” Bryan, wearing knee-length flower-print jams and a Halloween-orange jersey over his wetsuit, landed an inverted full-rotation aerial, then did a cutback that sprayed water outside of the enclosure. Not once during the exhibition did the wave slow down, stop, or change shape.

The wavepool project looked poised to take a giant lead forward when the Ron Jon surf shop chain—which included a 52,000-square-foot turquoise-and-gold mirror-fronted beachfront redoubt in Cocoa Beach—announced that it was bankrolling a $10-million “Surfpark,” with a projected opening sometime in early 2005. The Surfpark blueprint featured three wavepools, including a “Pro Pool” that backers claimed would produce a barrelling eight-foot 100-yard-long wave every 15 seconds. On top of that, the pool’s bottom would be lined with a huge, shape-shifting, cable-ribbed bladder. “Everything is controlled by computers,” the project designer explained. “So you have a screen that says ‘Burleigh Head,’ or ‘Pipeline,’ or whatever, and you press a button and winches move the cables to the right length to give it the shape of that particular reef.”

Wavepool fans rushed to the Surfpark website and took in the complex’s entire “virtual tour,” which included a video clip of a 1:8 scale version of the Pro Pool. There it was—perfect mini-tubes spinning off inside a shallow concrete tank. “It’s going to be a whole lot easier to stay home,” Floridian pro surfer Cory Lopez said, “with a world-class wave down the street.”

The Surfpark groundbreaking was delayed until early 2006. When one of the smaller pools had a public unveiling, the waves were small and messy—worse, in fact, than Big Surf or any other the other, older pools. More delays followed. Then silence. Finally, in 2008, as the economy began tanking, the entire Surfpark project was scrapped altogether.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, in a quiet Basque Country valley, the husband and wife team of Josema Odriozola and Karin Frisch had founded a company called Wavegarden and were deep into prototype work on an entirely different type of wave, involving a hydrofoil. In 2011, when the first Wavegarden teasers showed up online, the surf world snapped to attention. The wave was small, but hollow and pristine, and the wavepool project at that moment seemed to move from the theoretical to the very tangible.

For the next few years, Wavegarden—still something of a surf-world mystery operation—continued to push forward and drop the occasional video tease. When Surf Snowdonia, the first pool to use Wavegarden technology, opened in the summer of 2015, in Dolgarrog, North Wales, it was somehow both revolutionary and disappointing. In a public setting, the wave didn't look as perfect as it had in the Wavegarden promo clips from years past, and Snowdonia park owners, not surprisingly, were hard-selling the wave-adjacent Camping Pods, Surf Academy, poolside cafe-bar, and surf-themed gift shop. The distance between Big Surf and Snowdonia perhaps wasn't as great as surfers had been lead to believe.

On the other hand, the Snowdonia centerpiece was very much a wave designed specifically for board-riding, not a water-sloshing family recreational park that could be pressed into service for surfing, and it wasn't hard to imagine a slow but steady development over the next decade or so to where the wavepool effort might really get interesting.

Kelly Slater, 11-time world champion, then played his ace.

Unbeknownst to everybody, surf-world insiders included, Slater had since 2006 been working with USC engineer Adam Fincham to create a wave that would live up to and possibly out-do the dreams of the most ardent wavepool fantasist. In December 2015, just a few months after Snowdonia opened it's doors, a short video clip called "Kelly's Wave" dropped into the internet—and the surf world stopped on its axis. Writer and lifelong surfer William Finnegan, in a 

 feature, later recalled what it felt like to watch the clip for the first time:

In a voice-over, [Slater] called it "our little secret spot" and admits to nervousness. As the first wave rolls, the camera stays on Slater's face. His reaction to what he sees goes from anxious wonder to wide-eyed joy. "Oh, my God!" He throws out his arms, bounding in place. The next wave, when it comes peeling toward us, is coffee-colored, thin-lipped, impossibly clean. It's breaking so precisely that it's hard to tell if the film is running in slow motion. Slater puts on a wetsuit, paddle out, and catches one . . . and it looks like a great ocean wave that happens to be the color of French roast—perhaps the best California point break on the best day in history. Your eye bounces around the frame, trying to place this spot—shaggy pine trees, fences, what look like farm outbuildings. It could be anywhere. Slater appears in closeup, crouched inside a shining tube, looking thoughtfully up at the pitching lip. An unobtrusive caption comes onscreen: "Waves roll all day." Slater's business partners say that there were more than a million views on YouTube in two days. I say that there were at least that number of texts flying around among surfers, expressing some version of "WTF?!?"

This was the first look at what was soon called Surf Ranch, and it wasn't long before people figured out that Kelly's secret wavepool skunkworks was located just outside of Lemoore, in California's Central Valley, about 40 miles south of Fresno.

On some level, what Slater and his team did in Lemoore was just scale up what Wavegarden had already done in Europe. Snowdonia and Surf Ranch both used the same basic technology. A submerged foil, attached to an unmanned powertrain, runs longitudinally down the center of the pool; water gathers in front of the foil, and the pool's bottom contours, like an ocean reef, shape the "swell" into a surfing wave.

But that's where the comparison ended. Kelly's wave was a Porsche to Snowdonia's VW. Kelly's wave, housed in a 700-yard-long converted artificial lake, lasted a full minute, while the ride at Snowdonia was 15 seconds, give or take. Kelly's wave was endlessly, hypnotically hollow—you could park yourself in one of those freshwater tubes for 20 seconds or longer. Snowdonia, in places, was briefly maybe kind of hollow, but not really. A lot of surfers were interesting in Snowdonia, and would perhaps detour to North Wales should they find themselves in the UK. Every surfer in the world save the most hardened naturalists were angling for a shot at Surf Ranch.

There were problems, however. The Lemoore pool was a prototype, and not open to the public. It was believed to be insanely expensive to run (operating costs were kept secret). Perhaps the biggest issue of all was output. Because the water surface needed to be calm for the wave to achieve perfection, Surf Ranch could only produce one wave per four minutes; all that time between waves was required to let the sloshing die down.

All of this combined meant that, while Surf Ranch may have arrived first in terms of a perfect-wave proof of concept, it was by no means certain that they had the winning model. And sure enough, a new and entirely different type of wavepool soon turned in in Waco, Texas. This pool made produced a shorter, punchier wave, but did so quickly and efficiently, and the park was open to the public. Waco became the new darling of the surf world.

Other pools were being built, or blueprinted, and while the question of what surfing even was when the object at the center of the act was so fundamentally changed—the wave itself; the thing that surfers had obsessed over and chased after for all of surf history—the mechanized genie was well and truly out of the bottle. The wavepool was here for good.

Chapter: 8

The Ride of Your Life

Surf in a Box

Subscribe or Login

Encyclopedia of Surfing

History of Surfing

Interviews

Features

The Sunday Joint

Videos